IN THIS GUIDE · Whether both companies are trading, how the two are related, and what capacity the transferee will actually hold
Start with the L-1A eligibility and application overview
Dormancy is the failure nobody sees coming
Hypothetical example: Thérèse is the executive of a custom feed-and-mineral blending company outside Saint-Joachim-de-Shefford, and the group is building a blending plant in the American Midwest with her at the head of it. Six weeks before filing, the Québec plant is taken offline for a rebuild that will run most of a year. The transfer looks unaffected and is not. The regulation asks whether both entities are doing business, and a plant that mills nothing, invoices nobody and has laid off its operators is going to be tested against that word. The answer is not to hide the shutdown but to describe what the Canadian entity is still doing: contracts being serviced from stock, formulation work continuing, staff retained, orders being taken for delivery after commissioning. If nothing is continuing, the honest conclusion is that the qualifying relationship has a hole in it at exactly the wrong moment.
Executive capacity is about authority, not headcount
The instinct is to count direct reports, and that instinct answers the wrong test. An executive directs the management of the organisation or a major component of it, sets the goals and policies for that component, and answers only to broad supervision. A manager may qualify by managing a function rather than people, provided the function is essential and the person operates at a senior level within it. What proves either is not an organisation chart with boxes drawn optimistically. It is a budget the person signs, a policy the person set, a hiring decision the person made, and a description of who deals with the routine work if the person is not doing it. Where the answer is that nobody else does the routine work, the petition is describing a skilled operator with a title, and that is a different case.
Write the relationship down the way the register shows it
Qualifying relationship is a documentary question with a documentary answer. Share registers, incorporation certificates, share certificates, shareholder agreements and the minutes authorising each issuance are the evidence, and they need to agree with each other. Where a holding company sits between the two operating entities, trace ownership through it rather than asserting the conclusion. Where control is held through a voting agreement rather than a majority of shares, produce the agreement. A common failure is a group that reorganised years ago and never updated the register, so the corporate lawyer's summary and the filed record describe different companies. Fix that before the petition rather than explaining it afterwards, because a discrepancy in the ownership evidence casts a shadow over everything else in the file.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.