Doing Business in Canada

Incorporating in Canada as a non-resident is more accessible than most Americans expect, though rules vary by jurisdiction: federal incorporation and most provinces no longer require a Canadian-resident director, though British Columbia and a few others still have residency requirements worth checking before you pick where to incorporate. Expect $200–400 CAD in government filing fees, plus a registered agent if you don't have a Canadian address. A business bank account, by contrast, typically still requires an in-person visit — the one step that genuinely can't be done from Ohio.

The Toronto Stock Exchange lists over 2,600 companies at a combined market cap north of $11 trillion CAD, but the character of the exchange is distinctly Canadian: heavy on banks (Royal Bank of Canada and TD Bank alone account for roughly 6% of total market cap), pipelines and energy (Enbridge, Canadian Natural Resources), and mining — a resource economy that never fully pivoted to tech the way the US did.

Shopify is the exception that proves the rule — an Ottawa-born e-commerce platform, dual-listed on both the TSX and NYSE, powering online stores for Tesla, Nestlé, and Whole Foods among millions of smaller merchants. Beyond Shopify: Brookfield (Toronto-based, one of the world's largest alternative asset managers, deeply embedded in US real estate and infrastructure), Bombardier (business jets, recovered from a near-death restructuring), and Canadian National Railway (CN, whose rail lines run deep into the US Midwest and Gulf Coast — a genuine cross-border infrastructure company, not just a Canadian one).

Canada's economy runs on a structural tension: resource wealth funds the country, but resource dependency also means the Canadian dollar and stock market swing with commodity prices Ottawa doesn't control. The bigger open wound is talent — Canadian tech graduates, doctors, and engineers move south for US salaries at a rate that shows up in actual government policy debate, not just dinner-party complaints — and housing costs in Toronto and Vancouver have become a genuine drag on the ability to hire and retain people in both cities.

For an American business, Canada is less a foreign market than an adjacent one — shared language (mostly), similar legal traditions, deep supply-chain integration, and a tax treaty that prevents double taxation. The friction is in the details: provincial regulatory variation, a genuinely higher corporate and personal tax load than most US states, and a 2026 USMCA review cycle worth watching if your business depends on cross-border trade terms staying stable.

Figures current as of August 2026 — verify before relying on them.