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Thanks ... many paths to the same result

We really like YotPo - for a few reasons.  As an e-commerce site, submitting reviews by customers can be a hassle - as most "native" review systems require the customer to come to your site, login, and then write the review.  YotPo has a a really cool system where they send the emails and those emails are so special, the customer need only write the review IN THE EMAIL they are looking at - not sure how this works technically - but YotPo will get you a lot more reviews than any native ecommerce system. In our experience, YotPo does require tech-saavy integration to get the full features.  One of these is to allow for crawl-able reviews.  IT IS DO-ABLE, but you need to look for their advanced integration instructions.  This has something to do with the review content being seen by google as being on 3rd party site, and thus not part of your site.  Trust me, you CAN fix this with Yotpo. I do hope this is helpful.

Same IP address is fine in my experience, just so long you are not registering multiple accounts for the purpose of writing reviews on your own Google Places. I always create separate Google accounts for each clients Google Places page (unless they have multiple offices), my theory is if Google ever deleted my account by mistake or I lost a password or got locked out then i would not lose all my clients Google Places pages tied to that account. Check out my latest blog post if you need any advice on Google Places Optimization

While this isn't a scientific answer, based strictly on my opinion, I would use a .ca for a local site, and a .com if organic is more important. I have never tried it, but when a person in Canada types in Google.com are they automatically redirected to Google.ca?