We cast, brief, and produce UGC ads with Canadian creators in English, in genuine Quebecois French, or as parallel native shoots of both. You get ad-ready video, full usage rights, and a domestic shipping loop your US-based partners cannot match. Built for DTC brands running paid social into the Canadian market.
Three production lanes. EN-only for English Canada. QC FR-only for Quebec. Bilingual parallel native shoots when you want one concept covering the whole country. The deliverable is paid-social-ready video built for hook testing, not lifestyle content for a brand feed.
A Canadian production team also sidesteps three frictions that quietly tax any brand running UGC into Canada from abroad. If you came here looking for our broader UGC service without a Canada lens, that page covers the engine. Everything below is about the Canadian market.
The three frictions you hit when you hire Canadian UGC from outside Canada
Most non-Canadian brands lose money in Canada three ways, and all three look like execution problems until you trace them back to where the production loop is actually run from.
Bill 96 turns your digital ads into "commercial publications"
Quebec's Charter of the French Language was reinforced by Bill 96, with its most restrictive provisions in force since June 1, 2025. Websites, social ads, and UGC running into Quebec are legally classed as commercial publications and must offer a French version that is "no less favourable" than the English. Corporate fines start at $3,000 and escalate to $90,000 on repeat offences, every non-compliant day is its own separate offence, and the OQLF runs primarily on anonymous citizen complaints rather than random audits. None of this is theoretical. The OQLF logged over 11,000 complaints in the most recent reporting cycle, with a third targeting commercial content, websites, and social media.
Metropolitan French gets rejected by a Quebec audience
Sourcing a Parisian creator (or worse, dubbing English audio under a French voice track) is the fastest way to burn a Quebec campaign. Magasiner, not faire du shopping. Cellulaire, not portable. Courriel, not mail. Souper for dinner, not dîner. The accent, vocabulary, and meal-time references read foreign to a Quebecois audience inside the first three seconds, and the trust premium UGC is supposed to buy is gone. Native Quebecois talent is not a nice-to-have on this market, it is the precondition.
Cross-border shipping eats your turnaround and your margin
Canada's de minimis threshold for inbound parcels is $60 CAD. Anything above that hits customs clearance, duties, and provincial sales tax, and unless the brand pre-arranged Delivery Duty Paid, the creator gets a surprise bill at the door for the product they are supposed to film. The 2026 collapse of the US $800 de minimis regime, including a 35% tariff on Canadian goods through the international postal network, made the same trip in the other direction equally painful. A domestic Canadian loop avoids brokerage, duty, and the friction that ends brand-creator relationships before the first take.
What we produce
The unit of work is one ad-ready concept, delivered in the lane you need. Pick the lane that matches the market.
| Production lane | Talent | Use case | Per concept, you receive |
|---|---|---|---|
| English Canada | Canadian English-speaking creators | Paid social into English Canada | Hook variants, edited cut, raw files, captions |
| Quebec French | Native Quebecois creators only | Paid social into Quebec | Hook variants, edited cut, raw files, on-screen text in Quebecois French |
| Bilingual parallel | Separate native casts in EN and QC FR | Full-Canada rollout | Two independent ad-ready variants of the same concept, never a dub |
Every variant is shot natively. We never lip-dub a French audio track onto an English performance, and we never run English on-screen text into a Quebec placement. The reason for the parallel-native rule is simple: a dubbed video misaligns the creator's mouth with the audio, the viewer clocks it as a repurposed ad inside a second, and the asset dies in feed. Hook craft, demonstration beats, and the rest of what makes a UGC ad convert are baked into the brief at concept stage, not retrofitted in post.
Usage rights, handled at signature
The base shoot fee buys the asset. What actually scales is the right to run it. We negotiate paid-media usage and creator-handle whitelisting into the original creator agreement, so nothing has to be renegotiated when an ad starts working. Market-rate context (paid-media usage typically lands around 30 to 50% of the base creator fee, whitelisting another 50 to 100% on top) is built into the quote from the start. The mechanics of how usage rights work, and the choice between Spark Ads and Partnership Ads, are covered separately.
