In 2010-2020 I conducted extensive research on hunter-gatherers in the northern mountains of the Mexican state of Zacatecas, right on the Tropic of Cancer, at over 1700 meters of altitude, while a university professor there. Currently a desert, the region had vast shallow lakes within endhorreic basins and narrow mountain ranges covered in lush forests during the Pleistocene, then gradually reduced to desert throughout the Early and Middle Holocene. Years of surveys and excavations focused the search on two cave sites that eventually yielded hard evidence of human presence in deposits strongly dated to between the Younger Dryas and the onset of the LGM: Chiquihuite Cave and Sima de las Golondrinas. Chiquihuite revealed a complex lithic industry manufactured from locally-available hardened limestones behaving like cherts. Golondrinas, formerly a flooded chasm, yielded no lithics but multiple modified bones. After 25 years in Mexico, I moved to Toronto in 2023, at a major CRM firm, in the hope of resuming my investigations on human presence older than 18k BP in Canada. However, the institutional and regulatory environments in Ontario archaeology make it hard or almost impossible, even though the potential is there, but largely ignored. This presentation analyses that transition and prospects.