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When comes to Canadian geocoding first option you have is geocoder.ca. You can get longitude & latitude, as well as postal codes online from their website, but also, programmatically, using Geocoder.ca API.

You can request values both by HTTP GET or POST using a few combinations: address + city, or free text location or postal code. Result is returned as XML.

Try this:

http://geocoder.ca/?stno=&addresst=&city=&prov=&locate=1+Yonge+St.%2C+Toronto%2C+CA&postal=&geoit=GeoCode+it%21

As you can see, there are only a few parameters: stno, addressst, city & prov if you want to use full address, or locate for free text search, or postal for postal code. There are the same with POST.

To transform this in a web API you only have to include geoit=XML in your requests. The result is an XML file.

See this PHP sample:

 $location="1 Yonge St., Toronto, ON";
$req=implode('',file(
 'http://geocoder.ca/?geoit=XML&locate='.
 urlencode($location)));

$p = xml_parser_create();
xml_parse_into_struct($p, $req, $vals);
xml_parser_free($p);

if (count($vals)==19) // error occured
{
   $er = $vals[2]['value']." - ".
 $vals[5]['value'];
   $lat = 0;
   $long = 0;
} else { // get values
   $er = '';
   $lat = $vals[1]['value'];
   $long = $vals[4]['value'];
}

echo "Error:{$er}<br>
   Latitude: {$lat}<br>
   Longitude: {$long}";

We are getting the results from strict result format, returned as XML file:

<?xml version="1.0″ encoding="UTF-8″ ?>
<geodata>
        <latt>43.642321123</latt>
        <longt>-79.374806219</longt>
</geodata>

You even don't need to register. There is a limitation per IP address of about 1000 requests per day. For more requests they have commercial licenses.