Agreed.
I've flown on a Canadian PPL from a couple of locations in the UK without any problems. ICAO member nation agreement or somesuch.
I had to sit one paper at one of the schools prior to being allowed rental - UK Air Law I think - which is fair enough. However I think that was a requirement of the particular establishment and not the CAA.
You can convert your license to a UK one, but as with most things over here it's a relatively expensive process. If you just intend to put in some leisure hours then it's probably not worth while. However if you're planning to advance your training over here then it's something you're obviously going to have to broach sooner rather than later.
As an aside, if you've not flown here before I'd definitely recommend buying a scanner - it took me several hours with an instructor just to get confident with the R/T, which you will find very different from Canadian radio traffic!
Where abouts in Canadia did you get your license? I'm still going over there fairly regularly for flight training, can't argue with the prices <img src="smile.gif" border="0">