[Paul Theroux is a notorious curmudgeon. He is also one of our best living writers and a natural Silverback. One year, as a Christmas present to Silverbelle Sandy, I went online and bought used copies all of all of Paul’s travel books. It cost a pittance, but provided both of us with hours of reading and vicarious travel pleasure.
Paul, like the rest of us, is getting on in years, so his travel adventures have become a little more earth-bound–He once paddled around the British Isles, for instance– but no less insightful. This time he takes on Canada, at which couldn’t be a more timely moment. This book is hot off the press, so I haven’t read it yeat, but I can’t wait. SB SM]
Our closest neighbour has never really understood us
by Paul Theroux Updated 23:22, Sep. 22, 2026 | Published 6:31, Sep. 22, 2026
Ali Kazal (Unsplash) / The White House (Flickr) / Emery Forbes
Twenty-eight-year-old Robert Louis Stevenson was in what he called “an immigrant train” travelling from New York to California. He was hurrying to meet his lover in San Francisco. “This is one of the lessons of travel,” he writes in his breathless account of the journey, Across the Plains, “that some of the strangest races dwell next door to you at home.”
On that same page, Stevenson mentions Canada and Canadians among his fellow passengers, which reminds the American reader that Canadians are the strangers next door. But though it is near and easily accessible—no visa required, no special documentation, unlike the burden of red tape for anyone driving across the Mexican border—Canada is a blur to most Americans.
“If there’s a country that understands America, it’s us,” Canada’s foreign minister said early in 2025, when the American president was loudly threatening to annex Canada and make it the fifty-first state. But the reverse is not the case. If they think of Canada at all, Americans tend to see it as Samuel Johnson saw it in 1756, when he denounced it as “Canada, a cold uncomfortable uninviting region, from which nothing but furs and fish were to be had, and where the new inhabitants could only pass a laborious and necessitous life.”
And there are those who dismiss Canada as “America’s Hat”—a big fur hat sitting askew on top of the incurious noggin of the United States, indistinct and bulky and baffling. Apart from iconic poster views of snowfields, or rocky mountains, great plains, tundra, or grasslands, Canada’s landscape is too vast to sum up, its population without an identifiable face, its politics so nebulous and British in form as to be undefinable, its economy a mystery, its weather punitive, as in another American jibe, “Canada has two seasons—winter and August.”
Being Canadian is a 2015 documentary more or less seriously wondering whether Canada (like Malawi and Singapore and other tiny bewildered and conflicted republics) has anything resembling a national identity. In the film, Canada’s love-hate relationship with the US is discussed by numerous manic, gifted, and successful Canadian comedians, who agree it’s a futile search, concluding, “Canada is like an attention-seeking younger brother.”
The question of national identity was answered by Mordecai Richler, quoting another Canadian writer, Morley Callaghan: “Forget all about the words ‘identity’ and ‘culture,’ just never mention them. Seek only excellence and in good time people all over the world will ask about Canadians.” And yet this query—“Canadian identity: Do we actually have one, and, if so, what is it?”—still perturbs the Canadian mind.
Richler claimed that, in spite of the divisive language question and much else, Anglo Canada and Quebec were united in one significant trait: their bad taste. A character in his novel Solomon Gursky Was Here (1983) describes Canada as “not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples.” Richler spent many years as an expatriate, and his foreign travel gave him a helpful perspective, turning him into an explainer and interpreter of Canada, believing, as he once said—and this might have the merit of being true—that the most positive aspects of Canada were invisible to non-Canadians.
Canada’s total population—41 million—is about the same as California’s. It’s also roughly the population of Tokyo, and it is actually smaller than the monstrous agglomeration in the sprawl of metro Jakarta, Indonesia (42 million), now called a “megacity.” Canada’s birthrate is in decline, its “ultra-low fertility rate” is on par with Japan’s and Switzerland’s. Canada’s land mass (almost 4 million square miles) is greater than China and a bit larger than the US.
Canada seems to me, in many respects, like a vast archipelago, a country of far-flung urban islands, as well as actual islands and settlements, like atolls, and remote villages, like islets, each with its own peculiar weather and character and lingo, proud in its own way, and with its own distinct perimeter, surrounded by either water or forest or tundra or prairie, separated by featureless emptiness or inspissated gloom.
But to know this is to know very little.
Canadians assert, often derisively, that Canada is not the US and, when pressed, define themselves by insisting at the outset that they are not Americans. For some Canadians—perhaps many—their aggrieved anti-Americanism inspires Canadian nationalism, fuelling the boast that they do things differently in Canada. There’s some truth in the boast. In certain matters, Canadians manage things much better, though when they confide that to an American, it might be delivered with a sniff of moral superiority. Sanctimony is a Canadian weapon, a blunt one, but there it is. And Canadian self-deprecation, music to some American ears, is seldom convincing.
“In 1963, when I was working for a market research company, the majority of Canadians in one of our surveys answered ‘No’ to the question ‘Is there a difference between Canada and the United States?’” Margaret Atwood wrote this in late 2025 in Elbows Up!, a collection of essays by Canadians about their sovereignty and identity. She added, “Though they also answered ‘No’ when asked if Canada should join the United States. It seems they knew there was a difference, but they didn’t know what it was.”
