I'll tag @bmetal , he's usually very forthcoming about stuff like that and can probably enlighten us all on the process and costs, or if its literally just the same as a regular renewal (and therefore a cash-grab).
there's no technical or financial justification for charging a redemption fee in the .CA world. It costs the registrar nothing. Purely a business decision.
As an example, consider that some of the .ca registrars "delete" expired .ca domains immediately ... any renewals at that point are automatically redemptions, and it would be insane for those registrars to charge a redemption fee (IMHO).
(edit: There are some technical hoops to jump, but any competent registrar has to have already written the software. The redemption process is a different sequence of a API calls than a normal renewal... but as I said, there is no extra cost to the registrar.)