The new Federal Government budget has incorporated a number of shifts in funding for small business, with a particular focus on research and development, industry-academic collaboration, and hiring incentives. These hiring incentives include small business tax incentives for Canadian SMEs to hire new employees without experiencing an increase to their EI costs. The program is part of a $200 million dollar initiative to promote prosperity within the Canadian economy and lower the unemployment rate. Businesses can receive up to $1000 in tax credits towards the hiring of one or multiple employees. These credits will cover the incurred additional EI costs for two or three new employees.
Canadian Government Funding Reallocated Towards Tax Credits
Canadian SMEs may also take advantage of the many Canadian Business Funding Grants for Hiring new employees. The majority of these programs offer wage subsidy grants to cover the cost of hiring recent graduates for an internship ranging from 3-12 months. These graduates can participate in a wide variety of activities and projects that will help your business to become more productive and profitable in the long run. The Canadian Government small business grants that are currently available include:
- Ontario Co-operative Education Tax Credit (CETC): Up to $3000 in tax credits for the hiring of a Co-op student for a 4-month internship or a minimum of 10 weeks. This can later be stacked with a Ontario business grant for hiring once the intern graduates.
- Small Business Internship Program (SBIP): $10K business funding grant or 75% of interns salary for a 12-week internship position. Graduates are intended to assist businesses to with an online marketing campaign to improve their online presence, social media strategies, website development, etc.
- ICTC Career Focus: $10K in non-repayable small business funding grants or 33% of an interns salary for a 4-11 month internship position. These grads can be applied to social media strategies, search engine optimization (SEO), or software implementation and IT-related projects.
- Graduate Enterprise Program (iSTEM): This program provides 50% or up to $10K to hire an intern with an undergraduate degree and $15K to hire a candidate with a PhD or masters. The program only applies to STEM Graduates (Science, Technical, Engineering, and Math) and graduates can be applied to a wide variety of projects related to their field of study.
- MITACS Accelerate: $7,500 wage subsidy or 50% of the contributions towards the hiring of a high-quality intern(s) from Universities for innovative research, methods and development of tools, model, technology or solutions to support challenges over 4-months.
- MITACS Enterprise: $15K towards a 6-month intern for the hiring of a science, technical, engineering, or math (STEM) graduate. Multiple interns can be hired at the same time through this small business funding grant.
Many of these programs begin to release their funding every year on April 1st. Interested organizations should begin their application process as soon as possible.
Canadian Business Funding Consultants.
Those who are interested in acquiring more information or advice regarding the Canadian Government Grants for Small Business can contact Mentor Works, the Canadian Government Funding Experts or receive the latest up-dates from our Weekly E-Newsletter and Twitter Feed.