Here are some differences. Canada protects the reproductive rights of all women and girls. Canada’s gun laws are more sensible and provide greater safety. Capital punishment does not exist in Canada—the last executions took place in Canada in 1962; but in 2025, the year I’m writing this, forty-seven prisoners have been put to death in the US. Canadian public education is generally superior. Canadian society is more secular, unburdened by religious orthodoxy, thus a rational trust in science is far greater than in America. Based on my random personal encounters, the average Canadian reads more books. Canada’s publicly funded and free health care system is open to all. Canada’s national broadcasting corporation, the CBC, is, for the better, more a reflection of the BBC than it is NPR and never pleads for donations, though you can buy a CBC tote bag or ball cap at their logo shop, as long as you don’t pay for them in Canadian pennies.
The Canadian government’s Council for the Arts is a generous patron, handing out prizes, promoting poetry, funding music, drama, and dance, bankrolling art exhibitions, investing in art spaces, paying writers to write books, and publishers to publish them. Canada manages all this in ways that make the US National Endowment for the Arts look stingy, swivel eyed, and philistine.
Admirable Canadian traits and a tradition of friendship have greatly benefited the US: Canadians fought alongside American soldiers in two world wars, served as peacekeepers in Vietnam, and, later, engaged in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. After the World Trade Center was attacked on September 11, 2001, Canadian firefighters and emergency medical teams rushed to New York City to assist in rescue and recovery efforts.
Canada’s accomplished writers, artists, athletes, musicians, composers, comedians, actors, and able-bodied workers have served as American culture’s farm team. Though many Canadians look at the US with mingled fascination and disgust, it is a historical fact that, for centuries, migrants from Canada (with the exception of the Ontario-born fascist “Radio Priest,” Father Coughlin) have helped make America prosperous.
Add to that the hundreds of Canadian inventions that have enriched American life, among them not simply (and predictably) ice hockey and the snowblower, the paint roller, and the garbage bag but innovations that Americans cherish as their very own and consider definitive to their culture. Yet in each case, it was a Canadian who invented the telephone, insulin, Superman, the Wonderbra, basketball, and peanut butter.
“Canadians founded the great American cities of Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, New Orleans, Saint Paul, Louisville, Des Moines, Mobile, Baton Rouge, and Biloxi,” a Canadian historian wrote in 2014, adding, “which today have a combined metropolitan population of more than twenty million.”
A last difference. The American dream, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, is for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But the Canadian ideal, spelled out in their Constitution Act of 1867, often quoted by Canadians as a vivid distinction, yearns for “peace, order, and good government.”
None of this history was apparently known to the new American president either before or after his inauguration in January 2025. In his first months of campaigning, he mooted the idea of absorbing Canada into the US and, soon after, insisted in writing that Canada “will someday, maybe soon, become our cherished and very important fifty-first state.”
This seemed preposterous, the lunatic idea of America’s annexing Canada. The Canadian people were rightly incensed. Yet the provocation had a historical precedent that went back to the late eighteenth century. One of George Washington’s ambitions was to expand the US by acquiring Canada. “A mere matter of marching,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in encouragement. Determined to act, Washington ordered the Continental Army to invade Quebec in 1775, hoping to stymie the British in Canada in their helping to suppress the American revolt and, at the same time, win the favour of the habitants, inspiring them to rise up against their masters.
In November of that year, Major General Richard Montgomery captured the British stronghold Fort Saint-Jean on the Richelieu River north of Lake Champlain. In the process, he took many prisoners, along with his landlord, the Yamaska aristocrat Joseph-Marie Godefroy de Tonnancour. But the Battle of Quebec in December was hampered by snowstorms and counterattacks; Montgomery was killed leading an assault, and, deprived of his command, his troops and those of Major General Benedict Arnold were repulsed by a massive British army. The Americans were defeated again in a subsequent attack on Montreal in the summer of 1776. Joseph LaFerté and his landlord were released by the Americans and sent back to Quebec in 1777, in a prisoner swap.
The War of 1812 offered another opportunity for invasion and annexation, Henry Clay assuring President James Madison beforehand that it would be a pushover, saying, “I trust I shall not be deemed presumptuous when I state that I verily believe the militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place Upper Canada at your feet.” His fellow war hawk, Congressman John C. Calhoun, promised that Canada could be captured within four weeks. But the invasion was called off. A decade later, in 1822, John Quincy Adams urged President James Monroe to make Canada part of the US. Monroe considered this, then sensibly argued him out of the idea.
That was not the end of the push for invasion. After the conclusion of the American Civil War, Irish American veterans of the Union Army launched armed incursions into Canada with the bizarre Fenian notion that they might capture enough territory to force Britain to grant Ireland its freedom. A “rag-tag of Irish bigots and hooligans,” wrote Canadian multimillionaire and white-collar criminal Conrad Black in his history of Canada, describing the invaders. The Fenian raids failed, but the horror and division of the Civil War seized Britain’s attention and persuaded her that her assortment of colonies called the Province of Canada would be better off as a confederation. This became law in 1867, an early example of American pressure and hostility uniting Canada.
