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A page that has a no index on it still gets crawled  and therefore the rel=canonical directive is still "seen" by the bot --- so why wouldn't the rel=canonical pass the credit over?

Thanks Tammy for your response! We do plan on adding the hreflang  tag to the different versions.

That being said  - I've seen many seos advise to use  set up # 2

but I’ve seen many brands do it differently

for example:

apple does it like # 1

ikea like # 3

so I wasn't sure whether there is any real difference.

Regarding tld .ca -- we  do own it and plan to redirect it to our subfolder. At the moment we prefer to use that route so we don't split up our link juice among two different sites.  Evnetually we can always separate them if we feel it will be better for use