Toronto, Vancouver and Mississauga have ebooks offered from their libraries, if by chance you have library cards from one of these library systems. I don't know offhand what other cities have Overdrive.
As a fellow Canadian grad student, I'd like to suggest the Sony readers to you. If you read journal articles in foreign languages, you can make use of the 12 touch-screen dictionaries that the new Sony models have (German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch and two monolingual English dictionaries.) Sony models also have better PDF support (from what I've seen) than the Kindle and Kobo and Nook (eink) models. With the Sony, you can annotate your PDFs. Personally, I'd go with the PRS-950, but if strapped for cash the PRS-650.
The Nook colour has good PDF support (I've heard), but I find e-ink screens easy to read from (the Nook Colour is backlit) and the Nook colour is a bit pricier than the Sony 650 right now, as the Sony PRS is on sale in many stores this week:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...=110877&page=4
Another new colour reader (if you are interested) is the Pocketbook IQ, and it's in the $150 range.