The most important thing which you need to mention is your interest in data analytics.
As the program is for data analytics and machine learning you need to show how your past experience is related to it.
As you said the program is based on R programming, you can try to show some of your basic knowledge in R. It could be as basic as data processing in R using a package called dplyr or knowledge of basic datatypes like vector,matrix, dataframe etc. If you can study about apply family it will be great. There are basic courses of R on sites like datacamp and coursera. Try your hand in it. Datacamp’s R course is good and won’t take much time to complete. You can send the link of certificate obtained from datacamp in your application.
Another important aspect of data analytics is database. Try to highlight your current experience in SQL. Try to highlight your courses related to database and how well you have done in those courses. Excel is also a big part of data handling. You can show your experience in Excel or VBA.
You should also try to highlight how you are upto date with latest innovations in analytics industry. I will say try to shortlist one or two sites which have analytics related information and highlight that. Some sites which come into my mind is AnalyticsVidya and Toward data science(Part of Medium website).
If you can just read basics about machine learning algorithms and highlight that, it might be useful. Some of these algos are Linear regression, Logistic regression, Clustering etc.
You have to also highlight that you will be able to handle the rigour of the program, for that you will have to highlight your past academic acheivments. Also try to highlight how you were able to multitask.
Shifting to Canada will be a major change in terms of environment, so if you can highlight a major change that you have handled in your academic or personal life then that might be an add on in your application.