Roads in Canada (lifted from imgur)

You can see the bit northeast of Thunder Bay where there is only one single major road connecting the entire East and the entire West.

Manitoba should invade down that highway -- see how the rest of Canada feels when the Riel Rebellion ...
Ah nevermind, let bygones be bygones.
Crazy how the whole northeast of Winnipeg is mostly dead.
I always found it funny driving through Thunder Bay to Winnipeg that it was called "northern Ontario" when you're following the US border and landing squarely in southern Manitoba.

Canada's shape looks kind of like a shark

I don't read this as Vancouver being isolated, I just read this as the prairies being victims/perpetrators of car dependent sprawl.

With a shit ton of complex geography, of course traffic is going to concentrate on a few main highways/roads

All of the agriculture and oil means there's a road essentially on the whole survey grid too so that fills out a bunch of the map.
- Totally. A bunch of roads all covering the farms. While in BC you won't see "boat roads" for its huge water logistics.
The issue is mountains

it pretty funny what people in Ontario call North. Even North Bay is actually in the southern half. Timmins too.

Its because farther north than that is barely inhabited. North of roughly the orillia line, geography and community size changes dramatically compared to what is south of orillia. Its a good seperatation for political purposes as the needs and cultures in these smaller communities are different from the southern communities.
- Its a good seperatation for political purposes
  Until the mid '90s, the map on the wall in the public area at Queens Park was cropped off just west of Sudbury.
  Something my friends in Thunder Bay found indicitave of the level of attention and support they got from the provincial government
- Northern Ontario starts at the French River, Orillia is just where the shield starts when driving from Toronto. Its an important geographic change but Kingston is practically in the shield too and I would hardly call that Northern Ontario
- The North west is basically on fire year around now.
Blame the Ontario Mnistry of Transport. The official definition, such as it is, came from them.

I think this map + population density would make it very easy to spot where you can find oil in the world.

Low density + high amount of roads = oil

That correlates much more closely with agriculture than oil. Compare this map with one for arable land. Lots of the AB, SK, MB area covered in roads are also covered in farms, while large parts of that area does not have significant oil industry.
- But wouldn't farmed land increase if there is an abundance of oil? Needed for farming equipments.
  I guess my point is. If there is an over abundance of oil it also facilitates agriculture because farming equiments is cheaper to power?
  I don't know if it translates to other places in the world because well...deserts and oceans but it would be interesting to find out.
Or logging, or farming. There's a bunch of reasons to have low population density road networks.

Never realized Vancouver was that isolated.

It’s been a hot topic over the years just how screwed Vancouver would be in the event of a disaster. The amount of ways out of the Lower Mainland can be counted on one hand.
- I mean, we were kind of cut off from the rest of Canada just few years back already, when the floods washed out all the highways leading out of lower mainland. Friend was telling me his parents had to drive over 16 hours through US to get back to northern part of Okanagan Valley.
- Boats and trains. Fuck cars.

If you look closely at eastern PEI, you can see where the fields would be between the roads. Like it up with satellite imaging and you'll see them there.

Saskatchewan, why are even your roads weird?

Which part? The southern prairie has 'grid' roads (magenta; literally roads in a grid, every mile E/W, every two N/S), with highways connecting the many towns and cities, settled because of agriculture. Then the northern shield (forest) has roads where they fit best to mainly indigenous communities.
- with highways connecting the many towns and cities, settled because of agriculture.
  And those towns were originally settled by farmers getting land adjacent to the railways, centered around the railway stations. They needed trains to get their produce to market, and to order their supplies from "the big city".
  Those early railroads had to build a water station about every 30 miles, as that was the distance the steam locomotives of the day could travel before needing to get more water. There were larger stations every 3rd or 4th water stop to re-supply with coal.
  The history of the railroads is the history of Canada, especially so on the prairies.
- If you look at Alberta and Manitoba, they also have the grid roads, but just looks more connected with a grid of highways following N/S or E/W. Saskatchewan's highway system reminds me of nerve cells reaching out with all the angled highways spreading out from the cities.

I guess all the large areas shaded blue where I'm pretty sure there aren't many roads (e.g. northern Ontario) are recent logging activity that still looks like roads to whatever software did the satellite image analysis.

Some of it's actually rail and not roads—I'm pretty sure that one line running up to the bottom of James Bay is actually the Polar Bear Express' tracks for at least part of its length. Some may also be clearance for seasonal (ice) roads, or high-tension power lines. And yeah, some of it's probably logging.
- Some of it's actually rail and not roads
  Such as the more northerly line running east from Winnipeg.