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.