IN THIS GUIDE · L-1B for Guelph/Eramosa firms: proprietary knowledge, and the placement at a customer's site that goes wrong
Start with the L-1B eligibility and application overview
Say what is proprietary, not what is difficult
Specialized knowledge is knowledge of the petitioner's own product, service, research, techniques or processes, or an advanced level of knowledge of the company's processes and procedures. The petition fails when it describes the engineer as skilled in data integration, cloud pipelines and geospatial formats, because those are skills the US labour market has. It succeeds when it explains what only this company's system does: the specific matching rules for reconciling yield data across equipment brands, the calibration logic she wrote, the reasons certain fields are rejected. Confidential detail can be summarized. The comparison is with what an experienced hire would know on the first day and how long it would take to acquire the rest.
The dealer site is where control is lost
Work at a third-party location is permitted only if the transferee is not principally controlled and supervised by the unaffiliated employer and the work is not essentially labour for hire. Here the dealer will assign her a desk, include her in its daily stand-ups and expect her to take tasks from its integration lead. That arrangement reads as the subsidiary supplying an engineer to the dealer. Restructure it: the subsidiary's engineering manager sets her objectives, reviews her work and remains her only supervisor; the deliverable is the company's platform integrated to the company's standards; the dealer is a customer receiving a service. Write that into the services agreement and the petition letter before filing, not in response to a request for evidence.
The transfer conditions still apply
The engineer needs one continuous year as an employee of the Canadian company within the three years before filing, and the subsidiary relationship must be documented by share ownership. Both companies must be actively doing business. A software company that has all revenue flowing through the US subsidiary while the Canadian parent has become a shell should check that the parent still employs staff and provides services; the doing-business test applies to both sides for the whole period of stay. L-1B is available for up to five years in total.
Alternatives when the facts do not fit
If the honest description is that the engineer is a capable generalist, or if the dealer insists on directing her day to day, the case should not be forced into L-1B. Depending on her degree and duties, a TN as a Computer Systems Analyst or Engineer with the subsidiary as employer may fit, though the third-party placement question does not disappear there either. A shorter engagement structured as remote work from Canada with periodic business-visitor trips for meetings may satisfy the dealer without any work authorization, provided productive work is not performed on US soil during those trips.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.