Everything here is only worth something if it's right. This is how each number is produced, what we refuse to publish, and how to tell us we've got something wrong.
Every incentive rate traces to the body that administers it — a provincial ministry, CAVCO, the CRA, or the statute itself. Commercial incentive maps and accountancy summaries are used as cross-checks to catch something we missed. They are never a source of record, because they are frequently months out of date and reproduce each other's errors.
Each rate carries an effective date, a source URL, the date it was read, and the name of whoever verified it. Where a figure has not been human-verified, the page says so in plain language rather than presenting it as settled.
Working research for all 7 provincial programmes plus the federal layer lives in docs/tax/, including statutory quotes, legislative history, and a corrections section per jurisdiction recording what the common secondary claims get wrong.
The ordering is the part that breaks spreadsheets. Under ITA s.125.5(1), "assistance" — which explicitly includes provincial film tax credits — reduces the federal qualified labour base dollar for dollar. So a province advertising a high labour-based rate takes a bigger bite out of the federal layer than a lower all-spend rate does. Comparing headline provincial rates without applying the grind systematically overstates the high-rate provinces.
We report net effective rate on total budget rather than on qualifying labour, because that is the number producers actually compare across jurisdictions.
Estimates only. Not tax advice. Confirm with a Canadian production accountant before you lock a budget — we're happy to introduce you to one.
Productions are gathered from municipal open data, provincial film commission listings, federal certification records and trade press. Each source is registered with its access terms, licence, robots status and known gaps before an adapter is written for it.
Extraction requires the model to quote the span of source text supporting each record. Anything it cannot ground is dropped rather than guessed — which is what makes the "unconfirmed" label mean something instead of being decoration.
Our database has no column for a street address or a daily shooting location — a field that doesn't exist can't leak. This isn't caution for its own sake: a site that helps people find working sets is worthless to the productions it depends on, and we'd rather be less complete than be that.
Some productions are confidential for talent-security reasons. If you're on one and it shouldn't be listed, tell us and it comes down. We respond within one business day and we don't ask you to justify it.
The design is four inputs: crew absorption ratio (40%), permittee depth (20%), stage occupancy (15%), and a quarterly practitioner survey (25%). Scored 1–5 per market with a 90-day forward reading, and confidence reported per market so four survey responses are never presented as equal to forty.
It is not on the site yet. We had an illustrative version up during development and took it down rather than let modelled numbers sit next to sourced ones. It goes back up when the survey has enough responses to compute a real reading. The weights are published here in the meantime so the method can be argued with before it ships.
This site is operated by a Canadian service production company with a commercial interest in productions choosing Canada. That is stated rather than hidden, and it is why every rate carries a source you can check.
Every correction we make is logged publicly and permanently at /corrections, and rate changes are recorded at /incentives/changelog. If something here is wrong, tell us — being corrected in public is cheaper than being wrong in private.