Originally Posted by mixedpuppy

I've dealt with this, moved to Canada years ago and before I ever thought about stuff like this. The best thing I ever did (related to credit) was to retain my oldest US card and keep a US address on file. Since then I've acquired more US cards as well. Move everything to electronic billing to save your friend some effort.

If you're using a US card for your normal card, even if the card has no-forex, you'll have to transfer money to the US to pay the bill (forex around 1-2.5% depending on how you do it), so you're loosing benefit of rewards in that alone. Unless of course you have plenty of cash in the US to pay the bills. Even then you're getting less rewards for dollar spent than you would with a Canadian card. If you get one point per US$, you have to spend $1.36CAD to get that point. The same card in Canada (e.g. SPG) you're spending $1CAD or $0.75US to get that one point.

AMEX can move the card to the Canadian side, and back later, that may be an easy way to start building Canadian credit. If you do that I'd first move it to a card that you don't care about the signup bonus. You can always apply later for a Canadian SPG and get the bonus here. Another alternative is to just get a credit starter card in Canada and use that for 6 months to build some credit.

I'd probably avoid using a US card for daily spend in Canada if it's attached to a US address, never know what that may cause with the issuer. I have cards in both so I can choose what works best when traveling.

The only reasonable no-forex cards in Canada are from Chase (Marriott and Amazon). Rogers kind of has it via 4% cash back on spend out of Canada. Some high end cards may have it also.