The Canada Small Business Financing Program is the only federal loss-sharing programme sized for a small-business buyer — and the one thing it explicitly will not fund is a share purchase.
Headline figure
$11B+
Total CSBFP lending over the past 10 years: “small businesses have received over 53,000 CSBFP loans totalling more than $11 billion dollars” — a computed average of roughly $1.1 billion and 5,300 loans per year over the decade. ISED does not publish a single most-recent-year figure on this page; only the 10-year total.
What the data says
A seller who insists on a share sale — often for lifetime capital gains exemption reasons — is, in the same conversation, taking CSBFP financing off the buyer's table entirely. A buyer relying on this guarantee has to structure toward an asset purchase, which carries its own GST/HST, employment-continuity and contract-assignment consequences the seller's tax preference does not touch. That tension is the single most useful fact in this dataset for anyone structuring a small-business acquisition.
The registration fee is 2% of the loan and can itself be financed; interest is capped at the lender's prime rate plus 3% on a variable term loan, or prime plus 5% on the line of credit. Those caps set a ceiling, not a quote — the lender still underwrites and prices the loan on its own credit criteria within them.
The 85% loss-share is itself capped further. Under the Canada Small Business Financing Act, s. 9(2), each lender’s aggregate recovery over every consecutive five-year period is limited to 90% of losses on loans up to $250,000, 50% on the tranche between $250,000 and $500,000, and 12% (for amounts registered after 31 March 2009) on the tranche above $500,000 — a portfolio-level cap on top of the per-loan 85% figure. Rate caps also differ by structure: a fixed-rate term loan is capped at the lender’s single family residential mortgage rate plus 3%, distinct from the variable-rate cap already noted. And beyond the 2% registration fee, ISED is explicit that lenders may charge the same fees they would on a conventional loan of the same size, paid directly to the lender and not eligible to be financed under the programme.
Read this alongside how long a Canadian business takes to sell — a CSBFP-financed purchase adds an appraisal step to the timeline — and against how many Canadian businesses change hands yearly for the scale of the market this financing actually serves.
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