Found this on another website:

Navigate to "[user]/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome Canary" and delete the "Local State" file in that directory. You should then be able to start Chrome Canary back up.

This did work.

Thanks for your report.

Does this also happen on 10.11.4?

Also, is there a crash report?

There was no crash report; the application never opened. Chrome Canary worked under OS 10.11.4, but required the deletion of the "Local State" file after upgrading to 10.11.5.

Can you check ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Crashpad/completed for any reports from April 8th (or whenever this was happening)?

This may be  issue 601457  which was fixed and is not related to OS upgrades at all, just a broken canary.

There were no files in that folder.

It was possible to fix the application by deleting the "Local State" file (as stated in the original report), so Chrome Canary is working fine now.

Thank you for providing more feedback. Adding requester "ellyjones@chromium.org" for another review and adding "Needs-Review" label for tracking.

For more details visit https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/issue-tracking/autotriage - Your friendly Sheriffbot

I'm going to mark this WontFix. It seems likely that the original profile was corrupt somehow, but without that profile, there's no way to tell if this bug still exists.