That's the number one thing that's bugging me in the US and I think is hurting the US a lot. The parties have managed to become so entrenched that people think they have to follow their chosen party instead of thinking about issues themselves.
Canada has "conservatives" and "everybody else".
That being said, the biggest difference between Canadian politics and U.S. politics (at the Federal level at least) is campaign contribution limits. For non-Canadians, individual donations to political parties is capped ($1,550) and election campaign spending is also capped. In Canada you can't simply out-fund-raise and out-spend your opponents. This limits the influence of corporations and the ultra-rich, at least a little. Campaign spending is still climbing rapidly and I'd personally like to see campaign spending limits ratcheted downwards.
The Canadian system is not perfect. Shadowy PAC's, ostensibly funded by third parties or even foreign interests, do exert undesirable influence. Lobbyists ply their trade in Ottawa the same as anywhere else. However, the Canadian system seems to result in governments that represent the will of the people to a larger degree than we've seen in the U.S. lately. B.C. on the other hand...
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As for big government vs low taxes... Ultimately, stuff has to get built somehow. In the U.S., private interests often wind up owning infrastructure that would be public in Canada. The results of this are frequently perverse. Let's go back to that bridge for a moment... Canada offered to pay for the bridge, and here's an ad that came out against letting Canada build that bridge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v93ii7eKjjo
Why is this ad trying to make voters suspicious of a "free bridge"? Look no further than the person who funded that ad: Manuel Moroun. Why does he care about free bridges? He owns the ambassador bridge, a toll bridge that the "free bridge" would have competed with. Having a bottleneck to traffic is bad for the local economy, but great for Moroun. If the bridge hadn't been "free" and the opposition a little more subtle, it very well might not have been built. This is likely a big contributing factor to the infrastructure building paralysis in areas of U.S. that aren't adjacent to Canada's border.
* Not saying this about OP, just that I've observed that bias generally.
are you from Toronto or Vancouver? In Montreal (and Quebec in general), this is not true.
That being said, the one thing I think Canada does 100x better is politics. Mainly because Canadians generally don't 'belong' to a political party or movement. Almost everyone here will vote almost any direction, depending on the issues at hand and happiness with the status quo. Identity politics is also non-existent here. This leads to a political class which is somewhat more pragmatic, less ideological, and certainly less extreme.
Also, at lower levels of government, politicians are more likely to be unaligned with any party, and at the provincial level the political parties vary by province and most aren't aligned with the federal parties.
So in general, I'd say Canada's advantage is simply that politics isn't as stratified. But again, while our country is amazing IMO, it's not perfect.