The idea behind Timbit Nation was for John Stackhouse, former New Delhi correspondent for The Globe and Mail, to see his own country as a foreigner might see it. After almost eight years of reporting from India, Stackhouse no doubt felt like a foreigner when he decided, shortly after returning home from his posting abroad, to hitchhike his way across Canada in the summer of 2000.

Though the title refers to the smalltown nature of the Canadian landscape and the homespun wisdom that is embodied by our simple desire for coffee and donuts, the book should really have been called Wal-Mart Nation. Stackhouse contends that Canada is being culturally and economically overrun by its neighbours to the south. He is keen to seek out the authentically Canadian, but is foiled time and again by the steady encroachment of mall culture, which, in the era of big-box stores and the steady migration of Canada’s population from rural communities to cities, is often as authentic as it gets.

Stackhouse gets picked up by 97 different drivers on his way from his starting point in Saint John, New Brunswick – where his family first settled in 1783 – east to Newfoundland and Labrador, then back west, eventually ending up in Tofino, B.C.

There is no shortage of interesting characters in the book, from talkative travelling salesmen to a recovering alcoholic and from a joint-smoking father to the chimney sweep and his two foul-smelling, bathing-challenged sons. The dialogue and interaction between Stackhouse and the drivers makes for engrossing reading. After all, the “cost” of getting a free ride is having to listen to the driver’s view of the world, even if it’s irrational, boring, or bordering on the insane. Stackhouse’s project makes for a sort of rolling town hall on the state of Canada at the beginning of the 21st century that includes plenty of resentment toward Ottawa in the Maritimes and, in the West, plenty of the same toward natives.

We learn more about the drivers with whom Stackhouse rides than about the hitchhiker himself and his feelings about the country to which he’s returned. The reportage is excellent, but with a project of this kind, more subjectivity would have been welcome.