Ease AIIf you have searched for small business technology funding in the last year, you have probably read about CDAP — the Canada Digital Adoption Program, with its $15,000 grant for a digital adoption plan and $100,000 interest-free loan from BDC.
It is worth being direct about this: CDAP has been closed since February 2024.
The Boost Your Business Technology stream was declared fully subscribed on 19 February 2024, and the programme wound up well ahead of its planned 2025 finish. There is no application to make. There is no waitlist.
What is remarkable is how much content still says otherwise. Search for it and you will find pages titled "CDAP 2026: Complete Eligibility and Application Guide", published this year, walking you through an application process that does not exist. Some of them belong to consultancies offering to help you apply.
So here is the honest version.
What actually exists now
Ontario's DMAP grant — up to $15,000, and it funds consultants
The closest genuine successor for Ontario businesses is the Digital Modernization and Adoption Plan (DMAP), run by the Ontario Centre of Innovation through its Digitalization Competence Centre.
- Up to $15,000, matched 50/50 — you fund the other half
- Open to Ontario for-profit businesses with 1–499 employees, incorporated with a valid Business Number and a permanent Ontario establishment
- First-come, first-served while funds last
- You can apply to DMAP or the retail-focused RMPG, but not both
The important detail, and the reason this matters more than its size suggests: DMAP explicitly funds engaging an external consultant to produce a digital modernization and adoption plan. That is not a technicality. It means the diagnostic stage of an automation project — the part where somebody maps how your business actually works and writes down what to fix, in what order — is precisely what the grant is designed to pay for.
Ontario committed a further $5 million to the Digitalization Competence Centre on 20 May 2026, funding a projected 448 additional projects.
One wrinkle worth knowing: the programme requires a letter of support from a Digital Adoption Consultant, and OCI's general roster applications are currently closed. However, OCI states that businesses with an identified consultant outside the roster can seek approval through their Business Development Manager or Digital Adoption Advisor. If you have someone in mind, ask.
BDC LIFT — $500 million, but read the word "loan"
Announced on 24 April 2026, LIFT is a $500 million facility from the Business Development Bank of Canada aimed at getting Canadian SMEs off the AI sidelines.
- Financing from $25,000 to $5 million
- Principal payments deferrable up to two years
- Covers digital tools and data infrastructure, advanced equipment and automation, and expert advisory support
That third category matters — implementation fees can be financed, not just hardware.
But be clear with yourself about what this is: these are loans, not grants. You repay them. BDC describes "no-brainer rates" without publishing a figure, and you will find third-party sites quoting a specific interest rate that does not appear anywhere in BDC's own release. Get the rate from BDC.
The Ontario Job Grant — for training, not software
Formerly the Canada-Ontario Job Grant, now simply the Ontario Job Grant. Applications are accepted year-round.
- Up to $10,000 per trainee, and up to $15,000 in some circumstances
- Employers with fewer than 100 staff can pay as little as one sixth of the cost
- Training a newly hired, previously unemployed person can be fully covered
This funds training, not tools. If your real barrier is that your team does not know how to use what you already own — a very common situation, and a cheaper problem than it feels — this is the programme.
Note that it has a fixed budget. Meeting the criteria does not guarantee funding.
SR&ED — expanded, but narrower than people think
Budget 2025 delivered the largest expansion of the Scientific Research and Experimental Development programme in decades: the enhanced refundable expenditure limit doubled from $3 million to $6 million, phase-out thresholds moved from $10M–$50M to $15M–$75M, and capital expenditures were reinstated as eligible — including development-related software and cloud infrastructure.
Now the caveat, because this is where the industry misleads people most often.
SR&ED funds experimental development involving genuine technological uncertainty. Deploying an established chatbot platform is routine implementation. It does not qualify, no matter how new the technology feels to your business. Building something genuinely novel, where the outcome is uncertain at the outset, might.
If a consultant tells you a standard implementation will qualify for SR&ED, that tells you something useful about the consultant. Ask your accountant, not your vendor.
What else has closed
Being told not to waste your time is worth as much as being told where to apply.
FedDev Ontario's Regional Artificial Intelligence Initiative is closed for southern Ontario. Both the productization and adoption pillars are shut; the last intake window ran 22 October to 20 December 2024. FedDev says details of the next intake will be shared when available.
This one is worth watching. Canada's national AI strategy commits $500 million to expanding the RAII, and a reopened adoption pillar would be the single most relevant grant in the country for small business AI adoption. If it reopens, it will matter.
Digital Main Street's Digital Transformation Grant 4.0 is also closed — the portal says so plainly. Several aggregator sites still advertise a "Digital Main Street Grant 2026" at $2,500. That appears to be inaccurate.
How to think about this
Three practical points.
First, check the source, not the summary. Nearly every error above comes from someone summarising a programme page rather than reading it. Go to the administering body's own site. If a page telling you about a grant does not link to the grant, be suspicious.
Second, look for a date. Any page listing funding programmes without a verification date is telling you nothing about whether it is current. Ours carries one, and we re-check quarterly, because these things change.
Third, size the grant against the project, not the other way round. DMAP's $15,000 at a 50% match is genuinely useful — it can halve the cost of getting a proper diagnostic done. It is not, on its own, a reason to start a project you did not otherwise need. The worst outcome here is spending $10,000 of your own money to capture $10,000 of somebody else's on something you did not want.
We maintain a full, status-sorted list of every Ontario and federal programme relevant to technology and AI adoption, including the closed ones, with a verification date and a link to each official source. It is here.