52 Countries in 52 Weeks, Part 2: Canada

In Which I Travel My Country As Generations Before Me Did, And Contemplate My Own City’s Lack Of History

Four nights. Five provinces. Four thousand, four hundred and sixty-six kilometres.

Zero power outlets.

That’s not entirely true: technically, there were three places to charge my devices on the Via Rail route between Vancouver to Toronto aptly named The Canadian — two at random intervals near my ankles on narrow corridors, and one somewhat close to a table in an observation car, which I made ample use of.

If you were so inclined, you could make a lot of metaphors involving The Canadian and Canada itself, things to do with ambition and execution, or the past and its future.

Personally, I’ll only say that it was a perfect way to start of my trip, and something I think every Canadian should do once.

But maybe not any more than that.

It was clear pretty early on in the planning for my year-long trip that it would have to start with The Canadian, for matters both of practicality and symbolism.

First, once I decided to start the journey on my birthday, it would be better for reasons of climate to travel the world heading east, allowing for North and South America in the spring, crossing the Atlantic for the summer, and having Asia and Oceania in the fall and winter.

That required heading to the east coast of Canada to begin, before looping back to the west through America to get to Mexico and beyond…and it would sort of defeat the purpose of the “trains whenever possible” rule to take a flight at the very beginning.

Secondly, travelling the world for a year is an inherently grand and hubristic idea — and The Canadian is a manifestly grand and hubristic train route.

You could argue the historical accuracy of the simplified “The Railway Built Canada” story many of us were told as children, yet what is undeniable is that for about the first 50 years of Canada as a political construct, there was no practical way to get from one end to the other than by train.

That not only determined where millions of new Canadians settled — including my great-grandfather, from Ukraine to the small Alberta town of Mundare, home of the world’s largest kielbasa — but how this country was described and romanticized from books to newsreels.

By plane, you see the country for 15 minutes before ascending above the clouds. By car, it quickly turns into highway sprawl and gas station checkpoints, cutting through the easiest pieces of land to fit four lanes through.

But by train? You are surrounded in nature, cutting through forests and mountains, often right on the edge of a cliff or a river or a lake. The Rockies and prairies and Canadian Shield unfurl hour by hour, day by day. There are geese and deer, pine and spruce, grain elevators and factories, slowly unspooling in a that makes your mind think in Gordon Lightfoot lyrics and visualize in Group of Seven paintings.

It is a framework of Canada embedded in our myths, albeit one we don’t really focus on anymore.  A British Columbian need never pass through acres of Saskatchewan wheat to get to Toronto. A narrative the glorifies the rails excludes the dozens of First Nations removed from adjacent lands.

Still, to travel by train is to understand the country in a more direct way, a more geographically resonant way, in a way that many once did but few do today.

And part of the reason few do is our train system, by most objective measurements, is underperforming.

Postcard views from Vancouver to…well, there are parts of Ontario where it gets a little less pretty. But it’s like 95% postcard views!

As of 2018 Canada was 50th when it came to passengers transported multiplied by kilometres trawled, sandwiched between Bulgaria and Algeria.

It doesn’t even register when it comes to world comparison of modal use of passenger trains, and it’s the only G7 country without any high-speed rail.

A Wikipedia article contains the delightful line “26 studies have been completed on the idea of high-speed rail in the Ontario-Quebec Corridor and none have been implemented.”

Between the distance between major population centres, the privatization of rail lines, the subsequent prioritization of private freight over public passenger trains when there’s limited track available, and the reluctance of governments and private businesses to re-invest, Canada’s train system — at least when it comes to people — has been in a decline loop for decades.

Nowhere is this more obvious than on The Canadian. The majority of the cars are steel “Budd” cars from the 1950s that, while full of nostalgia, much of the train world has long since discarded. Delays due to the priority for freight became so common and infamous over the years that Via Rail was eventually forced to turn add an extra night and around 28 hours to the expected itinerary so that they would be “on time”, a nice trick of accounting.

In the first three quarters of 2023, The Canadian accounted for just 2% of all trips on the Via Rail system. The business case for the route is so limited that there is a per passenger subsidy of more than $1,000.

And then there are those power outlets.

(Reportedly, there are more of them if you’re in economy or the luxury sleeper class, though not the mid-range shared bunks that I went for.)   

But I digress! This is not a depressing story, and The Canadian was not a depressing train ride. The views were phenomenal, and there was ample room in the observation deck most of the time to wander around and get elevated window seats.

As mentioned, I stayed in the cheapest sleeper car available (less than $1,000 in the offseason if you book on a Tuesday), and with that I received three free meals each day, with the dinner being a 3-course offering of high enough quality that it would reasonably set you back around $50 at a typical big-city restaurant these days.     

Seating is randomly assigned, but the people on board were an eclectic mix — I ate with a young New Zealanders who came to Canada for a ski trip, California train buffs, aspiring YouTubers, a Member of Parliament, and just folks who wanted to see the country from coast to coast for the first time.

We spoke about things that united and divided our countries, the ways that rail travel was Truly Superior, and other conversations you might imagine when conceiving of an ideal rail experience.

There’s only so many times in your life you can devote four days to a single mode of travel, and plenty of travel influencers will gloss over the fact that a comfortable trip with private beds can cost upwards of $4,000 a person.

As a one-time occasion though, it was certainly more worthwhile than a five-hour flight to Toronto.

And mercifully, the train was on time, allowing me to complete the rest of my Canadian week unimpeded.

Truth be told, the overnight stops to Toronto, Montreal and Quebec City were not meant to be full of great cultural insights.

I wanted to grab drinks with friends in Toronto, soak up the energy of Montreal, and see the only major city in Canada that I hadn’t before (apologies, Halifax!) before leaving my country for 51 weeks. Getting used to the rhythms of the road while still having the creature comforts of local currency and a data plan were a nice bonus as well.

Still, there were revelations and reminders: vibrant neighborhoods in Toronto and Montreal unspool in all directions for multiple blocks, whereas Vancouver has one downtown, a couple of mega-malls and suburban downtown cores (usually centred around a rapid transit station), and a few neighbourhoods where there’s 5-15 blocks of retail on a single street.

Quebec City is fully francophone-first in a way that Montreal is not, which is easy to understand conceptually, but provided me with a bit of warning of the culture shocks to come.

And of course, all of those cities have history — and nods to that history — in ways that are tangible (statues, plaques) and passive (narrow streets, old buildings).

Vancouver has been a fully-settled city for just over a century, a fraction of most metropolises.

That youthfulness has given the city energy and a continued drive to “be something”, ever since the first passengers got to the final stop of the railway that linked Canada together 145 years ago, and which sent me off in the other direction seven days ago*. 

But what is my city known for fighting for, other than the conception of its own ambition?

In Montreal, there are countless statues for people who created Canada or tried to break it up. In Vancouver, there are digital Orcas reflecting a globally-connected present, and fake steam clocks that point to a local past that barely existed.

Of course, that’s part of the beauty of Canada as a whole. Different parts making up a mosaic of experiences, from cities to railways.

It’s a place I know very well.

However, I type this having just crossed into upstate New York. It’s time to explore everywhere else.

*Okay, technically the original line was created by Canadian Pacific in the 1880s, while the line I took is mostly an amalgam of lines created by other private companies and later nationalized by the government, turned into CN Rail, and then privatized again. But that’s a little less symbolic, isn’t it?