Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig nwic.ca. NS
Answer
nwic.ca. 5 NS ns-1968.awsdns-54.co.uk.
nwic.ca. 5 NS ns-738.awsdns-28.net.
nwic.ca. 5 NS ns-200.awsdns-25.com.
nwic.ca. 5 NS ns-1107.awsdns-10.org.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0