1 The visionary architect Frank Gehry may live and work in California, but he was born in Toronto, so it's fitting that he should have designed the Art Gallery of Ontario (ago.net), which opened its stunning new building in 2008, with a great convex glass and wood façade that runs 180m along Dundas Street. (More typically, its south wing is faced in titanium.) Its collection's not bad, either: 68,000 works, ranging from ancient African and Oceanic pieces to the largest public collection of works by Henry Moore, by way of a fine range of European Old Masters.
2 And it's not the only striking example of modern architecture: Canada's largest museum, the Royal Ontario (rom.on.ca), has a dazzling angular multifaceted extension by starchitect Daniel Libeskind that looks as though it has crash-landed on the venerable 1912 institution.
3 Toronto is known as Tinseltown North, and no wonder, for it's the third largest film and television production centre in North America (after Los Angeles and New York), with anything up to 40 productions being shot in the city on any given day. No wonder, then, that the Toronto International Film Festival (tiff.net/thefestival), which runs for nine days every September, is one of the world's most influential.
4 Some of the world's best hotel brands are Canadian: both Four Seasons (fourseasons.com) and Fairmont Hotels & Resorts (fairmont.com) have headquarters in Toronto. (Among the latter's finest Canadian properties is Château Lake Louise in the Banff National Park, while Four Seasons Toronto, which opened in 1961, is the original hotel in that group.) For a contemporary boutique option, try the Hôtels le Germain (groupegermain.com) in Toronto, Calgary, Quebec, Montreal and Vancouver. Of the major overseas brands, Hong Kong-based Shangri-La is beginning to make inroads in Canada. Its very high-spec new Vancouver property - one of the finest hotels in Canada - occupies the first 15 floors of the tallest tower in the city, at 1128 West Georgia Street, has a Jean-Georges restaurant and a first-rate Chi spa. A sister hotel opens in Toronto in 2012.
5 Moored off Princess Royal Island in British Columbia, backed by the Great Bear Rainforest and accessible only by seaplane from Vancouver, King Pacific Lodge (kingpacificlodge.com) is a floating timber hotel (no foundations, no concrete) and a great base for whale watching, kayaking, bear safaris, getting close to nature - and away from everything else.
6 Heli-skiing is a Canadian invention, pioneered by Hans Gmoser and Ethan Compton, who founded Canadian Mountain Holidays (canadianmountainholidays.com) in 1965. The company still offers trips to 11 heli-skiing areas in the Columbia Mountains
in British Columbia, two of which offer heli-hiking in summer.
7 Arctic Canada is a great place from which to marvel at the aurora borealis. The UK operator Discover the World (discover-the-world.co.uk) offers four-night breaks in Whitehorse in the Yukon (from £1,090 pp), a place noted for these natural light shows, while daytime activities include snowmobiling and dog-sledding. This year, the Canadian Space Agency launched webcams in Yellowknife and Calgary to broadcast live feeds of the northern lights (asc-csa.gc.ca/auroramax/).
8 Canada's signal contribution to global gastronomy, maple syrup, may be the boiled-down sap of its national tree, but truly there is nothing more delicious on pancakes or waffles. It's a fine way to prep bacon, and Beyoncé reckoned it helped her lose weight. Its spring harvest is celebrated across Ontario with maple-syrup festivals: check out the Ontario Maple Syrup Producers Association website (ontariomaple.com) for listings.
9 Canadian wine isn't widely exported, but some of the wines produced in British Columbia (where Okanagen is the principal area for vineyards) and Ontario are very good. Look out, in particular, for Alvento's Cabernet Franc and Merlot blend Emilie, which is served at London's Le Gavroche.
10 The world's largest rodeo, the ten-day Calgary Stampede (cs.calgarystampede.com), will celebrate its centenary in 2012 (though, in fact, it's only been an annual event since 1923) and draws over a million visitors every July.
11 For a less commercialised, French-language rodeo experience, try the Festival Western de St-Tite (festivalwestern.com) during 10-19 September, when this little Québécois village in the Maurice region finds itself overrun by 400,000 bareback equestrians, both men and women, who compete in nine events of dazzling horsemanship and skill.
12 Home to loons, grebes and eagles, yet just half an hour from downtown Vancouver, Indian Arm is a 12-mile saltwater glacial fjord of phenomenal beauty. Explore it by kayak through Lotus Island Tours (lotuslandtours.com).
13 See polar bears in the wild from the Great White Bear Tundra Lodge (greatwhitebeartours.com), a customised 'train' in the Churchill Wildlife Management Area, near Hudson Bay, in Manitoba, that accommodates 36 people in private, if fairly basic, cabins (there are also lounge and dining cars).
