Canadian Presence Requirement (CPR)

In order to register a .CA domain name, you must have a connection to Canada. The type of connection that you must have is defined in Canadian Presence Requirements documents

• (a) Canadian citizen. A Canadian citizen of the age of majority under the laws of the province or territory in Canada in which he or she resides or last resided;
• (b) Permanent resident. A permanent resident as defined in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, (Canada) S.C. 2001, c. 27, as amended from time to time, who is ordinarily resident in Canada (as defined below) and of the age of majority under the laws of the province or territory in Canada in which he or she resides or last resided;(amended June 5, 2003)
• (c) Legal representative. An executor, administrator or other legal representative of a Person listed in paragraph (a) and (b) above;
• (d) Corporation. A corporation under the laws of Canada or any province or territory of Canada;
• (e) Trust. A trust established and subsisting under the laws of a province or territory of Canada, more than 66.6% of whose trustees meet one of the conditions set out in paragraphs (a) to (d) above;
• (f) Partnership. A partnership, more than 66.6% of whose partners meet one of the conditions set out in paragraphs (a) to (e) above, which is registered as a partnership under the laws of any province or territory of Canada;
• (g) Association. An unincorporated organization, association or club: (i) at least 80% of whose members: (A) are ordinarily resident in Canada (if such members are individuals); or (B) meet one of the conditions set out in paragraphs (a) to (f) above (if such members are not individuals); and (ii) at least 80% of whose directors, officers, employees, managers, administrators or other representatives are ordinarily resident in Canada;
• (h) Trade union. A trade union which is recognized by a labour board under the laws of Canada or any province or territory of Canada and which has its head office in Canada;
• (i) Political party. A political party registered under a relevant electoral law of Canada or any province or territory of Canada;
• (j) Educational institution. Any of the following: (i) a university or college which is located in Canada and which is authorized or recognized as a university or college under an Act of the legislature of a province or territory of Canada; or (ii) a college, post-secondary school, vocational school, secondary school, pre-school or other school or educational institution which is located in Canada and which is recognized by the educational authorities of a province or territory of Canada or licensed under or maintained by an Act of Parliament of Canada or of the legislature of a province or territory of Canada;
• (k) Library, Archive or Museum. An institution, whether or not incorporated, that: (i) is located in Canada; and (ii) is not established or conducted for profit or does not form part of, or is not administered or directly or indirectly controlled by, a body that is established or conducted for profit, in which is held and maintained a collection of documents and other materials that is open to the public or to researchers;
• (l) Hospital. A hospital which is located in Canada and which is licensed, authorized or approved to operate as a hospital under an Act of the legislature of a province or territory of Canada;
• (m) Her Majesty the Queen. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second and her successors;
• (n) Indian band. Any Indian band as defined in the Indian Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. I-5, as amended from time to time, and any group of Indian bands;
• (o) Aboriginal Peoples. Any Inuit, First Nation, Metis or other people indigenous to Canada, any individual belonging to any Inuit, First Nation, Metis or other people indigenous to Canada and any collectivity of such Aboriginal peoples;
• (p) Government. Her Majesty the Queen in right of Canada, a province or a territory; an agent of Her Majesty the Queen in right of Canada, of a province or of a territory; a federal, provincial or territorial Crown corporation, government agency or government entity; or a regional, municipal or local area government;
• (q) Trade-mark registered in Canada. A Person which does not meet any of the foregoing conditions, but which is the owner of a trade-mark which is the subject of a registration under the Trade-marks Act (Canada) R.S.C. 1985, c.T-13 as amended from time to time, but in this case such permission is limited to an application to register a .ca domain name consisting of or including the exact word component of that registered trade-mark; or
• (r) Official marks. A Person which does not meet any of the foregoing conditions, but which is a Person intended to be protected by Subsection 9(1) of the Trade- Marks Act (Canada) at whose request the Registrar of Trade-marks has published notice of adoption of any badge, crest, emblem, official mark or other mark pursuant to Subsection 9(1), but in this case such permission is limited to an application to register a .ca domain name consisting of or including the exact word component of such badge, crest, emblem, official mark or other mark in respect of which such Person requested publications.

