The 2018 Federal budget was announced on February 27, 2018. It was a fairly neutral budget that stayed on the Liberal path of reducing tax loopholes and continuing to spend on infrastructure despite big changes in the tax regime south of the border and threatened big tax changes for small businesses in Canada. On the funding side, the focus was on streamlining programs, concentrating on women entrepreneurs, and attempting to reduce IP related costs.

Streamlining Funding

The 2018 budget targeted $4 billion to support the next generation of academic researchers - the single largest investment in fundamental research in Canadian history. This will be split between infrastructure and researcher funding. The budget also proposed transforming the National Research Council (NRC) with $540M to improve collaboration, help breakthrough research, and reduce access fees for NRC facilities.

For businesses, the budget announced streamlined innovation funding around four “platforms”:

·         The Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) is now officially designed for R&D Projects over $10M in size. It was assumed that the funding was for large corporations and now it is official.

·         The Industrial Research Assistance program (IRAP) can now fund R&D Projects that go up to $10M in size (investment includes an additional $700M over five years and $150M ongoing funding), although it is very unlikely that many projects will be in the millions of dollars with the limited additional funding.

·         There will be continued support for regional development agencies ($511M over five years, of which $105M will be for women entrepreneurs).

·         The Canadian Trade Commissioner Service (TCS) will also receive renewed support as it helps Canadian businesses export around the world and existing programs will be consolidated around it.

Women Entrepreneurship Funding

The federal government also set out $1.65 billion over three years in new financing for women entrepreneurs through the BDC and EDC, as well as, an additional $115M over five years to help women entrepreneurs - particularly in the high growth areas of the economy. The government also set a supplier target of 15% for women owned SMEs.

Intellectual Property Funding

The federal budget also created an intellectual property strategy with $30M to pilot an IP sharing program, $21.5M to reduce legal fees, and $33.8M to create an IP marketplace.  This is a first step in examining different ways the government can help SMEs compete internationally in the IP arena.