Recalling his visit to Quebec, Henry James, in Portraits of Places (1883), reflected on the likelihood of the US gobbling up Canada: “I suppose no patriotic American can look at all these things [in Quebec City], however idly, without reflecting on the ultimate possibility of their becoming absorbed into his own huge state,” James wrote. “Whenever, sooner or later, the change is wrought, the sentimental tourist will keenly feel that a long stride has been taken, roughshod, from the past to the present. The largest appetite in modern civilization will have swallowed the largest morsel.”
Canada’s prospect of joining the US continued to remain an issue in both countries. In 1892, Rudyard Kipling alluded to this in his essay “Across a Continent,” collected in his Letters of Travel, when—newly married—he was on his way to Vancouver with his American wife to board a ship to Japan to spend his honeymoon. Kipling is on a Canadian train, and “a fellow-traveler spoke, as many others had done, on the possibilities of Canadian union with the United States.” The Canadian passenger objects to it; his language is “brutal in places . . . It seemed quite otherwise in New York, where Canada was represented as a ripe plum ready to fall into Uncle Sam’s mouth when he should open it.”
“I once asked a Canadian with a Scottish name if Canada might one day join the United States,” V. S. Pritchett wrote in 1964. “He went white with rage, turned his back on me and sat muttering in anger.”
Defiant Canada, often muttering in anger, has remained its sovereign self. Although it has followed its own path, developed its own institutions, and stayed true to its own pieties, it has always been a loyal American ally, while remaining a reliable trading partner. Canada and the United States have enjoyed a warm friendship, with such a degree of trust that their shared frontier is the longest undefended border in the world.
The first sitting president to visit the country was Warren G. Harding, forty-two years after Confederation, in the summer of 1925, a one-day stop in Vancouver. He was bilious and lethargic—he died of a heart attack a week later—but fought through his ailments to deliver a friendly speech. Harding’s visit is recalled in a memorial in Stanley Park in the city, on a tablet inscribed with his words:
“What an object lesson of peace is shown today by our two countries to all the world. No grim-faced fortifications mark our frontiers, no huge battleships patrol our dividing waters, no stealthy spies lurk in our tranquil border hamlets. Only a scrap of paper, recording hardly more than a simple understanding, safe-guarding lives and properties on the Great Lakes, and only humble mile posts mark the inviolable boundary line for thousands of miles through farm and forest.”
The 5,525-mile US–Canada border was established over the centuries by legal bilateral statutes, notably the Oregon Treaty of 1846, which used the forty-ninth parallel as the line of demarcation. This issue was revisited in the Boundary Treaty of 1908, which established the International Boundary Commission to create physical markings and monuments on the frontier in a spirit of friendship and to signify sovereignty.
Yet the newly elected American president, exhibiting a lightly furnished mind, claimed these treaties were invalid, that it was not a real border at all but an artificial line that he intended to redraw or eliminate entirely. “Because Canada and the United States—that would really be something,” he said, harping on this same theme. “You get rid of that artificially drawn line and you take a look at what that looks like, and it would also be much better for national security.”
The premier of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, replied, “It’s like a family member stabbing you in the heart.” Agreeing with this, the new Canadian prime minster added, “In this crisis caused by the US president and those who are enabling him, we lament a friendship lost,” and later said, “It is clear that the United States is no longer a reliable partner.”
For well over 200 years, Canada and the United States had enjoyed friendly relations as well as military and economic co-operation without the slightest suggestion of rancour. Remarking on this singular amity, the Canadian newspaper tycoon and convicted felon Conrad Black begins his 2014 book Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada with this sentence: “Canada has often had a perilous existence, but not for a long time has the threat been ravenously belligerent neighbours or exploitive colonizers.”
But this was ten years before the American president became a ravenously belligerent neighbour, with the intention of being an exploitative colonizer.
Adapted and excerpted, with permission, from True North: On the Road in Canada by Paul Theroux, published by HarperCollins Canada, 2026.
Paul Theroux is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include Burma Sahib, The Bad Angel Brothers, The Lower River, Jungle Lovers, and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, On the Plain of Snakes, and Dark Star Safari.
It’s easy. Choose Canadian.
In this trade war, remember that the sharpest weapon aimed at us isn’t a tariff. It’s disinformation.
Case in point: Trump keeps insisting America doesn’t need us. But Canada is the number one customer for more than two dozen US states and supplies almost all of the natural gas the US imports. Turn that tap off and see how “we don’t need Canada” ages.
The Walrus is going to keep making sure you have the truth. No tariff on that. Promise.
We publish our journalism for free so Canadians can be armed with knowledge in this cross-border fight for the facts. More than 1,300 readers have donated this year to keep down paywalls for everyone. If you’re one of them, thank you, truly. If you’re not, this is your moment.
Buy Canadian. Read Canadian. Fund the Canadian journalism Trump’s noise machine would pay good money to erase.
Stand with Canada. Stand with The Walrus.
Camille Dundas
Director of Philanthropy, The Walrus
Leave a Reply