Receiving a CIHR or NSERC grant does not automatically prevent you from claiming SR&ED. The same project may still contain eligible work, and your corporation may have paid costs that the grant did not cover.
The grant usually affects the amount of the claim rather than deciding the answer on its own.
There are two separate questions
First, did the work meet the SR&ED requirements? In plain terms, was the team trying to gain new scientific or technological knowledge through a systematic experiment or analysis?
Second, which project costs can be used to calculate the credit?
Other government funding does not automatically make the work ineligible. However, government and non-government assistance will generally reduce the SR&ED expenditures for that project. If a grant paid part of the research salaries or materials, that amount is usually removed from the cost base before the credit is calculated.
Imagine that a grant covered 70 percent of the eligible project costs and the corporation paid the other 30 percent. The work still needs its own eligibility assessment. If it qualifies, the corporation-funded portion may still support a credit, subject to the rest of the program rules.
The claimant matters
Medical research often involves a physician, a professional corporation, a hospital, and a university at the same time. Those are separate legal entities, even when everyone works on the same study.
Some publicly funded institutions, including many hospitals and universities, are not taxable and cannot claim an SR&ED investment tax credit themselves. A physician or medical professional corporation may be able to claim eligible costs it actually incurred, but the answer depends on who undertook the work, who paid for it, and what the agreements say.
For example, a medical professional corporation may have a possible claim when it funded the work and its physician-employees performed it. If the research was done for another party, contracts and service agreements become especially important. They should make clear which person or corporation agreed to perform the research and how that work was paid for.
Keep the funding trail clear
Your records should separate the costs paid by the grant from those paid by the corporation. Payroll records, invoices, grant budgets, and written agreements can help show where each dollar came from and which work it supported.
Provincial research credits, contract payments, and matched-funding arrangements may also change the result. Some third-party payments have their own rules, so these situations need to be reviewed using the actual agreements rather than a general rule of thumb.
Quebec clinician-scientists should also review the award itself. Our guide to FRQS and FRQ sector Santé funding explains why salary support and institution-managed grants need a separate funding trace.
You do not have to choose between a research grant and SR&ED. You do need to avoid claiming the same cost twice and confirm that the right person or corporation is making the claim. A short conversation can help identify any corporation-funded costs that may still be available.