Hi Gary--
Great question. I know a little bit about Canarian Spanish--but not enough... I really need to go there to do more research
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I'm not sure that it could be said that what is spoken in the Canarias is a "Latin American dialect"... It's more complicated than that, since many characteristics of Latin American Spanish can be traced to the southern part of Spain. From what I understand, the Canarian dialect is a mixture of southern Iberian (mainly Andalusian), Caribbean (particularly Cuba and Puerto Rico) with Portuguese influence, as well. The Spanish in the Caribbean was greatly influenced by Canarian Spanish (and Andalusian Spanish, as well). Which makes sense, since the boats going to the Americas left from Seville and stopped off in the Canarias on the way and huge numbers of Canarians went to the the Caribbean to work on the plantations.
There's also some vocabulary, place names, and proper names from the original Berber language called guanche that was there before the Spanish arrived. The Canarias were a crossroads between Europe and the Caribbean, so they soaked up linguistic influences from both directions and spread them mainly in the direction of the Americas.
One big grammatical difference is that vosotros isn't used in most of the Canarias. Also pronunciation-wise you'll find the the seseo (s sound instead of th for c/z) and aspiration of the s (as /h/) that you find in parts of Andalucia and the Caribbean (and other points in Latin America). And some of the vocabulary from the New World ended up in the Canarias like guagua (for bus), papas (potatoes), etc.
Canarian food has a lot in common with Caribbean food with black beans, mojo and ropa vieja, but also absorbed plenty from Spain and Africa.
