The Government of Canada is introducing the Strategic Response Fund (SRF) to help the country navigate a rapidly shifting global economy shaped by trade disruptions, supply chain challenges, and growing international competition. Canada’s new government is ensuring companies in key sectors do not just survive the immediate trade pressures but pivot to grow in the face of them.
The Strategic Response Fund will prioritize projects using the following criteria:
- Highly trade-exposed sector or company, facing significant revenue loss, decrease in profitability, and/or job losses.
- Large-scale projects with both front-end development costs (e.g., front-end engineering design) and capital costs to pivot toward alternative markets, products or enhance competitiveness.
- Projects that are critical to maintaining industrial or skills capacity and capabilities for Canada’s economic and crisis management.
- Projects that help companies develop their capacity to meet demands in the Canadian market and accelerate trade exports.
- Projects that receive matching funding commitments or greater from the provinces and territories.
The Fund will prioritize support for sectors most exposed to U.S. tariffs and global trade risks—such as automotive, steel, and aluminum—while also retaining flexibility to act in other high-value industries where swift federal intervention is vital to safeguard investment and capacity in Canada.
The Strategic Response Fund will seek to maintain industrial capacity by offsetting new market access costs, supporting retooling, and facilitating plans by Canada-based firms to expand or secure new markets. The Strategic Response Fund would have flexibility to fund pre-development and demonstration activities including pre-front-end engineering design and front-end engineering design studies.
The Strategic Response Fund is part of a broad set of tariff support measures, including the Workforce Alliances, Large Enterprise Tariff Loan Facility, the Business Development Bank of Canada’s Pivot to Grow initiative, and the Regional Tariff Relief Initiative.
