In Toronto for a visit with my adult sons —“The Locusts,” an affectionate epithet won during their years with ceaseless appetites— and to wander the city’s messy streets of early Spring. I’m in a café in Little Portugal sipping espresso, eating custard tarts and easter bread.
The sun is shining bright but it’s cold.
The Oakland Athletics, visiting from California to take on the hometown Blue Jays in tonight’s home opener, will be grateful for the closed stadium dome. May brave Kevin Gausman (photographed here, in the middle of his pre-game preparations in Dunedin, Florida, late last month)
outpitch the A’s fearsome Luis Severino under the lights, and may the rest of the new-look Jays follow suit!
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When one is in Canada, and maybe especially a bustling Canadian city, it’s easy to sink into the neighbourhood-friendliness and forget how overlooked the place commonly becomes.
Many Canadians broke rank from their characteristic reserve to feel pride over prime minister Mark Carney's much vaunted speech at Davos in January. Even begrudging conservatives were said to be chuffed to see Europeans noticing. Singling out Carney for speaking out and stepping up, the Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen suggested that Canada represented the “kind of leadership” a “new world order” would seem to require.
Let’s pause to gulp, and gulp again, at such invitations to northerly smugness and self-satisfaction, not to mention the crystal-ballish pronouncements and sweeping assemblages that are forming because the reckless words and actions of the Trump White House. While I for one am delighted to dream of Canada joining some future, trans-oceanic iteration of the European Union, I’m simultaneously expecting to reconcile any such belonging with an abiding interest in and love for the painful and exhilarating migrations and movements and poly-centric, multi-ethnic reality that have made, and are, “America,” Canada’s undeniable continental neighbour, all that it has become and, hopefully, all that my friends and the populace at large will again embrace.
Canada’s more accustomed to being taken for granted, when not passed over, to return to my original line of inquiry. Everything from its geographical diversity and extent to its cultural specifics are little known to most beyond its citizens and inhabitants and frequent visitors-in-the-know. It’s why the American television commercial for Labatt’s Blue beer from a few years back was so brilliant. “A whole country north of Buffalo!” a guy in a bear suit exclaims, “who’d have thought?”
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This mundane reality came home to me recently, again, as I listened in on the renowned English documentarist-turned-podcaster Louis Theroux’s conversation with the Canadian actor and writer Michael Cera from last summer (recorded on 24 June 2025). The exchange seemed testy to me, oddly prickly —and humorous on a level neither participant would have intended— as if each interlocutor, while steadily proving himself more insecure than his fellow, was at the same time unable to stop interrupting the other in a self-defeating quest for oneupmanship.
The most pointless point in this fast-stalking tussle came when neither Theroux nor Cera could quite articulate what “the picaresque” was, much less where “it” had flourished or how it might now powerfully manifest in so much human storytelling. Cera, who left conventional schooling in grade nine to dedicate himself to acting, clearly possesses a fierce intelligence and excellent noticing skills. Accordingly, and to his credit, he knew he was interested in what he vaguely thought the picaresque might be. Trying to help, Theroux —who’d flashed the term in the first place, to describe a number of Cera’s actorly roles— offered that the genre of writing centred upon the actions of a “pico,” by which he meant pícaro. Italy was somehow key, he continued, without mentioning Spain, the Spanish kingdoms within which the picaresco novels developed and took off in the sixteenth century. As the conversational flailing continued, I can’t help suspecting that it was only because a googling or AI-informed producer held up a desperately scrawled message to the glass of his sound booth that Theroux suddenly blurted “a rogue’s journey!”
Just as unimportantly, but tellingly, the matter of “the picaresque” was passed over in silence in the episode’s “outro.” This is the closing segment during which, in the case of the“Louis Theroux Podcast,” the voice of our hero is heard solo, and, crucially, ex post facto. It’s here that Theroux can be at his most biting but also at his most charmingly confessional. It’s here that he reflects on what the conversation at hand has revealed, and here that he addresses issues arising, and, it’s just here, that Theroux often apologises —profusely, hand-wringingly, in his inimitable style— for various faux pas and, yes, little mistakes along the way of his intrepid mode of live audio and long interviews. The specifics around pícaros —and the staying power of the picaresque and its exquisite comeuppances-from-below—didn’t matter enough to the presenter or producer to warrant mention in their signature moment of self-reproach.
