@TomSrOfBoston, most of my Canadian relatives went to school in their city (Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Toronto) or province except for McGill. We have relatives from Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto who went to McGill. Everyone else stayed home.
@ucbalumnus, good that you are distinguishing between academic ambition and ambition in the world. One doesn’t have to want to be the best student ever or best PhD student ever to want to have influence in the world. In my cohort of undergraduate buddies, I’ve got a now retired PE guy, a now retired Fortune 100 CEO, a university president, two folks with high appointed positions in DC (one preceding Trump, one arguably independent), a leading cancer scientist, the head of a charity, a World Bank economist, as well as the usual cohort of doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. Many were excellent students but by no means all. Banking (i-banking I assume you mean as no one is going into banking any more) and management consulting can be steps to some of those positions and largely reflect an appetite for money and not necessarily an interest in more significant work. As a former academic who left to start a consulting firm, I find the intellectual challenges of what I do are comparable to those of being an academic (and I still write, though I am less interested in pleasing the academic purists).
@JHS, one of the things that seems different about the upper reaches of the US system (HYPMS) and the Canadian system is that above and beyond a good education (which they give but so do many schools) but they give two additional things: horizons and networks. I was trying to explain to a very bright nephew the difference between Harvard and McGill when he was in HS. An extremely ambitious kid at McGill like him might leave McGill saying “I want to be the best in Canada at what I do.” The same kid at HYPMS would say “I want to be the best in the world at what I do.” I also described the difference between being surrounded by a higher proportion of really bright folks. Finally, the networks are obvious (see above). He later got a degree at Oxford and said that he didn’t understand what I was saying until he started at Oxford and saw the differences with McGill.