Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig user.start.ca. NS
Answer
user.start.ca. 5 NS dns61.telus.ca.
user.start.ca. 5 NS dns61.telus.com.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0