Canada Council Artistic Creation: every field and its character limit

Canada Council publishes what Artistic Creation funds. It does not publish how much room you get to say it in. You find that out inside the portal, usually at the moment you paste in three paragraphs you already spent a week on and watch the box refuse the last third of them.

So here are the limits. Every number below was read field by field off the live applicant portal (Funding Opportunity 1000, Artistic Creation), first on June 7, 2026, with two corrections since, noted at the bottom.

Three things to know before the table:

• Every limit on this application is a character count. Not words, not pages. Spaces and punctuation count. A "1,700 character" box is roughly 250 to 280 English words, so each of the four respectful and ethical practice questions is about half a page, not the two pages people tend to plan for.
• Page maximums are a different thing. The CV maximum of 3 pages and the writing sample range of 10 to 20 pages are requirements written into the support material section. They are not enforced by a field, so nothing stops you uploading a 6-page CV. It just makes you the applicant who did not read the guidelines.
• The step and field names below are our shorthand, the numbers are the captured fact. Canada Council's own wording is longer and moves between program revisions. We match each box by what it asks for, not by its label, so read the table for the limits and match the questions by meaning.

The limits

The Activity timeline box is worth reading twice, because the question is doing two jobs. The portal asks what your project timeline is and to provide important milestones. Two answers, one 3,500 character box.

The three that catch people

Application name, 80 characters. This is the shortest box on the form and it is the first one you meet, which is exactly why it gets treated as a throwaway. It is not. It is the string that appears on every list a program officer looks at. "Untitled Documentary Project (working title) - development phase" is 62 characters of nothing.

One-sentence summary, 255 characters. They mean one sentence. 255 characters is about 40 words. If you are writing a paragraph here you are writing it in the wrong box, and the box will cut you off.

Sample descriptions, 255 characters each. Every piece of support material gets a description, and each one is a tweet. If you have five samples, that is five separate 255-character decisions about why this particular clip earns its place. Plan them before you are in the upload screen.

Write them somewhere that counts

The practical problem is not knowing the numbers. It is that the portal only tells you that you are over after you have written it, and Word has no idea Canada Council exists. Draft in something that enforces the same caps you will be submitting into, or draft loose and accept that you are going to spend a night cutting.

Corrections to this page

We publish the capture date because a number here is only as good as the screenshot behind it, and ours have been wrong before.

• July 27, 2026. Budget line Notes were recorded as 255 characters in the original pass. That was a misread. A live check during a user session showed 500, which matches what the Micro-grants budget was independently captured at on July 3, 2026. Corrected above.
• July 29, 2026. Not a limit, but the same class of error: this reference previously listed .rtf as an accepted support-material format. The portal does not accept it. See what support material Canada Council accepts for the real list.

If a number here and the portal disagree, the portal is right and this page is the bug. Tell us and we will fix it.