There is no "canvas" in Illustrator. This is not a raster imaging program.
In Document Setup, Transparency pane, you can use the transparency grid as a fake "background" by setting both parts of the grid to the same color. Effectively, this makes the Illustrator window display as the color instead of white. But this is just an on-screen display, originally intended as a means to view transparency effects. It does not print. It is not the same thing you think of in terms of the "canvas color" in a raster program.
If you want your document to actually have a colored background, draw one. Get the Rectangle Tool and draw a large color-filled rectangle. Sent it to the back and lock it. Or put it on its own Layer and lock the Layer.
In Illustrator, you create and work with objects, not regions of different-colored pixels as in a raster program. If there is no object, there is no color, because there is nothing to which to apply the color.
JET
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