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The Drive Across Canada

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Experience driving Canada’s longest road and travel with the adventurers who helped make it a reality.The Trans-Canada Highway is one of the longest highways in the world – 7,700 kilometres from St...
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  • 03 June 2025
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Experience driving Canada’s longest road and travel with the adventurers who helped make it a reality.

The Trans-Canada Highway is one of the longest highways in the world – 7,700 kilometres from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Victoria, British Columbia, with almost the same distance again on secondary routes. It’s ironically Canadian, but its story is a long and winding journey. In The Drive Across Canada, automotive journalist Mark Richardson tells the stories of the pioneers who first drove across the country in the early days of cars and motorcycles, even before any roads existed, and of the political fight to create a physical link that would connect Canadians to every province of their vast country.

Richardson drove the length of the Trans-Canada Highway in 2023, repeating the drive he first completed in 2012. In his most recent journey, he encounters a hurricane in Newfoundland, a firestorm in British Columbia, and unspeakable tragedies on the Prairies. He meets people whose lives have been changed by the highway, sometimes in ways they could never have imagined, and along the way the highway changes his life too.
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Price: $24.99
Pages: 296
Publisher: Dundurn Press
Imprint: Dundurn Press
Publication Date: 03 June 2025
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781459754928
Format: Paperback
BISACs: TRAVEL / Canada / General, Travel guides: road travel / road trips, TRAVEL / Essays & Travelogues, TRAVEL / Food, Lodging & Transportation / Road Travel, HISTORY / Canada / Post-Confederation (1867-)
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In this book of personal, cultural, and national history, veteran Toronto Star automotive journalist Mark Richardson takes us on a literal trip across his country, following a drive he made traversing the full length of the Trans-Canada Highway in 2023. Along the way he relates tales of the settler colonialists who first traversed a similar path in the early 20th century, the political and cultural infighting that challenged the creation of a roadway that would link Canadians to their culturally similar or different/diffident cohorts in other provinces, and the distinct engineering challenges of such a mammoth undertaking.

The Drive Across Canada is vast and sweeping, personal and sometimes surprisingly moving. It's a story of huge public works and their small individual impacts. If you've ever driven anywhere on the Trans-Canada (and if you're Canadian you probably have), you need to read this book; it instantly conjures memories of road trips past.

Mark Richardson is an automotive journalist who contributes regularly to the Globe and Mail’s Globe Drive. He is the former editor of the Toronto Star’s Wheels section, and the author of Zen and Now and Canada’s Road. Mark lives in Cobourg, Ontario.

Prologue

  1. Newfoundland and Labrador
  2. Nova Scotia
  3. Prince Edward Island
  4. New Brunswick
  5. Quebec
  6. Ottawa
  7. Southern Ontario
  8. Northern Ontario
  9. Manitoba
  10. Saskatchewan
  11. Alberta
  12. Mainland British Columbia
  13. Vancouver Island

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Appendix: Rules for the Todd Medal

Selected Bibliography

Image Credits

Index

About the Author