.ca is open for registration by anyone, and people are used to seeing that TLD. Combine that with the bilingual super long domain names and every once in a while you’ll see a phishing scam like:
.gc.ca exists for that exact purpose. It has the advantage of being bilingual ("GC" expands to both "Government of Canada" and "Gouvernement du Canada", .gov.ca omits the "u" in the French word gouvernement).
I believe the canada.ca thing relates to the centralization of federal government IT under Shared Services Canada (SSC) in 2011. SSC is an attempt to make a "one stop shop" for government IT services, and Canada.ca is an extension of that philosophy to web presence.
As an aside, SSC is very controversial in the Canadian federal government. They have a reputation for glacially slow delivery of services and inflexibility in IT policies. The head of StatCan actually resigned in 2016 in protest as a result of problems with SSC [1]. They have gotten better since then but it's still rocky.
I completely forgot about gc.ca. I'm surprised they haven't kept with it! Didn't know about SCC, resigning over that is a pretty strong indicator of how the internals of the federal government's IT decision makers work haha.
They have. Canada.ca is the "marketing site", basically, and all of the federal internal systems and departmental apps are in .gc.ca, usually on a cryptic subdomain which is the English and French acronyms for the department.
> CIRA could set up a .gov.ca second level or something if they really wanted to keep the .ca
As has been noted elsewhere in the thread, Canada wouldn't be eligible to use bare .gov if they wanted to, because it's only for US government entities.
It’s at least consistant in looking like a phishing scam!