Although I understand the point, I'm not impressed by the comparison. For all intents and purposes, the entire EU is one country; national borders are meaningless (and more and more so is national sovereignty, but that's a different discussion for another time).

It's really not fair to compare in-country fares when the countries are so small over there and so large here. For example, look at London-Edinburgh: the entire UK is only 2/3 the size of the state of California, and the LON-EDI route is shorter than SFO-LAX (okay, by 14 miles, but it's still shorter). And this is compared to YVR-YUL, which is longer than LON-TLV (in fact, it's longer than LON to anywhere on the continent of Europe).

There's also the issue that Europe has a formidable competitor in the railroads. Even the worst of them is far better than anything we have in either Canada or the US!