OK ... first off, your university admin - the folks who manage your scholarship and who are responsible for administering your funds are required to send you those scholarship report requests and nag you to get those in - and in fact, at my university you actually can't proceed with defense arrangements until all ancilary papaerwork is completed (including any outstanding scholarship reporting that they manage). I'm not sure how you got all the way to the defense process without them checking in on this stuff - sounds like they dropped the ball. They're pretty officious about at most universities - because, for one thing, THEY are out a lot of big time funding if they're not doing THEIR job to 'manage' grad students who don't have the same practices in place for 'reporting' as tenured faculty receiving big time grants. When SSHRC talks about reporting they're talking about actual grants - not scholarships. From what I gather from my colleagues who have been on SSHRC evaluation committees, stuff like scholarship reporting isn't less of an issue than: not especially enthusiastic letters of support, poor track record of publication, feasibility of the research and strong supporting rationale - and then there's the issue of SSHRC's own funding 'priority areas' which are of course always useful to peek at before proposing a project. Don't let the SSHRC-holes get you down - it's a terrible process that does all sorts of symbolic violence because they don't bother letting anybody know why they didn't win the pony ... keep your head up!
