Recruiting US vs Canada

It's going to be different firm to firm. Generally they tend to start later in the summer. Based on 2019 recruiting for SA2020, the timeline was:

July/Aug - CS TO, MS TO, GS TO, Greenhill TO Early-mid Sep - Barclays TO, BAML TO, BB Calgary offices Late Sep - early Oct - big 5 Canadian banks + National (simultaneous processes that they agreed on together)

This year though, things may be very different, with some processes like National/Barclays/CS having already kicked off/close to kicking off. So definitely start networking early.

Recruiting process wise, it's going to be different for you as they like to do everything on-campus for the Canadian targets, but I am sure because you are at a US target school, the teams will look very favorably upon you reaching out of the cold.

From my experience, the BB/EB Canadian offices have some of the hardest technicals across all interviews I have had. They like to make all their technicals in-house so there will be a lot of creative/new technicals that you wouldn't have been able to prep for. As an example, during one first-round I had, one of the technicals was literally them giving me a deck of an overview of Canadian M&A deals last year, with all text taken out, and asked me to give them a 5 min presentation of the deck with 5 min to prep (of course, needed a lot of personal knowledge on the M&A space to make the presentation work). That was something I have never seen in any interview before. Maybe it's cuz they know Ivey/Queen's kids are whizzes with technicals.