A friend on here uses Planethoster, a Canuck company based in Montreal but also have servers in France. He has had good experiences so far, but you might need to request English once in a while. Why do you want to have a Canuck host provider? This severely limits your choices of host provider. I use A2 in Michigan.
I always split domain name and hosting because there was a time when host providers could hold your name ransom if you wanted to leave. I think most host providers split out their domain name part to an external company/different sub-company, but I don't want any surprises.