I will start with your last question first. I fish Canadian waters often from the MI side. You are allowed to run into Canadian waters to fish, as long as you have your CAN license, don't touch land, don't anchor and don't come in contact with any other vessels. You do not have to call in or report to customs, etc.

The fishing can be better over there at times, however, it has been so good in US waters that there is no need to run over there right now. We used to go over by vehicle and launch out of Leamington or Wheatley, but that changed with the pandemic. Haven't been back over by vehicle since. We are allowed to now, but you have to have a vax card, a negative Covid test within the last 72 hours and the traffic at the bridge has been a nightmare (from what I hear).

The western basin is usually pretty good through July 4th or so, then it starts to slow down. Prime casting time for the western basin is really from the end of April until July 1st or so. There are always some fish in the western basin (mostly eaters) well past that date. But if you want the bigger mature fish, you need to follow them East. IMO, casting for them is much harder in the Central basin, as the water is much deeper, so trying to keep your baits at the right depth can be a challenge.

Around mid July or so, we would normally run to the Central basin on the CAN side and fish out of Wheatley for Steelhead with spoons. We typically get a ton of walleyes as "by-catch". Several trips over there they were actually a nuisance. We had to check each line every few minutes to remove the 13"-16" walleyes. It was not uncommon to have them on every line as we checked them. They were like white bass. But we do get big ones too. They are usually a bit higher in the water column than the steelies, and they don't like it moving quite as fast. We troll 2.8 - 3.4 mph for steelies. Walleyes are usually best at 2.4 - 3.0.