I have a daughter who graduated from a small “primarily undergraduate” university in Eastern Canada this past May. Yes, it was a very positive experience. Classes were relatively small. Her largest class over four years was 90 students. She had two classes first semester freshman year with 15 or fewer students. She got to know her professors and had great research and coop opportunities.
Yes the school was small, the town was small, and the small Canadian universities are not known at all in the US. The grading seemed fair, neither particularly harsh nor particularly easy.
I have heard the same things about the larger Canadian universities having harsh grading and hard coursework.
We did sit in on the largest classroom at McGill during a tour. It was almost exactly the same size as the largest classroom at MIT, where I did have a couple of classes as a freshman.