How we work
A domestic production loop runs in days where a cross-border one runs in weeks. The Canadian platforms tracking this report standard turnaround of seven to ten days from when the product hits the creator's door, which only works because the product gets to the door in 48 hours instead of two weeks at the border.
- Strategy intake. Funnel stage, the angles you want to test, what your current creative is doing, what is failing in the account.
- Brief. Per-concept brief built around hook, demonstration, and ask, written for either lane (EN or QC FR), with on-screen text written in the right register.
- Casting. Match creators to angle and to market. For Quebec, native Quebecois only, with regional fit (Montreal, Quebec City, regions) considered against the brand.
- Domestic dispatch. Product ships from a Canadian 3PL to a Canadian creator. No border, no broker, no surprise duty bill at the door.
- Shoot and QA. Native shoot of every variant. For bilingual concepts, two separate performances by two creators, not one dubbed twice.
- Ad-ready delivery. Edited cut, hook variants, raw files, captions, and, where licensed, creator-handle access for Spark or Partnership Ads.
The brief is doing most of the work here. We cover the brief itself in the creator brief template, and the full production loop, from intake to handoff, in the UGC workflow and the creative pipeline for brands running this at volume.
Who this is for
Built for DTC brands with paid social already running into Canada or about to launch into it.
- DTC brands targeting English Canada that want creators who actually sound Canadian, not a US creator in a toque.
- Brands expanding into Quebec for the first time and unsure how to do French without tripping Bill 96 or the Metropolitan-French wall.
- US brands looking to hire Canadian talent for the CAD rate advantage without absorbing the cross-border tax and shipping mess.
- Canadian brands already producing UGC in English that need to add the French lane without compromising on authenticity or compliance.
Why us, specifically
A Canadian shop with a native Quebecois bench, a domestic shipping loop, and a paid-social-first brief is a different category of vendor than a global self-serve marketplace. Five short notes on what that actually means.
A real Quebecois bench, not a sticker
We cast Quebecois creators for Quebec work, period. Where the brand benefits from it, we match regional flavour (Montreal versus Quebec City versus further out), because the audience hears the difference and the algorithm reads it through engagement.
A domestic shipping loop
Product ships from a Canadian 3PL to a Canadian creator. No customs delay, no DDP coordination, no creator-side surprise duty bill arriving with the parcel.
CAD-native pricing, no cross-border tax friction for the brand
Quoted in CAD, no W-8BEN paperwork for the brand to chase, no 30% IRS backup withholding to unwind on a foreign-contractor invoice. For US brands, a Canadian Dollar trading in the $0.70 to $0.75 USD range shows up as real margin on every shoot, not just a headline rate. Services billed cross-border into the US are zero-rated for GST/HST on our side, which keeps the invoice clean.
A performance brief, not a vibes brief
We brief to hook, demonstration, and ask, which is the structure paid social actually rewards. The depth of what separates a working ad from a pretty one lives in the ad-craft breakdown.
Compliance baked into the produce-and-ship loop
Bill 96 is treated as a production constraint from the brief stage. No English-only on-screen text into Quebec. No Metropolitan vocabulary. "No less favourable" parity on French variants. Where bilingual on-screen text is unavoidable, French gets the two-to-one visual space the law requires. The shoot ships compliant, not "we'll fix it in post."
A note on pricing
CAD-quoted. Scoped per concept, where a concept is one hook angle, multiple hook variants, an edited cut, raw files, and captions. Bilingual concepts cost more than EN-only because they are two native shoots, not a translation. Retainers are available for brands running continuous testing. The full market-rate read, including how creator tiers, usage windows, and whitelisting stack up, lives in the UGC pricing breakdown.
Get a Canadian UGC quote
Tell us the product, the market (English Canada, Quebec, or both), the funnel stage, and roughly how many concepts you want to test in the first 30 days. We come back with a scoped quote and a casting shortlist. If your scope ends up broader than Canada, we also handle the rest of the UGC engine from the same brief.