Is this the only cctld they do this for? I know we have provinces but do other cctld do this to a degree, it sucks
You need to understand the background of this, going back to CANARIE and pre-CIRA days. The .ca domain was set up to establish a tree for communications, and it made sense to implement a geographic, rather than organisational, set of sub-domains. This way, you could easily establish the location and even the responsible organiser for each given sub-sub-domain.
Key to all of this was the fact that each party was allowed to register
one .ca domain, plus an additional one as a translation of the first in the other official language. By branching by province, you then were able to provide many organisations with addresses.
National organisations, or at least ones with a presence in more than one province, were able to request a sub-domain directly from the .ca level but this was usually too much work for most folks.
If you compare to other countries, which used .co and .org, such as the United Kingdom with .co.uk and .org.uk and so on, Canada had a much more intelligent approach.
After CIRA took over the .ca system it was possible for anyone to register any domain, and any number of domains, which was possibly not the best idea in terms of structure, but certainly delivered plenty of money to CIRA.
One could argue that if the provincial and territorial sub-domains were kept as priority, we would have a bigger market right now for end-user domains - think food.bc.ca to food.nl.ca - and more intelligent rules about gaining a direct .ca registration would have placed a far higher real and perceived value on great .ca domains.