Canada never was a rural economy, although a majority of the population lived out of subsistance agriculture until the beginning of the 20th century. As a good old colony, extractivism was an important part of the economy of Canada from the XVI^(th) century until... the XXI^(st) century!

Under the French regime, the main source of revenue was the military, as France was injecting a lot of money to maintain an active garrison in its North American colony. We could argue that the main business was not the fur trade, as fur was a very volatile market influenced by fashion. Fisheries, which were supplying cod and whale oil for Europe where a more continuous source of revenue for France, even though the colony saw little of that money.

During the English regime, this fur/garrison/fisheries economy changed with the development of forestry. Sure, the military still contributed to a lot of the cash flow and the fisheries were important, but foresting/shipbuilding also became part of the Canadian economy. To this we could add the development of wheat agriculture (especially in Upper Canada), which became an important export.

The importance of wheat would grow after 1867, with the colonization of the Prairies and their godzillions of acres of (stolen) land, but so would forestry with the development of the rotative press and newspapers in the United States. These paper mills would become among the first industrial fixtures, but other industries would develop near railroads and canals, such as textile, distillation, brewing or metallurgy. Meanwhile, the vast mineral potential of Canada would start to bloom with gold, iron and coal mines. Agriculture would start to move from subsistance farming to larger plots as the construction of railroads and canals would give access to continental and even world markets, pushing unspecialized rural inhabitants to the industrializing cities. Very soon, trade with the United States would become the main outlet for Canadian production, given its relatively small home market.

Investments in all these ventures would mostly be foreign, especially British and American, but a strong local (mostly Anglophone) bourgeoisie would slowly emerge as investors would establish themselves in the colony. Fisheries, wheat, mining and forestry would remain important, but now the proximity of the US market would offer an outlet for other goods. The vast migrant populations of cities (either internal migrants from rural areas or external migrants, mostly from Europe) would offer cheap labor in factories. And harbors such as Quebec, Montreal and Halifax would offer access to world markets while the Great Lakes and canals offered access to the American markets.

Therefore, the shift to an industrial economy happens before WW2, at the turn of the XX^(th) Century, and big money always came from extraction (of forests, animals and fishes at first, then of iron, coal, gold, then hydro power, gas, oil, asbestos, cobalt, nickel, uranium, diamonds...). On the subjective scale, most Canadians were rural dwellers until around the 1920s in most provinces and saw little industrialization, but on the GDP scale, money was concentrated in the hands of a few who were benefitting from extraction and cheap labor. This shifted a bit after WW2 to a service economy, with Canadian expertise in many fields being exported and a strong home market sustaining businesses such as entertainment, healthcare, education, retail, restaurants, public service and construction. It then shifted a bit more with the migration of many industries to cheaper labor markets such as Mexico and China around the 1970s, which led to deindustrialization (except for heavily subsidized sectors such as the automobile industry, aluminium production or the aeronautical sector...), but extraction-oriented industries such as oil and mining are still an important chunk (if not the main chunk, in provinces like Alberta) of the Canadian exports and GDP.