Canada Travel Guide

Canada has no truly national newspaper . The closest thing is the daily Globe and Mail , a Toronto broadsheet also published in a western edition and available more or less throughout the country. Most cities have a quality paper, like the Toronto Star, Calgary Herald, Ottawa Citizen or Vancouver Sun , which is also available throughout their province. In Quebec, the French-language La Presse is the most widely read in the province and there's also the separatist Le Devoir . The conservative Maclean's and Time Canada are the most popular weekly news magazines. The monthly Canadian Geographic covers the great outdoors through articles and fantastic photographs.

To low-budget travellers, watching cable television in a motel room may well be the commonest form of entertainment. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) with national and regional broadcasts has the largest volume of Canadian programmes. The main commercial station is the Canadian Television Corporation (CTV), a mix of Canadian, American and national output. There are other public-broadcasting channels and private broadcast companies whose output makes Canada's TV very similar to mainstream American TV. Most US stations can also be picked up.

The majority of Canadian radio stations, too, stick to a bland commercial format. Most are on the AM band and display little originality - though they can be good sources of local nightlife and entertainment news, and road and weather reports. On FM, on the other hand, the nationally funded CBC channels provide diverse, listenable and well-informed programmes - for example This Morning (Mon-Fri 9am-noon), a phone-in programme that gives a good grasp of Canadian opinions and happenings. Although some of the large cities boast good specialist music stations, for most of the time you'll probably have to resort to skipping up and down the frequencies. Driving through rural areas can be frustrating, as for hundreds of kilometres you might only be able to receive one or two very dull stations. With this in mind, it's worth asking your car-rental agency if their cars are fitted with cassette players.