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.