They nest inside one another — they do not stack. The programme’s ceiling for buying a business is $1,000,000 total, not $1,000,000 plus a separate $500,000 plus a separate $150,000.
Short answer
The Canada Small Business Financing Program caps a term loan at $1,000,000 in total, and that figure already contains its own two sub-ceilings rather than sitting alongside them. The Regulations state the outstanding loan amount “does not exceed $1,000,000, of which a maximum of $500,000 is for a purpose other than the purchase or improvement of real property or immovables of which the borrower is or will become the owner and, of that $500,000, a maximum of $150,000 is for the purpose of financing the purchase of intangible assets and working capital costs.” Read the punctuation carefully: the $500,000 is a slice of the $1,000,000, and the $150,000 is a slice of that $500,000 — not a fourth pool of money on top.
Buying a business with the programme, the whole facility — real property, equipment, leaseholds, goodwill, intangibles and working capital together — tops out at $1,000,000. Inside that number, no more than $500,000 can go to anything other than real property, and inside that $500,000, no more than $150,000 can go to intangible assets (goodwill included) and working capital. A deal that puts $480,000 into equipment and a further $150,000 into goodwill and working capital has not spent $630,000 of headroom — it has spent all $500,000 of the non-real-property ceiling and then some, because $480,000 plus $150,000 exceeds it.
a file the lender could not price for the risk used the nested reading correctly to size a $500,000 facility down to $410,000 across a term loan and a programme line of credit once every class was tested against its own cap. A second, structurally different question — a farm holding company two tiers above the operating business — runs an entirely separate federal statute with its own 90% composition test rather than this dollar cap; see a two-tier holdco that needed two ninety-percent tests for why the two programmes are not interchangeable.
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