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Canada's 28 times bigger than Germany. I would expect the cost to ship something across Canada is much higher than the cost to ship something across Germany.

This may be true in some of the rural areas, but to Ottawa, the free shipping takes 1-2 days.

I think in the US, Amazon is in one special state where taxes are low or something. So they have to ship from there, too. Hence, the mean distances Amazon has to ship to in the US is way longer than in smaller countries.

However, USPS is slow even for short distances. I presume it is optimized for mean shipping time of all US destinations instead of minimum shipping time of individual packages. And population density in the US is slightly smaller than in Germany, so shipping is more bound to be slightly less efficient.

I guess Canada has a considerably lower population density, so shipping gets more expensive. Maybe the Canadian postal service does not offer fast shipping at attractive prices?

It's probably a result of the very intimate relationship they have with DHL and the German postal service.

DHL is actually a part of "Deutsche Post"