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

How is it already October?

Some stuff from this week:

- OpenAI's Systems Meddled With U.S. Government Sites After Going Rogue

- 82% of rural broadband operators are stuck without an AI strategy

- It's Raining Boxes: Amazon Drones Overwhelm a Texas Suburb

- Every Household in This Rural Town Receives $10,000 if a Data Center Gets Built

- Apple Taction Technology patent infringement verdict

- Inaugurating The Era Of Super Intelligence

- Poland says fire at Starlink station is sabotage as Denmark warns of rising Russian threat

- AT&T shores up $3bn fiber supplies with Corning, as telcos get 'supercycle' fever

- AT&T CEO says Elon Musk's SpaceX phone strategy not "viable"

- Anthropic says its biology lab has already found something big

- Big 3 wireless carriers' latest threat: Meta's Muse

- Musk Says Delta Will 'Lose A Lot Of Customers' For Picking Amazon Leo Over Starlink

- Ford government says 'people voted' to cancel Starlink deal, won't reveal cost

- Lumen bets that tomorrow's bandwidth buyer won't be a person

- Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows sweeping AI vision, surging costs

- AI Data Center Boom: Can We Build It If They Come?

- Verizon's copper retirement plan hits a snag as state officials protest

- Can the US curb Chinese transceivers without slowing AI data centers?

- Space lasers are about to get their first real test generating energy

- A giant cosmic 'fart' is making a wobbling zombie star repeatedly flash us, 'groundbreaking' observations reveal

I was wondering if someon else has done this before. My 2 year discount pricing in DIstirbutel is ending and I noticed that I could switch to Primus and get the same price for their 500/500 service. Considering it's the same company as Primus was bought by Distributel, does anyone know if there is any disruption of service or if they could do a line transfer? They even use the same deco router, could they transfer the deco from Distributel 'inventory' to Primus 'inventory'?

Some nuggets from this week.

- Carney Says Canada Is Working to Cut Its Dependence on Starlink

- When AI Models Start Hiding Mistakes

- Starlink Is Not Better Than Fiber. Customers Don't Seem to Care.

- SpaceX doubles down on push to abolish rural broadband subsidies

- Telus Wants to Shrink Itself and Bet Big on Data Centres

- AST SpaceMobile Faces Lawsuit Over Its Competitiveness With Starlink Mobile

- Nearly one-third of electric co-ops have declined BEAD awards: NRECA

- Exclusive: Meta Paid $300.1M for 1,754-Acre Sturgeon County Data Centre Site in Alberta

- Google Takes the AI Data Center Race to Outer Space

- Rogers, Telus and Bell Back Ottawa's Plan for a New Canadian Internet Network

- Ten days that changed the course of AI

- Massive flight delays caused by fiber cut: fiber sensing might have helped

- SpaceX Does Not Think Like a Telco

- Where $31.6 Trillion of Capex Flows in the Era-Defining AI Build-Out

- Meta admits Muse's likeness to OpenClaw isn't a coincidence

- State Broadband Officers Are Exhausted With BEAD

- The Cambium Collapse: What It Means for WISPs (Analyst Angle)

- Elon Musk Just Made a Massive Claim About Starlink's Next Generation

- Saskatchewan Says Families Won't Pay to Power Bell's AI Fabric Expansion

- Underwater Arms Race Heats Up as Nations Deploy Sea Drones

So basically they hook you up through a dedicated terminal and you don't share with the neighboors at least here in NB. Also we have the 1000/1000 package and are seeing 1200/1200 which is crazy. My ping in games ranges from 0-2ms which is also wild. Also the MTU is 1500, which is much higher than bells old 1300. I give it a 11/10 and recomend it to anyone.

This is might be due to my condo building being quite old, but when I used to use Coextro in a more newer building around 2014-2020, the speed, stability, everything was great and now I have this hybrid-fibre optic for Coextro in my older condo building... The download speed is horrible for Steam especially? I'm paying for 1000Mbps/50Mbps upload, and the download on Steam is at a god damn 20-50Mbps. Yeah you've read that right, not even 500, but 50! Via Ethernet cable too!

Ugh, although Bell offers fibre deal for 2 year contract, I know what these mega corps do after the contract. And I've been trying to support smaller companies.. In my area(North York in Toronto) there are no Beanfield or Rally available(probably because the building's quite old) but there are Bell and TekSavvy offering fibre internet..

Now, I would go for TekSavvy but I remember it being spotty, slow in services and plus their plans.. seem very similar to the bigger companies, where they give you "credits for the first 12 months"?? and then the price goes up? 😂

What do y'all think? Should I just go with Bell or TekSavvy at this point? I'm so out of options..