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Another thing that doesn’t turn out to matter to the podcast host is Canada. Cera, as noted, is Canadian, and (regardless of what you might think of his talents) arguably his most quirkily iconic role came as the lead in “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World” (2010, dir. Edgar Wright), set and filmed in Toronto, not far from Cera’s hometown-suburb of Brampton. To my surprise, the film barely figures in the conversation guided by Theroux, as the host seemingly hustles Cera towards his breakthrough role for US audiences in the television series “Arrested Development.”
On it went, at least to my displaced-Canuck ears.
For an even more noticeable culture-gap is revealed oddly when Cera is telling Theroux about his debut as a nine-year-old child actor. He had appeared in a commercial for a summer camp supported by the donut- and-coffee-shop chain, Tim Horton’s.
Just as Cera pauses so that Theroux and their audience might ponder his start —might take in just how many of the child-actor’s friends would have seen the commercial— the host completely blanks. Cera attempts to help, noting the paler state-side Dunkin’ Donuts for comparison, even mentioning that some northerly states —”like Michigan”— and even Glasgow, Scotland, now have Tim Horton’s shops. Theroux not only still draws a blank, he and his producer entirely blow past Cera’s point of reference and proferring of local context, seeking something else, something they were curious about.
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Rampant capitalism, American corporate takeovers, and some questionable menu-expansions and branding pivots notwithstanding,
Tim Horton’s persists. And, as Steve Penfold has brilliantly shown across the second half of the twentieth century, and now, into our age of increasing disconnection and self-check out, “the humble donut” still plays an outsize role.
As a local gathering place for, and an employer of, all kinds of people, across the country, up and down the social and economic ladder.
When my children were young, I’d slip out of the house in the chill and dark —before the boys’ wake-up and breakfasts and our walk to their kindergarten and elementary school— to write. My notebook and keyboard and I would guzzle coffee and munch a breakfast sandwich in the Tim Horton’s on Bloor Street, which opened at 5 am.
Where does the birthday party meet? Not to mention the fishermen, the farmers all winter long, the girls’ softball team?
Where does one celebrate the acquisition of a new passport photo in the Windsor office, minutes from my Detroit lair? (“I didn’t know Skeletor was allowed to travel internationally…,” quipped my too-quick friend Bill Colgate (a valiant reader-sufferer of Dispatches) upon seeing said photo.)
I also remember my young son Ian, then in pre-school, calling out for a quick visit to Tim Horton’s, doubtless for a donut, if not for a sweet ice-cappucino. In what has to rank as one of the best mis-hears in my now long history of mis-hearing people, I could have sworn he called it “Timportance.”
Louis Theroux isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, as most recently and somewhat painfully emerged (or is it “was captured”) in Charlotte Edwarde’s 7 March 2026 interview with him in The Guardian on the occasion of Theroux’s latest documentary film “Inside the Manosphere” (2026, Netflix). The striving, jocular, but somehow lonesome and ultimately injured polymath that English public schools seem built to churn out is arguably there in the public presence of Louis Theroux.
But, winningly, and entertainingly, he knows it. Performing his own rendition of indefatigable-affable, Theroux is not unlike his podcast-presenter predecessor-peers such as Ira Glass (“This American Life”) and Jonathan Goldstein (check out “Heavyweight”). He is brilliant at half-learned irresponsibility and the display of social discomfort, both of which are surely near the centre of his loveable-but-not-too-loveable shtick. While I can see how he might be suspect to some, I myself value the edgy, risky, and, yes, sometimes slightly cruel dose of misanthropy that Louis Theroux brings to the table. In this, he is not unlike his novelist and travel-writerly father Paul.
It’s ultimately good for representatives of humankind to be stopped in their hurtling tracks, to have their pretensions punctured, to end up a little humbled in plain sight, each of us —along with Louis Theroux and his guests— with our sadnesses, our contradictions, our vulnerabilities and ridiculousness, set out there, for all to see.
And so, heaven help him, this Louis Theroux, when next he runs into a Canadian pícaro . . .
Photographs and watercolour by Kenneth Mills
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