What support material Canada Council accepts

Support material is the part of a Canada Council application that gets left to the last night, and it is the part with the most ways to fail silently. A file the portal will not take. A link to a platform it does not read. A 255 character description you write in a hurry for a clip that was supposed to be your best argument.

Everything below was captured from the live applicant portal, most recently on July 29, 2026.

The two upload fields

Canada Council splits uploads by media type, not by what the document is for. Your CV and your treatment go in the same field, because both are text. Your trailer and your stills go in the other one, because both are audiovisual.

There is no .rtf. This one is worth saying loudly because it is the format a lot of writing tools still default to when you export "plain text", and because we got it wrong ourselves for a month. The portal's own wording is "Required text-based documents (.pdf, .doc, .docx, .txt, .text)". No .rtf, no .pages, no .odt. Export to PDF.

There is also no .avi, no .mkv, no .webm and no .wmv. If your rough cut is any of those, transcode to .mp4 or .mov before the night you submit.

The size and count limits

The portal states it plainly: maximum of 10 file uploads, with a maximum size of 500 MB per file.

500 MB is generous for a trailer and tight for a feature. If you are attaching a long piece, attach an excerpt and say in the description which excerpt it is and why that one.

Weblinks

There is a weblink row, and it accepts exactly three platforms:

• SoundCloud
• Vimeo
• YouTube

That is the whole list. Not Google Drive, not Dropbox, not WeTransfer, not your own site, not a Frame.io review link. This catches out people whose entire body of work lives in a Drive folder, and it catches them at 11pm.

Two practical consequences. Put anything you want them to watch on Vimeo or YouTube, unlisted if you need it private. And if it is password protected, the password goes in the description, because there is nowhere else to put it.

The portal will let you add weblink rows without any apparent limit. It is unnumbered and repeats forever, which is not the invitation it looks like.

Descriptions are 255 characters each

Every piece of support material gets a description, and the cap is 255 characters, about 40 words.

That is not room to summarise the piece. It is room for one sentence explaining why an assessor should spend three minutes on this rather than on something else you made. Write it as an argument, not a caption.

Five samples means five of those, and they should not be interchangeable.

What each program expects

Artistic Creation asks for specific documents, with page maximums written into the guidelines: CV maximum 3 pages, writing samples 10 to 20 pages. Those page limits are not enforced by the upload field. Nothing stops you attaching a 6 page CV. It just tells the person reading it that you did not read the instructions, before they reach your work.

Micro-grants treats support material as "as applicable". There is no required CV and work-sample block, so what you attach is a judgement call rather than a checklist.

The order to do this in

1. Decide what you are attaching before you open the portal, not while you are in it.
2. Check every file's extension against the tables above. Transcode and re-export now.
3. Get the video onto Vimeo or YouTube and confirm the link plays in a private window.
4. Write the descriptions somewhere you can see the character count.
5. Then upload.

Nearly everything that goes wrong here goes wrong because these five steps happen in the reverse order, at the end.