ISO 8601

Canada uses ISO 8601 standards for the date. The ISO 8601 date format is an easy date format to understand because it always starts from the biggest number first and then goes down to the smallest number last, year(2009)-month(12)-day(31), and the format always includes the date with a 4-digit year, so it is free from ambiguity.
yyyy-MM-dd (e.g., 2009-12-31)

In the United States, dates are traditionally written in the "month day year" order, that is, in neither descending nor ascending order of significance. (In computing, this would be called a "endianness" order.) This order is used in both the traditional all-numeric date (e.g., "12/31/99" or "12/31/1999") (said with all cardinal numbers) as well as in the expanded form (e.g., "December 31, 1999") (usually said with the year as a cardinal number and the day as an ordinal number; e.g., "December thirty-first, nineteen ninety-nine"), with the historical rationale that it is indeed big-endian with respect to the month and day, as the year was often of lesser importance. The most commonly used separator in the all-numeric form is the slash, although the hyphen is also common. Dots have also emerged in the all-numeric format recently due to globalization.
MM-dd-yyyy. (eg. 12/31/1999)
-Wikipedia