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Interactive map of Canada with latitude and longitude markers

Is there the easy way to have interactive map of Canada (based on provinces first), to basically be able to click on province, then to zoom in selected province, and show markers on that region based on latitude and longitude?
Initially I though I can use google maps API for that, but it would be too much extra codding to draw province boundaries and to add all the events, etc. so I'm looking for some alternative which might save me some time so I don't have to worry about UI part that much. Any suggestion?

I could recommend leaflet: Leaflet
Here is an example of an interactive map: Interactive Map Example
I sometimes get boundary datas from (but there are for sure a dozent others) : Boundary Provider
You can get a json from the boundary provider an use leaflet javascript library to fullfill your project. Leaflet is really easy to get into and many code-snippets can be found on the internet to have a quick nice looking output.

Check out Leaflet.
Leaflet is the leading open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps. Weighing just about 38 KB of JS, it has all the mapping features most developers ever need.
I have personally used Leaflet in many R projects and it's the best JavaScript library for interactive maps manipulation out there.

level picker in JavaScript API v3 for indoor maps

I'm doing an offline mapping of my school building. One of the buildings have 9 floors. Just started to test and put two ground Overlays that way:
layer1 = new google.maps.GroundOverlay('images/2floor.svg', layerBounds);
layer2 = new google.maps.GroundOverlay('images/1floor.svg', layerBounds);
In other words, I've placed the two layers in the same spot.
I believed that when I increase zoom in the area, the floor picker would be shown, but that doesn't happen.
I appreciate any help with this.

The V3 version of javascript GroundOverlay does not support what you want to do. Google Maps will just lay the second GroundOverlay over the first, and the first will never show.
With the upcoming demise of Google Maps Engine, and because we had a need to show different imagery at different zoom levels plus non-rectangular satellite imagery, we wrote a GroundOverlayEX javascript class for Google Maps API V3. It does everything the Google Earth version of GroundOverlay does (including image rotation, non-rectangular images, drawing order, support for switching images at different zoom levels, etc).
The class is up on GitHub at https://github.com/azmikemm/GroundOverlayEX
There is complete API documentation there too (documentation.txt). This is a recent coding effort.
If you want to see a working example of the class in action, you can visit
https://sites.google.com/site/issearthatnight/. That Google Map is showing 100s of GroundOverlays drapped over North America and at the default zoom is showing low resolution images from NASA. If you zoom in, all the GroundOverlayEX objects auto-switch to high resolution images from NASA.
The zoom-switching is completely configurable in the class, and can have as many different per-zoom-level images as you want.

If you talk about the Indoor level picker of Maps, you need a processed floor plan by google.
To do this, go to (your plan will be visible by all on GMaps) :
https://www.google.com/maps/about/partners/indoormaps/
A simple GroundOverlay is just a layer, the only possibility to do that is to create buttons for changing floor...

Thanks, I'm using Leaflet with the leaflet-indoor library (https://github.com/cbaines/leaflet-indoor) to do that.
This is an example of what I want to do: http://cbaines.net/projects/osm/leaflet-indoor/examples/
Still accepting help or advice on this subject...

Google Maps API V2: How to add markers which behave like the default google maps markers

I was wondering, with the free version... Can I plot the more default markers (from maps.google.com). The kind which when clicked, offer the option to enter driving directions and other tid-bits pulled from google's search of a business (eg: reviews).

Options like driving directions can be achieved by adding links to the infowindow that call the part of your code that does GDirections calls.
If you've got some reviews, then the Maps API provides you with the tools necessary to display them in the infowindow.
You need to code each of the other tid-bits you want individually. Almost all of them can be achieved with sufficient effort, but there's no shortcut. Be warned. Google are consstantly improving maps.google.com. If you get your site to work exactly like maps.google.com today, you may well find that when you look again a few months later, there are significant differences.
If you want something that does the whole lot exactly like Google, then you might consider using Google Maps itself, or an embedded Google Map, rather than using the API.

Google Maps Best Practices?

We started using Google Maps on our web application rather extensively. It worked fine at the beginning, but as we add more markers we find that the performance are not quite there. Although I'm quite sure we don't use it in the most efficient way.
I am looking for information about Google Maps best practices and tips'n tricks. Any suggestions?

You might find some good ideas in this article, which compares several methods of handling large amounts of markers.
Marker Manager has some limitations, depending on what you're trying to accomplish; for instance, it doesn't allow every marker to be available from every zoom level. I created a clustering function based on the principles discussed in this tutorial. It uses the Static Maps API in PHP, but the principles behind the clustering can be used however you want.
Update: This clustering utility was just released: MarkerClusterer

Use Marker Manager.

Limit markers to what's visible (ie, understand the window boundaries, and only show markers that fall inside the window)
Learn to listen for various map activities and react - such as viewpoint moves, zooming, etc - to update the markers
Don't show markers that overlap significantly - show only one marker (perhaps a different shade or color to denote there are several points at this marker) and let the user zoom in if they want to see the individual markers. Use the tooltip to show a zoomed in window if you want to get fancy.

How to show Google Maps tile overlays of Google Earth's Old-world maps (or a blank / physical world map)?

I am trying to build a Google Maps-driven web application that can display a map of the whole world in one or all of the following configurations:
A continent-outline map, only differentiating between land and water (like this, but without the country borders/names, and without showing any additional detail as you zoom in)
A physical geography map of the world, containing absolutely no road, city, or political borders (so the default satellite map is out - if I can't get anything else working, I'm considering just restricting the zoom-level such that you can't get in close enough to see modern features)
The same kind of old-world maps shown here and here for Google Earth.
A similar effect to what I'm after can be achieved with the old maps from the Rumsey Collection (q.v.), which are excellent but rather bandwidth-intensive and slow down the GMaps performance significantly. Simpler, less detailed images would better suit my purposes.
Is there an efficient way to load those world-spanning KMZ graphical files from bullet 3 as tilesets?
How about the physical or silhouette-based map? If necessary, one could follow the GMaps guideline for carving out .png files to represent each tile if there exists a freely available starting map.

You can also use open-source MapTiler application - http://www.maptiler.org/ or the command line utility gdal2tiles.

Here is a tutorial on building custom tiled maps:
http://webtide.wordpress.com/2008/08/27/custom-google-maps/
This appears to be a service for creating custom tiled maps:
http://www.maplib.net/
Good luck!