Canada's Boost Your Business Technology grant, the flagship stream of the Canada Digital Adoption Program (CDAP), launched in March 2022, after first being announced in the 2021 federal budget.
The headline commitment? $4 billion. The uptake? The Globe and Mail reported the program had spent just $131 million, about 3%, after its first full year.
Government figures put total grants and loans issued across both CDAP streams at a few hundred million dollars, not billions, by the time new applications stopped in February 2024. Most of the $4 billion was simply never spent.
For a lot of manufacturers weighing whether to finally digitize the shop floor, that grant was still the thing that made the math work, while the door was open.
It's now been over two years since that door closed. Long enough to ask an honest question: what now?
Fragmented Funding
There is no direct federal replacement for the Boost Your Business Technology grant.
What emerged instead is a patchwork that varies a lot by province.
Ontario'sOCI Digitalization Competence Centre offers up to $115,000 through a two-stage process: a $15,000 planning grant (DMAP) followed by a Technology Demonstration grant of up to $100,000, both on a 50 percent cost-share basis.
Quebec runs its own set of programs: ESSOR funds feasibility studies up to $50,000 and digital diagnostics up to $20,000, while SIPEM funds Industry 4.0-style automation and digital adoption projects up to $500,000 at half the cost.
Alberta's Manufacturing Productivity Grant matches technology upgrades dollar for dollar up to $30,000.
Federally, BDC launched a new program called LIFT in April 2026, aimed more squarely at AI adoption. It's a loan, not a grant: up to $2 million for AI and data projects, or up to $5 million for physical automation like robotics, and the AI-focused path requires at least $1 million in annual revenue, out of reach for plenty of smaller shops.
The result of the fragmented funding is clear: a manufacturer in Ontario and a manufacturer in Alberta are now working from completely different playbooks for the same basic problem. That alone has slowed adoption for companies that don't have someone dedicated to tracking grant programs full time.
Money for Training
Every program above funds the technology itself: the tablets, the software licenses, the integration work. None of it pays for the part that actually decides whether a digital work instruction rollout succeeds or turns into expensive shelfware: getting operators comfortable using it.
That's a separate funding lane: the Canada Job Grant. Delivered provincially under different names, it reimburses a portion of what an employer spends on third-party training. The terms vary:
- The Ontario Job Grant (formerly the Canada-Ontario Job Grant) reimburses up to $10,000 per employee, with the employer covering one-sixth of the cost for businesses under 100 employees, or half for larger ones.
- The Canada-Alberta Job Grant reimburses two-thirds of training costs, up to $10,000 per person, capped at $300,000 per employer per fiscal year.
- The Canada-Saskatchewan Job Grant follows the same two-thirds, $10,000-per-person structure, capped at $100,000 per fiscal year.
- The Canada-Manitoba Job Grant covers 75 percent of training costs for employers with 100 or fewer staff.
- BC's Employer Training Grant runs two streams: a general Workforce Training Stream covering 60 percent up to $5,000 per person, and a Technical Training Stream covering 80 percent up to $10,000 per person, specifically for skills tied to automation and new technology.[^5]
ERP training and other technology-skills development show up explicitly as eligible categories across these programs, not as an edge case someone has to argue for. That makes this money a closer match for a shop floor mobility rollout than most of the equipment grants above. A tablet-based work instruction system is only as good as the operators trained to use it, and this is the funding built specifically to pay for that part.
It's also money most manufacturers researching what replaced CDAP tend to miss, because CDAP itself never covered training this way. The instinct is to go looking for CDAP's replacement, not for a different category of program entirely. Pairing a technology grant like Ontario's TDP or Quebec's SIPEM with a job grant covering the training rollout gets a lot closer to funding the whole project than either one does on its own.
So What?
None of the underlying pressure eased while the funding landscape sorted itself out.
Manufacturing injury data points the same direction. Travelers'2025 Injury Impact Report found 30 percent of manufacturing injury claims involved workers in their first year on the job, Further, the average manufacturing injury results in 76 missed workdays, part of a broader trend of longer recovery times it found across every industry it tracks. When you consider the gap between what an instruction sheet says and what a new hire understands in the moment, you can start to piece together why these numbers are so high.
That gap has only gotten harder to close, because the workforce standing in it has changed. A growing share of production headcount at many plants now comes from staffing agencies and temporary labor, brought on to cover seasonal peaks or backfill open roles.
It's difficult to justify weeks of dedicated, in-person training for someone who may not be on the floor past the season, which quietly pushes plants toward whatever training method requires the least ongoing supervision, whether or not that method works.
And the paper instructions meant to bridge that gap keep drifting further from reality. A sheet printed two years ago, right around when the grant money disappeared, as it happens, doesn't know the process has been adjusted three times since.
The lack of updates isn't necessarily neglect. Updating a hundred printed documents across three shifts is just tedious enough that it rarely happens on schedule, and the instructions quietly stop matching the work.
Even where companies want to fix this, adoption isn't automatic. The operators with the deepest floor knowledge, the ones any digitization effort most needs on board, are often the most skeptical of the tools meant to capture that knowledge. Frequently for a fair reason: a past rollout added a step to their day without removing one.
The Case Got Stronger
Two years on, the grant that used to make the ROI conversation easy is gone in most provinces, replaced by a slower, more fragmented set of options, plus a training-funding lane most manufacturers don't know to look for. But nothing about the underlying case for shop floor mobility and digital work instructions softened in the meantime. New-hire injury rates are still elevated. The workforce mix has shifted toward workers who need faster onboarding, not slower. And every month a paper instruction sheet goes unrevised is another month it drifts further from what's happening on the line.
The money has changed. The reasons to act hasn’t.