3. For the purposes of this policy: (a) ?ordinarily resident in Canada? means an individual who resides in Canada for more than 183 days in the twelve month period immediately preceding the date of the applicable application for registration of the .ca domain name or sub-domain name and in each twelve month period thereafter for the duration of the domain name registration; and

(b) ?Person? includes an individual, a corporation, a partnership, a trust, an unincorporated organization, association or club, the government of a country or any political subdivision thereof, or any agency or department of any such government, and the executors, administrators or other legal representatives of an individual in such capacity, a ?person? as defined in the Trade-marks Act (Canada) and a Person intended to be protected by Subsection 9(1) of the Trademarks Act (Canada).

Domain Transfer to CADNS

If you wish to transfer your .ca domain registration to CDNS, you will need your EPP code or Authorization password for your .ca domain name from your current registrar. Once you have this code you can go here to start the transfer of your .ca domain name to Canadian Domain Name Services. If you need help with getting your authorization code for your .ca domain name registration from your current .ca registrar, please contact us for help. We would be glad to assist you in dealing with your current .ca registrar.

Domain Transfer away from CADNS

You will need your EPP code or Authorization password for your domain name. You can get this by logging in to your account and clicking on the manage domain button for the domain name. Once you have this code you can go to your new registrar to start the transfer

Domain Renewal

You will first need to log into your account. Once logged on you can then go here to select the domain names in your account to renew. A .ca domian name can only have a max registration term of 10 years. So for example if you registered a domain name for 10 years and the next day tried to renew it for 1 more year, the system will reject the request.

To Be Released (TBR) Domains

TBR domains can only be registered through a CIRA certified registrar. Every registrar is allowed to submit requests to CIRA's TBR server once the TBR registration session starts. TBR domains are then registered on a first-come first-serve basis. There is no bidding process involving CIRA between registrars.

Meaning which ever registrar submits a request for a particular domain name first gets it for their customer. The TBR session is always on a Wednesday and begins at 14:00 EDT/EST (2:00 pm) and ends at 15:00 EDT/EST (3:00 pm).

It is highly recommended that you pre-book a TBR domain name well in advance of the TBR session to ensure that the domain name you desire is high in our queue system if not the first in the queue. Our system works on the same first-come first-serve basis. Once you pre-book a TBR domain with us, no one else can order that TBR domain name and it will be added to our TBR processing queue in the order it was received.

For example: There are no TBR orders in our system yet for the week. You pre-book "domainireallywant.ca" which is to be released on the Wednesday. Your domain name is now first in our queue as you are the first order. Someone else pre-books "tbr2.ca" 10 seconds after you. Their order will be second in our queue, etc.

French Character IDN (Internationalized Domain Name)

French character IDNs provide the opportunity to Registrants to register domain names correctly in French, one of Canada's two Official Languages.

When a domain name works with any letters beyond the a-z, 0-9 and hyphens, it's called an Internationalized Domain Name (IDN).

CIRA allows Registrars to add the following French language characters to .CA domain names: é, ë, ê, è, â, à, æ, ô, œ, ù, û, ü, ç, î, ï, and ÿ.

How Does IDN work? Non-ASCII Unicode characters are transformed into a special sequence of ASCII characters, using character normalization and a Punycode algorithm. When an application such as web browser or email client sees a non-ASCII character in a host or domain name, the application converts the label with the Unicode character into an A-Label again, using character normalization and the Punycode algorithm. So as far as the DNS system is concerned, all domain names are just ASCII.
Here is a French character IDN example as it would appear in a zone file:

trèsbonsdomaines.ca is converted to: xn--trsbonsdomaines-vsb.ca

The special marker ('xn--') is added to the beginning of the A-label containing non-ASCII characters to show that the label was not originally ASCII.

Bundles and Variants

A bundle is a collection of multiple domain names that are grouped together because the base canonical name of each variant is the same. A base canonical name is the normalized, non-diacritic version of the domain name. For example, the base canonical name of cïra.ca is cira.ca. Similarly, the base canonical name of çirâ.ca is also cira.ca and both of these IDNs would be in the same bundle.

Bundling, in CIRA terms, refers to simple administrative bundling and the requirement is that the different domain names in the bundle are registered by the same Registrant, with the same Registrant contact ID, with the same Registrar. Variant domain names in a bundle will fail if the Registrant contact ID is different even though the contact information is the same.

