Does a 17 year old traveling with a parent need a passport to enter Canada or is a Drivers License and birth certificate enough?
Here are the rules to enter Canada. 18 seems to be the age you need to have a passport.
This site seems to put the cut off age at 16.
It is very much at the whim of the border agent. I entered without a passport in 1995 (back when you certainly didn’t need one, though I was an adult) and got a lot of grief for it, though I was admitted. Periodically as a child we would also have hassles, though not, apparently, enough to bother getting a passport.
If you have time, I would get one. If not, look into Nexus.
I’m curious about this too, since we’ll likely take a short trip up to Canada with the kids in a month or two. The kids are six and two, so no drivers licences 
They aren’t doing a very good job making this clear. That link claims that children under 18 “must follow the same rules to enter Canada as any other visitor”, which implies they need to have passports. Then they fail to include travelling with both biological parents in the elaborations below. Some of the other cases (travelling alone, only with one parent) explicitly state a passport is required.
I think on balance I’m going to interpret the official site as saying they need a passport, but I’m inferring it and I cannot find it explicitly stated. Bad job, Canada!
The prevailing opinion from the internet masses seems to be that you don’t need a passport, but I’m not sure how much stock to put in that.
One thing I do know is that the border agents follow their own agenda and not necessarily what appears on some government web site. A border agent told me that explicitly when I had a printout of a government web site that quite explicitly denied what he was saying and it caused a very unpleasant incident.
The same thing is true of US border agents. There was at least one incident of a Canadian Citizen who was denied entry and put on a permanent unwelcome list for truthfully answering the question of what she thought of Trump.
Truth is, regardless of what the rule says, it could go either way. Get the passport.
I thought that if the child was underage and both parents were not present, a notarized note from the absent parent was required to “permit” the child to leave/enter the country. This was to prevent abductions.
Yeah, this.
My Candian wife and I travel back and forth between the US and Canada with our two children semi-regularly. We live in the US, but visit her side of the family a couple of times a year. No problem. Both our children have passports, although they’re very young, and my wife is a legal permanent resident of the US.
Sometimes my wife will take the girls to see her family without me, and she has to carry a letter from me, signed and notarized, declaring that I’m aware of this trip and fine with it.
I think custody disputes are the big issue. It may or may not be “kidnapping” for a parent in the midst of a divorce to take the children off to another country, but it’s certainly not OK with the authorities if the other parent doesn’t approve.
Cool story bro time:
I cross a land border about once every week or 2 on average. In addition to my myriad unpleasant incidents with Canadian and American border agents, I once witnessed a guy go through something kinda Kafkaesque. He had been flagged as “combative and threatening” after a previous crossing didn’t go well. This caused him to be pulled in for secondary screening the next time he went through the border. I remember him desperately trying to figure out what he’d done and what this meant for future crossings. The border guards doing the secondary screening simply said “we don’t know what you did specifically, but we have to make sure you’re not threatening towards our agents.” He replied that he travels for business and crosses the border regularly, their response was shrugged shoulders. I think he was being jerked around and delayed for a few hours because he had stepped on the wrong swinging dick.
(I was in secondary screening for the heinous crime of “having had a Green card, since surrendered, and therefore being a illegal alien risk.” Fortunately only about 1 in 20 border guards are dumb or grumpy enough to actually send me to secondary screening for this crime.)
It may not be a criminal offence, but it certainly is against the civil law of countries like the US and Canada. Both countries are signatories to the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.
The basic principle of that Act is that if one parent removes a child from the country of habitual residence, without the permission of the other parent, the country where the child is taken to will take all steps necessary to return the child as quickly as possible.
There are very few defences to a claim under this Treaty; the basic rule is "If you have a problem with your spouse about custody, you resolve it in the courts where you normally live.