workerparasite

Congrats! I too was just accepted to the MA program at SFU; it's nice to see someone else on here. While the $10.5k isn't amazing, they do have some internal scholarships on top of that, and you can live in Burnaby/East Vancouver fairly cheaply. Did you apply for SSHRC funding too?

Regarding addressing emails, I usually try to follow the cues of how they're signed by the professor, as others here have said. What I find useful (and had a British-educated, prim and proper professor suggest when I was contacting people under her supervision) is to start off by addressing them as "Prof. X" and if/when they sign an email with their first name reply with "Dear Bob (if I may),". I've had a few go back to signing emails "Prof. X" indicating that I may not, but I don't think I've ever caused offence. Then again a lot of these people are Canadian and at smaller institutions, so your results may vary.

akwok, I'm in the same boat. I only applied to one (MA - US History at Simon Fraser) and I'm really, really wishing I had applied to more. I didn't want to go through the hassle of moving back to the US just yet and there aren't many suitable advisers for this topic in Canada, but I'm going to be sweating bullets until I hear from SFU.