CAN my be a little confusing in the beginning, but I am sure you will work into this.
PIC BASIC will not help you much regarding CAN communication, you will have to set all registers by hand.
As preparation you should do the following things:

1. check if your CAN transceiver has an enable pin and check its status
2. get the baudrate generator calculator from Microchip to calculate BRGCON register settings

Then you can prepare your code
3. configure you CANTX and CANRX pins correctly
4. set CANCON register to 128 for config mode
5. configure the BRGCON1..3 with the calculated values
6. configure the identifier registers TXB0SIDH and TXB0SIDL to generate the required message ID
7. configure the data length register TXB0DLC to match the length of your CAN message
8. configure the CIOCON register (usually CAN recessive high, bit 4 set)
9. set CANCON to 0 for normal mode
10. copy your CAN data to TXB0D0...TXB0D7
11. set the TXB0CON register to 8 to send your CAN message

.. and off you go!