14 Book a weekend in Vieux-Québec (bonjourquebec.com), the only walled city in North America (a Unesco World Heritage Site), which is also the most French and the most picturesque. Not surprisingly, it takes its café and culinary culture very seriously too.
15 Stretching 228km between Lake Louise and the town of Jasper and styled 'the most spectacular journey in the world', the Icefields Parkway (icefieldsparkway.ca) is one of the world's great drives, taking you through the wilderness landscape of the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Site.
16 The Canadian Rockies also offer outstanding skiing. Fernie Alpine Resort has an average annual snowfall of 8.84m. Kicking Horse has a 16km run, the greatest vertical in the range. Nakiska, in the Kananaskis Valley, was built to host the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics, so most of its 28 trails are for intermediate or expert skiers only. For data on Canada's principal resorts, go to canada-ski.com.
17 Don't discount the ski resorts in the Pacific Mountain range. Here, Whistler has the new 4.4km Peak-2-Peak Gondola (peak2peakgondola.com), linking it in just 11 minutes with Blackcomb to create a ski area with more than 200 trails, 38 lifts, 12 alpine bowls and three glaciers.
18 Canada's capital, Ottawa, may have less to offer tourists than some of its other cities, but it does have the Rideau Canal Skateway (ottawatourism.ca), a 7.8km stretch of the canal that links Ottawa with Kingston, Ontario, and that freezes in January and February. Some locals use it to skate to work.
19 Canada has an exalted classical dance culture. Its leading company, the Toronto-based National Ballet of Canada, has been led both by the revered New Zealand-born dancer Alexander Grant and the late great Dane Erik Bruhn (the great love of Nureyev's life), and has produced numerous dancers with international reputations - look out for current étoiles Guillaume Côté and Greta Hodgkinson - not least the Royal Ballet's latest signing, principal Nehemiah Kish. But it's not the only important Canadian company. In Manitoba, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet is where the great contemporary choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, former director of the Bolshoi, now at American Ballet Theatre, honed his skills in the early 1990s.
20 Canada took gold in the men's ice hockey at last winter's Vancouver Olympics, and no wonder, for it is the national sport (it even features on one side of a five-dollar bill). For a night out of high excitement, try to catch a game: the six top-rated teams to look out for are the Calgary Flames, the Edmonton Oilers, the Montreal Canadiens, the Ottawa Senators, the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Vancouver Canucks (nhl.com).
21 Last year, there was no Canadian Grand Prix, despite its having been a fixture on the Formula 1 circuit since 1967. This year, however, it was back, held, as it has been since 1978, on the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, named after the Québecois Ferrari driver, who won here in 1978 and was killed in 1982. It involves 70 laps of a 4.361km circuit through the streets of Notre-Dame Island in Montreal (Monte Carlo and Singapore are the only other street circuits in the championship). A contract has now been agreed ensuring it will be held at least until 2014, and next year's race takes place on 12 June.
22 Until recently the tallest free-standing structure in the world (till it was overtaken by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai), Toronto's iconic CN Tower (cntower.ca) stands 553.3m high, and on a clear day the views from its Skypod, 447m up, extend up to 160km across Lake Ontario, the easternmost of America's Great Lakes. They're almost as unforgettable as those down from the glass-floored deck 342m above the ground.
23 Sitting back and enjoying Canada's diverse beauty from the comfort of a train is surely one of the best ways to explore this vast country. Rocky Mountaineer offers four different routes through British Columbia and the Canadian Rockies. The First Passage to the West trip retraces the steps of 19th-century explorers as they travelled from Vancouver to Calgary - highlights include the legendary Spiral Tunnels - while the Journey through the Clouds, from Vancouver to Jasper, follows the route of the Fraser river, home to British Columbia's largest salmon fishing run. Jaw-dropping panoramas guaranteed (rockymountaineer.com).
24 Sturgeon may be endangered in the Caspian Sea, but they abound in Canada. Indeed, the Fraser river and its tributaries in British Columbia are home to the largest, healthiest population of these fish in the world. This makes it prime territory for fishing as there is also abundant salmon during the migration period between June and November, when the waters all but teem with different varieties of salmon. An hour from Vancouver, Fraser River Lodge (fraserriverlodge.com) offers all-inclusive fishing breaks.
25 Two cities exist by the name of Niagara Falls (niagarafallstourism.com), one in the US and one in Canada (120km southeast of Toronto). Both are popular bases from which to explore the falls, but you get better access from the Canadian side because the Horseshoe Falls, as the Canadian stretch of waterfall is styled, are larger, at 790m wide (compared with 320m for their US sibling) and with a 53m drop (compared with 21.30m). The Maid of the Mist boat tour and the Journey Behind the Falls, a lift that takes you to a tunnel leading to two observation decks behind the falls, are musts.
