The great virtue of Paul Theroux’s latest, and at age 85 likely his last, travel book – True North: On the Road in Canada – is that he thoughtfully and eloquently explains Canada, to both Canadians and Americans.

Theroux was in Canada at a fraught time, including a visit to Ottawa during the “Freedom Convoy” protests in early 2022 and another visit in winter and spring 2025 during the last federal election campaign. Theroux drove from east to west mainly on the TransCanada Highway, precisely because it is so unlike an American Interstate, and preferred to stay in small towns. Except in Toronto, he never made a reservation, always showing up at motels where he “always found a room available, and invariably a friendly greeting.”

While Theroux did not ignore the scenery, especially when it was spectacular, his main interest was in talking to the Canadians he met along the way. In addition he made an effort to call on writers he knew, or knew of, as a second way of taking the pulse of the country.

Theroux has deep Canadian roots, which he traced all the way back to an ancestor who came from France as a soldier in the seventeenth century. He still has relatives in the Eastern Townships, pur laine Quebecois, and he enjoyed connected with them, sometimes in French.

Starlight Tours

He often spoke to Indigenous people who are living with the legacy of forced cultural assimilation and police violence. He happened in on a coroner’s jury hearing about the RCMP shooting of Rodney Levi, an Indigenous man with a history of addiction and mental health issues. In Winnipeg Theroux heard about the police practice of “starlight tours,” picking up Indigenous people, taking them into the woods in the winter at night, and leaving them to make their way home. Some froze to death. I had never heard of this before and I am appalled.

A Cracked Mosaic

Cognizant of Canada’s practice of multiculturalism, he explores what he calls ethno-bubbles or ethno-burbs, places where immigrants’ linguistic and cultural identification with the mother country is much stronger than with Canada. Two are the Sikh (Khalistani) community of Brampton, Ontario and the Chinese community of Richmond, British Columbia. When visiting Prince Edward Island he saw the gates of a large compound of Chinese Buddhist monks and would have liked to visit if permitted. Theroux asked several people in the ethno-burbs if they were Canadian and the answer was that, even after many years in Canada, they still identify with their country of origin.

Theroux opines that such ethno-bubbles “could only exist in Canada, because the country was so officially accommodating, so fair in its social services, so proud of its tolerance, so generous and humane.” But Theroux declares that he “never saw the smallest tincture of patriotic pride in Canadian ethno-burbs and ethno-bubbles, not a hint that anyone would volunteer to risk their lives their lives in their service to the country.” Theroux believes it is very much a result of Canadian openness to immigration and to these ethno-bubbles that old stock or pur laine Canadians repeatedly tell him that “the Canada I grew up in was very different from what it is today.” Canadian immigration policy is now the subject of a multi-faceted debate. Theroux’s implicit questioning of whether we are doing enough to integrate immigrants into the broader community should be part of that debate.

A Better Canada

It has always been a great frustration to Canadians that Americans know so little about us. Theroux goes some distance in bridging this gap, not only by telling Americans about ethno-bubbles, pur laine Quebecois, and our shameful relationship with our Indigenous people. The book starts with a list of cultural and policy differences between Canada and the U.S. that goes far beyond publicly funded single-payer health care and the abolition decades ago of capital punishment. It’s an important point of departure for any American to begin to understand how our societies differ.

Theroux asked Canadians about their reactions to the hostility enacted almost daily by the Trump administration, and those he met responded with defiance, Here are three instances:

“Americans are a fearful people. That’s why they have so many guns. They’re afraid.”

“[Americans] think they’re the most important people in the world. But now the world knows better!”

“Why would I [still visit the U.S.]? It’s a shithole down there. All the conflict. They don’t read, they don’t think, they don’t know anything.”

Personal disclosure: I’m considerably in agreement with the first two, not so much with the third.

Justin Trudeau’s slogan in the 2015 election in which he unseated Stephen Harper is that “a better Canada is always possible.” To his credit, Theroux’s book contributes significantly to discussion among Canadians about what a better Canada would look like. And given that Canada and the U.S. are neighbours, increasing Americans’ understanding of Canada would also contribute to a better Canada. True North is not only an enjoyable travelogue, but a significant, even Tocquevillian, meditation on Canadian society. It deserves serious reading on both sides of our border.