I've lived in Toronto, Ottawa, London, Waterloo, and Vancouver - and let me say Shaw's service is not the norm for the rest of Canada.
I live in the US now and I can say confidently that US home broadband is well ahead of most of Canada (particularly, Ontario), where the data caps are onerous, throttling and packet shaping extreme, prices sky-high, and your throughput is not anywhere near advertised. Ontario is a complete internet backwater by any measure.
I moved from the UK to the Toronto area and I have to say that Canada is the fall pile from a crap-chute.
I'm currently with Cogeco cable and they're mostly accurate with their throughput even close to peak times, however the price is high and the bandwidth amount is appallingly low.
I'm actually lucky that being tech-knowledgeable I've been able to deal with their workers well (it helps one of my friends works there, but didn't help when I moved into my apartment as he couldn't do the install) so they'll max-out my up and down (my mother-in-law has 3mbps upload when she should have ~500K thanks to me talking to the guy).
I live in the US now and I can say confidently that US home broadband is well ahead of most of Canada (particularly, Ontario), where the data caps are onerous, throttling and packet shaping extreme, prices sky-high, and your throughput is not anywhere near advertised. Ontario is a complete internet backwater by any measure.