I completely agree with you, and on a related note the almost uniformly higher rates of transit usage in Canada compared to the US (with the exception of the massive anomaly that is NYC) is an interesting source for discussion, and one which cannot be explained by disparities in urban transit infrastructure alone.

That almost all Canadian cities have a rapid transit system of some kind certainly helps their numbers, but even cities in the US with considerably better systems, by most metrics, tend to underperform their Canadian peers. For instance, in 2016 the Canadian capital of Ottawa (a massive city filled with suburbs and rural towns, which then had no rail system whatsoever, and whose slow, unreliable, and infrequent buses are a constant source of complaint) had a higher transit modal share than Washington DC or Chicago, both mostly dense urban cores with extensive heavy rail metros.

I was about to type up an entire essay on the topic, but to be brief I see the cause of Canada's relatively more transit oriented populace to come down to the fact that White flight/suburbanization didn't happen to quite the same extent there (the reasons for which you could write a book on). Something which ensured that downtowns remained hubs of jobs and people, rather than wastelands of parking lots. Simultaneously, because urban centres weren't imagined as places of a terrifying racialized other, to quite the same extent as in the US, transit was not demonized as much and middle-class Canadians were consequently more willing to allow themselves (and their children) to use it.