A developer and tester for Canadian businesses, from India
Canadian engagements look much like US ones on the clock, and quite different on the paperwork — PIPEDA and, for anyone with users in Quebec, Law 25, which is now the strictest privacy regime in North America. Both are worth settling before the first schema is written.
Hours, money, and the law
The three things that decide whether hiring across a border works.
Your morning, my evening
India is 9.5 hours ahead of Toronto and Montreal, and 12.5 ahead of Vancouver. I hold 6:30pm to 10pm IST for calls, which is 9am to 12:30pm Eastern and 6am to 9:30am Pacific. Eastern-time clients get a comfortable daily window; Pacific clients get an early one or an asynchronous rhythm. Either way the working pattern is the same: you review in your morning, the response is there the next.
CAD or USD, with no sales tax to add
Invoices are issued in CAD or USD, paid by bank transfer or Wise. GST/HST is generally not charged on services supplied from outside Canada; depending on your registration you may self-assess. There is no Indian GST on an export of services. Because I am a non-resident with no permanent establishment in Canada, there is normally no Canadian withholding on services performed entirely outside the country — your accountant should confirm that against your own circumstances.
PIPEDA, and Quebec's Law 25 if you have users there
PIPEDA sets the federal baseline: consent, purpose limitation, safeguards and access rights. Quebec's Law 25 goes further — explicit consent for many uses, mandatory breach reporting, privacy by default, and a right to data portability, with meaningful penalties behind it. If any of your users are in Quebec, that is the standard worth building to, because retrofitting consent and deletion into a live system is far more expensive than designing for it. Alberta and British Columbia have their own provincial statutes for private-sector data.
What clients here usually need
Bilingual English and French
French-language requirements are a legal question in Quebec, not a nice-to-have. The application is built to hold both languages properly; the French copy should come from a native speaker.
Professional services and booking systems
Clinics, consultancies and trades needing scheduling, intake forms and reminders — with the data-handling questions answered before launch rather than after.
Independent QA on an existing product
A test suite over software your own team wrote, running in your pipeline. Often the cheapest way to buy release confidence without adding a headcount at Canadian salary levels.
Questions from Canadian clients
The ones that come up before a first call.
If you handle personal information of people in Quebec, generally yes, regardless of where your business is registered. It is stricter than PIPEDA on consent, breach reporting and privacy-by-default, and it carries real penalties. The practical consequence for a build is that consent, retention and deletion have to be designed in from the start — which is cheaper than retrofitting them, and is how I would approach it anyway.
Generally not, since the supply comes from outside Canada. Depending on your registration status you may need to self-assess. No Indian GST applies to an export of services. This is a general description and not tax advice, so have your accountant confirm it for your situation.
The application is built to support both properly — routing, locale-aware formatting, and a content structure that holds two languages without duplicating the site. The French copy itself should come from a native speaker or professional translator, particularly given Quebec's language requirements. I will not machine-translate a business's own words and hand it over as finished.
A deposit to start, then payment against agreed milestones rather than an open hourly meter. Larger projects are split into more milestones so neither side is ever far out of pocket. Wise is usually the cheapest route for CAD; a direct bank transfer works equally well.