Explorer on the Trans-Canada: Cold War Tourism and the Early Years of the Canadian Highway

Abstract

This article asks what happens when an image of the Canadian nation marketed to American tourists also simultaneously helps produce a vision of highway nationalism in Canada. Starting with a primary discursive analysis of Trans-Canada Highway tourist brochures, I then address three Canadian travelogues from the period—Edward McCourt’s The Road across Canada (1965), Walter Stewart’s series for Star Weekly magazine (1965), and John M. Mitchell’s Coast to Coast across Canada (1967). While the travelogues implicitly replicate the same visions of the colonial adventurer family attached to the brochures—which I contextualize according to Western Cold War middle-class presentations of freedom and consumption—simultaneously McCourt’s and Stewart’s texts foreground discomfort with the tourist industry’s Americanization of nation-space along the highway. By celebrating Western nuclear family values through the image of colonial exploration, while also questioning the integrity of an Americanizing tourist industry, McCourt’s and Stewart’s travelogues—published just a few years after the Trans-Canada Highway officially opened in 1962—realize the way early representations of the highway were marked by a co-opted nationalism where the means of nationalist differentiation simultaneously encouraged a feedback loop of American imperialism.