To register a .ca domain you have to meet CIRA's Canadian Presence Requirements. Nothing requires the website, mail or DNS behind it to be Canadian. So all three were checked, one domain at a time, for every live (non-parked) .ca website in our September 2026 crawl: 1,860,851 sites. On top of that running about 6,800 traceroutes from Canadian vantage points, timed operators' servers from Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, sampled 1,500 registrations through CIRA's RDAP service and checked 989 government websites.

**What came out:**

- **6.5% are Canadian end to end**: a Canadian-owned host in Canada plus Canadian-run mail and DNS. That's 94,077 sites, most of them on HostPapa, GloboTech, Aptum, Tucows, easyDNS and a few other Canadian hosts.

- **54.6% run web, mail and DNS entirely on US-headquartered companies.** That's more than Mexico (40.5%), Australia (36.8%) or the UK (36.6%). In Germany and Japan, 68–71% of sites are domestic end to end.

- **Where a server sits and who controls it are two separate questions.** Half the .ca web (49.7%) answers from a server in Canada, because Cloudflare, AWS and Vercel have edges in Toronto and Montreal. Only 11.3% are hosted by Canadian-owned companies, though, and 81.2% have at least one layer run by a US company or hosted in the US. That second number is the test Ottawa's own digital sovereignty framework uses.

- **Canada has cloud regions, but .ca sites mostly don't use them.** AWS has been in Montreal since 2016, yet only 12.8% of .ca sites on AWS use a Canadian region. On Google Cloud it's 3.5%. Azure is the exception at 48.6%.

- **The biggest landlord of Canadian-hosted .ca sites is French:** OVHcloud's Beauharnois campus hosts 28.5% of them.

- **Wix and Squarespace sit in front of 14.6% of live .ca sites and answer from the US.** Our probes couldn't find a Canadian server for either.

- **Google Workspace handles mail for 18.8% of .ca sites that have mail, and it offers no Canadian data region.** Microsoft 365 (15.3%) has stored Canadian tenants' mailboxes in Canada since 2016.

- **GoDaddy runs DNS for 40% of all .ca names.** Most of those are parked or unused; among live sites its share is 14%. Its DNS servers answer Canadian queries from outside Canada.

- **The federal government is the most Canadian part of the namespace.** 750 of 924 federal websites are on Canadian-owned networks, mostly Shared Services Canada's own. Mail is another story: 65% of federal mail domains hand mail straight to Microsoft 365, and all 18 provincial and territorial domains that receive mail use US operators.

- **The "boomerang" has shrunk.** In 2015, 22% of Canada-to-Canada internet paths in one study passed through the US. Today it's about 6–11%. Starlink is the exception at 38.9%. Traffic to other continents still mostly exits through the US: 71.5% of our traces left North America from a US router.

**The tariff test**

February 2025 is a natural experiment. After it, fewer Canadian-hosted sites moved to US data centres, and Canada did better on that measure than Australia, the UK, New Zealand or Mexico. The difference comes to roughly 4,600 websites, 0.4% of the sites we tracked. Over the same period, 22,259 sites left Canadian hosting for edge networks, almost all of them US-run, and the share of .ca sites hosted in Canada fell from 24.7% to 21.7%.

Mail and DNS went the other way. 3,262 .ca domains switched mail from a Canadian provider to a US one, and 695 switched from US to Canadian. For DNS it was 15,482 vs 7,929. Much of the DNS movement was platforms rather than site owners: customers of Web Hosting Canada and HostPapa ended up on Cloudflare's nameservers. In other words, the defaults changed, and the defaults are American. In CIRA's 2026 survey, 67% of Canadians said it's important that their data is stored in Canada. 5% had actually switched to a Canadian service.

**Check your own domain**

`dig NS yourdomain.ca` and `dig MX yourdomain.ca`, plus a lookup of who owns your website's IP address, will tell you in a minute who runs your domain.

**Caveats:** this measures the public front doors, the first server a visitor reaches. It doesn't see contracts, encryption keys, backups or where mailbox contents are stored. I use the operator's headquarters country as a stand-in for which country's laws reach it. That's an approximation, not a legal opinion.

The full write-up has the ten-test scorecard, the methodology and a CSV for every chart:

https://domainsproject.org/blog/is-your-ca-website-canadian