The problem-plagued Sustainable Development Technology Corporation (SDTC) is officially no more.

All of SDTC’s programming has been transferred to the National Research Council (NRC), NRC media relations advisor Tosin Akin-Ogundeji said in an email to Research Money.

A total of 167 funding agreements with companies were transferred from SDTC to the National Research Council with the transition completed in March 2025, he said.

A report in June 2024 by Canada’s Auditor General Karen Hogan found that 10 of the 58 projects funded by STDC that her office audited were ineligible and yet had still received a total of $59 million.

Hogan also found serious governance issues, such as 90 funding approval decisions representing nearly $76 million in which there was an apparent conflict of interest by a voting member.

Hogan’s report placed significant blame on Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada for failing to monitor its contribution agreements with SDTC.

The ethics commissioner in a report in July 2024 found that SDTC’s former board chair, Annette Verschuren, had contravened federal conflict-of-interest rules.

The same day Hogan’s audit was published, then-Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne announced he was shutting down SDTC as an independent agency and folding its responsibilities into the National Research Council within one year.

A separate report by the Privy Council found that SDTC was plagued by questionable governance and executive mismanagement that cost Canadian taxpayers more than $150 million.

Leah Lawrence, SDTC’s president and CEO, resigned in November 2023, followed by Verschuren’s resignation within two weeks.

Both denied allegations of financial mismanagement and conflict-of-interest by some of SDTC’s former employees.

The federal government didn’t hold any specific individuals accountable for the scandal at SDTC.

Verschuren remains as chair of the board at MaRS Discovery District. Lawrence headed to Harvard University as a 2024 Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow and remains a board member of the Innovation Asset Collective.

The RCMP confirmed in early October 2025 it had started an investigation of the allegations related to SDTC, but that investigation hasn’t gone anywhere.

Akin-Ogndei at NRC said the transition of SDTC’s programming to the National Research Council included 54 employees from the former SDTC organization accepting the NRC’s offers of employment.

NRC wouldn’t say whether any of those employees were former SDTC executive or senior managers, to protect individual’s privacy.

Funding for new clean technology projects was made available again in July 2025 through the National NRC’s Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP) clean technology programming stream, which supports innovative companies in Canada that are developing, demonstrating and commercializing clean technologies.  

Information about Canadian companies that have received NRC IRAP funding is made available on the Government of Canada’s Open Portal: Grants and Contributions. New projects funded by IRAP under the Clean Technology stream will be proactively disclosed.

The SDTC’s transitional three-member board completed its operational wind-up and legal dissolution under the under the Canada Not-for-profit Corporations Act, at which point interim and board chair Paul Boothe and directors Catherine Doyle and Marta Morgan formally resigned from their positions on SDTC’s board, said Andréa Daigle in media relations at Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED).

Research Money asked ISED whether the government’s longer-term plant to transfer SDTC’s programming to the proposed new Canada Innovation Corporation by 2026-27 is still proceeding.

ISED declined to answer that question, saying only that “more information will be shared once details become available.”

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