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Canada is vast -- driving between major cities can mean full days on the road, so most visitors combine domestic flights for long distances with a rental car or transit locally. Air Canada and WestJet connect every major city, and it's often faster and cheaper to fly between, say, Toronto and Vancouver than to drive.
VIA Rail runs long-distance trains, including the scenic Toronto-Vancouver route through the Rockies, though service is slower and less frequent than Europe's rail networks and isn't a practical way to cover the country quickly. Regional transit is strong within Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, but a car is genuinely useful, sometimes necessary, once outside the biggest cities.
Winter driving demands real preparation -- winter tires are effectively mandatory in much of the country from November to April, and some highways (particularly in the Rockies and the north) close temporarily during storms. Cross-border trips into the US are common and straightforward with a passport, though land border crossings can carry long waits at peak times.
Canada is the world's second-largest country by area, spanning six time zones from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with the Arctic Ocean forming its entire northern border. Its geography splits broadly into the Atlantic provinces' rocky coastline, the flat, fertile prairies of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, and the Rocky Mountains running along the western edge of Alberta and through British Columbia.
The Canadian Shield, an enormous expanse of ancient rock, lakes, and boreal forest, covers roughly half the country's landmass, stretching from Ontario and Quebec north into the territories -- one of the reasons Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world combined. The Great Lakes, shared with the United States, sit along the country's most densely populated stretch, from Toronto through southern Ontario.
The north -- Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut -- makes up more than a third of Canada's landmass but holds a tiny fraction of its population, dominated by tundra, Arctic islands, and, in the Yukon, some of the country's highest peaks, including Mount Logan, Canada's tallest mountain.
Canada's climate varies enormously by region and by season. Coastal British Columbia has a mild, wet, maritime climate closer to parts of Western Europe than the rest of Canada -- rarely extreme in either direction, with rain concentrated in winter rather than summer.
Most of the rest of the country has a continental climate: genuinely cold, snowy winters and warm, sometimes humid summers, with a wide swing between the two -- Toronto and Montreal regularly see summer highs near 30°C (86°F) and winter lows well below freezing in the same year.
The north is colder again, and for longer -- much of the Arctic sees only a brief summer thaw, with permafrost underlying the ground year-round and winter temperatures that can fall below -40°C for extended stretches. Daylight swings dramatically with the seasons this far north too, from near-permanent summer sun to only a few hours of winter daylight.