I'm thinking PROBABLY 4 cylinder. I want something with low insurance, good gas mileage, small, preferablly 4 door, easy and cheap to fix, runs for a long time, and power options are preferred but definitely not required.

I am considering things such as the Toyota Corolla, Saturn, or Nissan Sentra. A used car that is about 3-6 years old and has less than 70,000 miles on it.

Please, I'm not a car person, I don't even know my own price range. I'm going to go insane with all these options I need help before I throw myself down the stairs.

Can't go wrong with a Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic, or Nissan Sentra. Especially if it has under 70k miles.

You might also want to look up the Mazda Protege and 96+ Ford Escort (based off of a Mazda platform).

We had a 94 Saturn SL2 until 2002 and it held up pretty well. Only had 120,000 km (probably 60k-70k miles) but it never had any serious problems, only brake jobs.

How much do you want to spend?

Here are a couple sites that might be useful.

http://www.canadiandriver.com/used.htm

http://www.caranddriver.com/idealbb/default.asp

http://www.carsurvey.org

Older Saturns aren't particularly advantageous in the long term, either for reliability or for overall quality (in short, they're really not good cars at all). Toyota is what you want here, either a Tercel or Corolla.

You can get a decent deal on a civic for insurance as long as it is not a hatchback and not in certain colours (like red).

The main reason why Civics and Volks are so expensive to insure here is theft, so you can't really get around it (and yeah, it's even worse if you happen to have a johnson and a hatch). If he's in the States it might be better though, Montreal is pretty much the car theft capital of North America.

Toyotas and Hondas are popular with the public, which makes them popular with thieves. They also tend to have interchangeable parts among model years which creats a profitable market for replacement parts.

For the 16 years I've been a driver and had vehicles, I've never been asked by an insurance company what color it was.

For good reliable car. It is pretty much either Toyota or Honda. So it is either Corolla or Civic. Test drive both and see which one you like.
Test drive, test drive, always test drive before you buy.

Skoda Fabia 1.4 MPi (VW group), good, reliable car that will last long, the best crash test in its class (super mini)...and it's cheap too!

Archangel, they do ask that in Ontario anyways...