Canada announces more than C$813m for research and research institutions
More than C$813m has been announced for research teams, new and renewed research chairs, laboratory infrastructure and the institutional costs of supporting research across Canada.
Canada has announced more than C$813 million in funding for researchers, research infrastructure and institutions. The package was announced in Hamilton, Ontario, on 23 October and is intended to support more than 450 researchers across the country, alongside projects, facilities and the indirect costs of research at post-secondary institutions.
The announcement brings together several programmes rather than setting one uniform award. It includes funding directed to research teams and individual chairs, as well as support designed to help institutions maintain the environment in which research is carried out. The different streams have separate recipient groups and purposes, so the headline figure should not be understood as a single payment shared evenly among researchers.
Funding for teams, institutions and chairs
The largest research-team element is C$120 million for five teams in the 2026 New Frontiers in Research Fund Transformation competition. The programme is intended for large interdisciplinary projects addressing major challenges, with grants of up to C$24 million over six years. The government said the competition is aimed at work capable of producing real and lasting change.
For institutions, the 2026–27 Research Support Fund grants account for more than C$369 million for 161 institutions. This funding is intended to cover part of the indirect costs of research, such as the institutional capacity needed to manage a research enterprise and maintain a research environment. The announcement also sets out nearly C$104 million in incremental project grants for 34 institutions and nearly C$25 million in research-security grants for 51 institutions.
More than C$187 million is allocated to 220 new and renewed Canada Research Chairs. The chairs programme is intended to help attract and retain researchers and to support work across health, engineering, natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities. The funding is for new and renewed positions, not solely newly created chairs.
Infrastructure and equity awards
A further nearly C$8 million through the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s John R. Evans Leaders Fund will support 35 projects at 22 institutions. That part of the package is for research infrastructure and equipment, rather than a general operating grant. It is intended to give researchers the tools and facilities needed for their work.
The package also includes C$300,000 for three recipients of the 2025 Robbins-Ollivier Award for Excellence in Equity. The award supports initiatives intended to address persistent systemic barriers in the research ecosystem and academia. It is a comparatively small element of the overall announcement, but one with a different purpose from the infrastructure, institutional-support and research-chair funding.
What the wider package is intended to support
The government said the investments would give research teams opportunities to deepen work in areas including clean energy, regenerative medicine, machine learning, and health and community services. Those areas illustrate the stated scope of the package; the announcement does not say that every project will work in each field or guarantee a particular research or commercial outcome.
The institutional grants also distinguish this announcement from a scheme focused only on personal awards. Research Support Fund money is directed to eligible institutions, while the Transformation competition, research chairs, infrastructure fund and equity award have their own routes for teams, researchers or projects. The public announcement confirms the overall funding and the programme allocations, but does not provide a single per-recipient value across the package.
For the October announcement, the central development is the combined commitment across these streams: funding for research people, equipment, interdisciplinary teams and the institutional systems that support their work. The eventual effects will depend on the projects, institutions and researchers involved, rather than on the headline total alone.
