NorthBridge Consultants’ Canadian Business Blog is dedicated to bringing businesses news and information to help companies identify and access the most appropriate government funding programs.

We offer opinions and insider information that can provide a pulse on government initiatives, the health of the Canadian economy, and firsthand thoughts from Canadian business owners.

August Survey of Manufacturing

Good news for Canadian manufacturers – according to StatsCan, manufacturing sales in August rose 1.4% to $47.6 billion. This is the highest level that manufacturing sales have been at since October 2008. A breakdown of some of the provinces is… Read more »

Open Source and Innovation

What exactly is “Open Source”? The open source production model is a model where the source materials for the end products are available to the public. In the case of software, where this term is mostly heard, it means that… Read more »

The CRA’s SR&ED Service Standards

The CRA released their average processing times for claims during the months of April 2011 through September 2011. Overall, it’s looking a lot better than it was previously – the total average numbers have all fallen since we last spoke… Read more »

What’s your biggest office pet peeve?

A survey done by LinkedIn and released today took a look at what people’s greatest pet peeves in the office are. Turns out the top five are: people not taking ownership of their actions constant complainers dirty common areas start… Read more »

In the News This Week…

In this article by Michael Scissons, we read about Why Canada is a hotbed of tech activity, including five factors that are unique to Canada in contributing to the innovative tech activity that is happening here. We have all heard… Read more »

British Columbia Reverts Back to PST/GST

After a vote on August 5th, the voters of British Columbia have decided to revert back to the PST/GST system from the combined HST system they were using. Reverting back to the separate PST/GST systems will take approximately 18 months… Read more »

The UBB Hearing

This week and next week, the CRTC has been having a hearing about the proposed User Based Billing (UBB) that some of the large telecom companies would like to instate. While this hasn’t been getting nearly enough exposure on traditional… Read more »