I'm Canadian and when i learned about it in high school the teacher really pumped it up and made it sound really important but when i asked an American friend about it whose really into history he barely knew anything about it. Now i know it was an important defining moment for Canada and I'm not discounting the importance of that but did it really have any effect on the war and did Canada really act exceptionally or is it just puffed up to be more important then it actually is?
Its a bit of a subjective issue, how important is “really important”?
It was certainly a useful piece of territory to possess. From Vimy Ridge, the Germans had line of sight giving a clear overview at least as far as Mont St Eloi and on a fair day as far as Arras. This was important stuff and the Germans could monitor the BEF’s activity in a strategically vital hub.
Conversely, when captured, it afforded the BEF with similar oversight to the east with the mine dumps of Lens pretty clear.
Obviously, in a war dominated by artillery, possessing such a feature is jolly useful as you can spot your shot and the enemy cannot.
That said, advancing much beyond the ridge was a bit of a problem. As you can see from the photo, there is little cover but flat ground running all the way to Lens.
So yes, it was strategically and tactically an important feature to hold but its seizure was not by itself going to win the war, nor would the failure to seize it mean the war would be lost.
Its a battle best viewed as one of the BEF’s ‘Bite and Hold’ operations of 1917 (which would include battles such as the Menin Ridge Road and Polygon Wood) in which it was demonstrated that they could smash their way into any given German position, given adequate preparation, but that there was as yet no way to push on and turn the break-in into a break-through.
Recommend reading White Heat by John Terraine and Forgotten Victory by Gary Sheffield as good solid descriptions of how the BEF’s operations evolved from the groping attacks of 1915, through the nadir of the first day of the Somme, through Bite and Hold of 1917, and eventually to the successful implementation of all-arms open warfare of 1918.
Another poster has answered your question, but a nice book for general survey reading is A Military History of Canada from Desmond Morton. A big point he makes is that First World War Canadian troops were caught between being underestimated by the British military and overestimated by their own evaluation (they at times really bought into their own frontiersman mythology)- so battles like Vimy Ridge kind of served well for everyone. These sort of engagements also came at an important time for defining and also reassuring Canadian identity and sovereignty; after the war there were some meetings to discuss the Empire and eventually in 1931 you had the Statute of Westminster which was a further step in Canadian independence.
Gallipoli is another interesting situation, which is very important in the national identities of New Zealand and Australia; I'm sure there are some comparisons to be drawn there.
The contemporary German sources considered the battle to be a draw at worst due to the lack of an allied breakthrough in that sector. When the Germans mounted their spring offensive in 1918 they ignored Vimy ridge, which suggests that it was of limited value.
Source: 'Vimy Ridge: A Canadian Reassessment', specifically the section titled "The German Army at Vimy Ridge" by Andrew Godefroy.