The Extraordinary Canadians series of biographies, edited by John Ralston Saul, would be a great place to start for something really approachable. These are short biographies of remarkable Canadians written by some of the best Canadian writers active today. Most of the authors are not historians or biographers, and some had no familiarity with the subject until being recruited to write about them, but there is often a thematic link between the writer and subject that allows them to bring a unique perspective. You'll recognise these books in the store by their orange spines.

I would particularly recommend Louis Hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin by Saul, Marshall MacLuhan by Douglas Coupland, Tommy Douglas by Vincent Lam and Big Bear by Rudy Weibe.

As a quick suggestion, you can check out this open-source book that offers an overview of Canadian history. It's a collaboration of several academic historians and it covers the highlights. I like it because it offers a pretty good balance of institutional vs. social history, acts as an "appetizer" that can point you towards stuff you might want to learn more deeply about, and you can read it for free.

If you want a narrative history, Robert Bothwell's book "A History of Canada" is pretty readable. The name is a bit of an exaggeration because it's really a history of the development of the Canadian state and not a history of Canada in general. But IMO those facts can provide good structure (although many students find them dry, tbh).