🇨🇦 Living in Montreal

✈️ Flights

If you’re travelling to Canada from France, you can check out this offer from Air Canada allowing two pieces of luggage of 23 kg each.

🏠 Accommodation

• Housing info from Polytechnique: English version | Version française.

• ​Kijjji.ca: buy and sell anything in Montreal; many apartments to rent, share, and sublet

• ​Craigslist: numerous listings

• ​Les pac: many different categories of classifieds

• ​Louer.ca: for the entire province of Quebec

• Rentals.ca: Apartments, houses, and condos for rent across Canada

💸 Doing your taxes

Here is a short description of how to do your taxes when studying at Polytechnique. Before getting into how to do it, you must know that taxes are to be done once a year and are usually due by the end of April. Taxes should be submitted at both the provincial and federal levels.

• Gather all your required documents:

  First, you should gather all the documents which are going to be required to fill your tax declaration. Without those, you won’t be able to move forward. You will need documents regarding:

  • Research scholarship funding (or internship funding): T4A and either R1 or R2

  • TAing or work activities: T4 and either R1 or R2

  • Tuition fees: T2202 and R8

  • Your Social Insurance Number (SIN / NAS in French)

  • Your residence: R31 (should be given to you by your landlord

• First year doing taxes:

  If it’s your first year doing your taxes, you might not have an ARC account. This means that you won’t be able to automatically pull the above files by just connecting to your account. This also means that for Quebec, you will have to print your declaration and send it by mail or drop it in one of their offices (there is one in Complexe Desjardins).

• File your taxes using an online tool:

  I recommend using WealthSimple which is pretty intuitive but other tools such as TurboTax are pretty good as well. Fill in your information on the website. The tool will even allow you to submit everything online (except if you don’t have an ARC account).

Nota Bene: For TAing at UdeM, it might be complicated to get your T4 and R1 because they delete/close your account at the end of the session and you can’t log in. This means that you have to go to the following page to ask them to transfer it to you.

Daily life