The requested label and its preferred variants are allocated to the same Registrant. Performing a domain search for a bundled domain name variant will result in a successful look-up. A variant is an alternative form of the domain name. One example is if you register cira.ca, çirâ.ca is considered a variant. When there is more than one form of the same letter, it becomes necessary to treat different labels as being the same and these then become variants.

Note A bundle can only be sponsored by one Registrar and all domain names in the bundle must have the same Registrant contact ID.

Move a domain to a new account

If you wish to move a domain registration from your current account to another CADNS account, you will need manage the domain you wish to move under your current account. On the domains management page there is a button to "Move to another Account", click that to begin. A page will be displayed asking you for the account id of the account you want to move the domain to and the transfer token that was generated from the owner of the target account. If the new owner doesn't have an account with us you will need to choose the option to create a new account to move the domain into. You can then give the new account id and password you created to the new owner of the domain.

*PLEASE NOTE* You should create new registrant/admin/tech contacts on the domain name you are moving FIRST to make sure the contacts aren't linked to any of the other domain names you may own.

How do I access/setup URL forwarding?

You can access the URL forwarding page by logging into your account and then clicking on the "Manage" button beside the domain name in your domain list that is displayed on your accounts main page. This will take you to your domain management page. You will see a URL Forwarding button there. Click that to manage the URL forwarding for your domain name.

Make sure your domain name has our nameservers assigned to your domain name:

• ns1.cadns.ca
• ns2.cadns.ca
• ns3.cadns.ca

My URL forwarding isn't working

There can be a number of reasons why URL forwarding isn't working for your domain name. Please check the following:

• Make sure only our nameservers are assigned to your domain name. Our nameservers are ns1.cadns.ca, ns2.cadns.ca, ns3.cadns.ca. You can check this by clicking to Manage your domain from your list and looking under the Nameserver section that is displayed.
• The first time you activate the URL forwarding service you must allow 30 minutes minimum up to 48 hours maximum for the service to start working. This assumes that you have our nameservers assigned to your .ca domain name
• If your domain name has expired then any nameservers on your domain name will not be functioning to resolve your domain to our service.
• If your domain name is not with us as your registrar, or is transferred away, the service will not work for your .ca domain.

Error Messages

If you receive an error message at the top of the page in a grey box that you are unsure about. Please copy the error message and email it to us. We will take a look into the error and respond to you.

Forgot login info

You can have the account password sent to you by going to the forgot password page and entering a domain name you have with us. The account info will be sent out to your accounts email address. If the accounts email address is defunct you will have to contact us and we may require you to send us photo id's or incorporation papers to prove your identity.

My cdnsXXXXXXXXX username doesn't work

Please be aware that as of Oct 13 2010 there has been a system migration. Your login credentials have changed. You no longer need to type the 'cdns' in front of your username. For example if you had a username of cdnsxxxxxxxxx ( where x is a number) you would now just use the number part as your account id. Your password has remained unchanged.

If you had multiple domain names under your old CIRA registrant account you will no longer have a username for each one. Instead they have been merged under a single account id. Use the forgot option to retrieve this id. It will usually be the number from your very first registration.

My account email address is defunct and I lost my password

Please go here to complete the necessary form to gain access to your .ca domain name registrations account.

How do I order web hosting for my domain name?

You can order web hosting for your domain name by first logging into your domain registration account here. Once logged in you will see two tabbed lists below your account info. A "Registered Domain List" and a "Hosted Domain List". Make sure you select the "Registered Domain List" and then click the Manage button in the action column for your domain. From here you will be on your domains management page. Click the order hosting button on the page to be taken to the web hosting selection page.

How do I access the web hosting admin panel for my domain name?

You can access the web hosting admin panel for your domain name by first logging into your domain registration account here. Once logged in you will see two tabbed lists below your account info. A "Registered Domain List" and a "Hosted Domain List". Make sure you select the "Hosted Domain List". From here if your hosting account has been fully setup and activated your domain name should be listed as a hyperlink you can click. By clicking this link you will be taken to the hosting servers login panel where you can login using the credentials that should have been emailed to you once your hosting account was activated.

*NOTE* Make sure your domain name has our nameservers assigned to your domain name:

• ns1.cadns.ca
• ns2.cadns.ca
• ns3.cadns.ca

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