Hi All,

Does Canada have an IT contracting market like in the UK?

My OH is looking to start contracting out there but we are not finding much info on the web, any advice on sites and where to look would be great.

Any personal recommendations would also be really great!

In the UK we use an umbrella company to solve the tax headaches any recommendations around a Canadian eqvialent would also be really useful.

We are planning a recon visit in a couple of weeks and it would be good to try and get some meetings setup while we are in country.

Cheers,

P

I'm pretty sure dbd33 is your man if I recall correctly... but i could be wrong... he seems to know it all when it comes to contracting around the GTA

Anyway if you're contracting in the big city(LDN) like me then from what I hear you will get nowhere near what you get in LDN... You just need to save those extra pennies now

I am also in IT contracting (as a consultant actually). I got this position from a recruiter and its the same case with my friends doing IT contracting. The reason behind this is the clients who are often mid to large company prefer to deal with their official vendor than individual. So it wouldn't be a bad idea to get in touch with recruiters.

I also came to know that the clients take more than a month to pay but the recruiters pays us every week, well ahead of the clients payments to them.

I could pass on the information about two recruiters where one deals with a major bank and the other with Telcom.

BTW, What is the avg hourly contracting rate of a Production DBA in London.
Here, I can tell you it ranges any where from $60-$85 (again this is up to my knowledge).

That would be great if you could put me touch with the recruiters! :-)

Re the DBA questions I think it ranges from £300 up to £600 (seen more in the city!) depending on experiance.

Hi Jagz - yeah I go through a recruiter just like 99% of contractors I have met. Its the norm... You tell the recruiter your daily rate and they add their cut on top and skim some from your rate if you're a newbie

Your question regarding DBA rates - I can only really go by what they pay in Banking but I would have said £300 a day was extremely low even for a support position. It must start around £500 - 600 a day I would have thought. But you could always check it out yourself... www.jobserve.com (A contractors best friend) Its kept me in work since 97!!

Thanks for the answer.

I am looking at project management / PMO roles. Could you give me the details of good recruiters to use or via PM if you dont want to post on the forum.

Cheers,

P

I did PM you. Looking at the figures you posted on the rates of London, here it is not that promising but at the same time not very dynamic also.

I have been a contractor based in Toronto since 1985. My primary income is from software royalties but I still bill 50 or so hours a week in actual work. I also do some pimping. Obviously I know a bunch of contractors. I have current, part time, contracts in (I think) 15 countries including the US and the UK.

Based on this I'm a bit perplexed as to why a contract banking project manager should be looking at Toronto. There's not much banking here and I can't recall a case of a firm using an outsider as a project manager, typically they use contractors to do the actual work and keep the overhead positions for staff.

I can answer the umbrella company question though. What you need is a numbered corporation (it has no name, just the next free number). It's the cheapest way to incorporate and although the firm will be called nnnnnnn Ont Inc it can use any sort of trade style. Trucks are typically signwritten "o/o by Joe's Transport (a division of nnnnnnn Ont. Inc.)". Incoporation gets you a bunch of tax breaks but mostly you need it because agents want it; if they deal with individuals they can get dragged into the individual's tax problems and may make themselves subject to employment related legislation. You can get a numbered company at the Ministry of Consumer Affairs or pay an accountant or lawyer to set it up. Cost is about $800 and then $150 a year.

I have no recent experience of agents except that, since we have various supplier numbers, people occassionally come to us wanting us to hold the paper on jobs that have been arranged by word of mouth; the deal typically is that the hirer and the contractor know each other from past jobs but the one can't hire the other without going through an approved agent. We'll be the "approved agent" for a percentage but won't finance the receivables.

[QUOTE=dbd33;6341272]My primary income is from software royalties but I still bill 50 or so hours a week in actual work. I also do some pimping. /QUOTE]

Software royalties and pimping...quite a combination and I'm sure one that keeps Revenue Canada interested.

[QUOTE=clynnog;6342071]
Ack! Like everyone in the business I've gradually sprouted more and more companies. In the case of software royalties (where there's no agent involved) they pretty much all flow into our US company and then get paid to a Canada numbered company from which they're paid to the individual Ontario corporations of the partners in the Canadian corporation. From there we each pay wives, mistresses, children and pets a salary. It has to be that way because companies, even Canadian companies, are wary of buying software from Canadians; they'd rather deal with a US firm.

Pimping dollars, and consulting dollars, flow into the Canadian or US corporation at the whim of the client (the laws governing contracts differ by location so, for example, no one wants a contract under the laws of California and even the Canadian federal government would rather sign a deal under the laws of Nevada than those of Ontario), again they flow out to the Ontario corporations.

Revenue Canada, being government, makes a big fuss about things that don't matter, such as whether or not an Ontario software company really needs a tractor and manure spreader, while missing what does; the fact that very many of these contracts are arranged around sales tax issues. Many of the consulting and software contracts would be subject to VAT or GST or similar if written according to the laws of the states or provinces where the work is effectively done (it's the interwebby era so there's no physical location no more). Our clients are large firms, they buy millions of dollars worth of software and tens of millions of dollars worth of consulting per year, arranging things so that their financial affairs are conducted outside North America is either prudent or a massive tax evasion, depending on your politics.