Oh .ca-nada

Since we now have status as Permanent Residents of Canada, I thought that this week I would flex one of my new rights. It’s not one of the more dramatic ones (like the right to work for any employer in any field, not just my sponsor and the line of work that my Provincial Nominee status lists). No, I decided to do something that I’ve wanted to do ever since I knew that it was available: I registered the domain drucker.ca .

I couldn’t legally register a .ca domain until I was a Resident because the top-level-domain .ca is regulated by the governmental agency CIRA, which stands for Canadian Internet Registration Authority. The choices available from the drop-down menu at the CIRA web site for the types of people and organizations that can register a .ca are:

• Aboriginal Peoples indigenous to Canada
• Canadian Citizen
• Canadian Educational Institution
• Canadian Hospital
• Canadian Library Archive or Museum
• Canadian Political Party
• Canadian Trade Union
• Canadian Unincorporated Association
• Corporation (Canada or Canadian province or territory)
• Government or government entity in Canada
• Indian Band recognized by the Indian Act of Canada
• Legal Rep. of a Canadian Citizen or Permanent Resident
• Official mark registered in Canada
• Partnership Registered in Canada
• Trade-mark registered in Canada (by a non-Canadian owner)
• Trust established in Canada
• (and I’m not making this up:) Her Majesty the Queen
• Permanent Resident of Canada

There it is, so I didn’t have to worry about the RCMP coming to break down our doors if I registered drucker.ca before I was a Permanent Resident.

When I told a coworker about this, he said ‘You mean you waited until you really were a Resident to do this? Dude, if I’d known, I’d have bought that domain months ago and now you’d have to buy it from me!’

It’s just ‘parked’ right now. I could never get drucker.com, .org or .net, thanks to the followers of the teachings of Peter Drucker, but here in the Great White North (or rather, the Great Soggy West), there was still no one who cared enough to secure my last name as a Canadian URL.

Is a .ca useful? Well, it’s more important if you’re a Canadian business and want to make it clear that you ship products to others without the extra duties you have to pay if it’s coming from the US. Thus, there is an Amazon.ca and an Apple.ca. There is also a Google.ca and a Yahoo.ca, even though they are quite ubiquitous throughout the world (and Google.cn has been in the news because of censorship issues with the Chinese version of that search engine).

I intend to use it perhaps as a better place to display my resumé and portfolio. I’ll link to this blog from it, but now I’ll have a pretty logical central address for my Internet identity, such as it is.