Honestly, in a way I feel bad for even considering NOT spending our dollars in Canada next year. And, don't get me wrong, we would love to drive across Canada, but we were planning to do that in a few more years when the kids were older, and we've already travelled the Maritimes extensively. The truth is, living where we are (in the Maritime provinces) we find Canada hard to travel in because of a) general cost (even with the poor exchange travel in the US was normally cheaper) and b) the sheer size of Canada. How vast our country is makes travel hard to fit into our budget/how we like to travel.
Example: the only place we want to visit that we can easily drive to is Ontario. Anything else requires flying, which we can't afford to do (flights for 4 to Alberta from NB run about $2700-3000). We have discussed taking a trip to Ontario and "doing" Toronto and Niagra Falls attractions because there are attractions there that interest all of us, and it's only a 12-13 hour drive away. But the two cities are roughly 1.5 hours apart. So even if we stay somewhere between the two, anytime we want to go anywhere, we've got about a 45 minute drive to get there which my husband will find stressful on those highways. And, we're stuck staying in a hotel. With the exception of Disney (lol), we go on vacation to relax, and there's nothing relaxing about being stuck in a hotel room for a week, spending 1-2 hours driving Ontario's busy highways every day when we want to do sight seeing. We priced trying to get a cottage in lake country, but then we're driving 1-2 hours to get into the cities for sight seeing, and the cottages are expensive.
Contrast that to say, New Hampshire, where we can rent affordable lodging etc... in a central location, and have a plethora of attractions and hiking available within minutes. And while some of the attractions might be 45-60 minutes away, you're not having to do that every time you want to go see something, and they're easy drives on not busy two-lane roads with breathtaking scenery. Same with Hersey, PA, or Chattanooga, TN, other places we had looked at going. It's all right there.