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We're all going on a summer holiday, like it or not. Travel season has arrived and many Canadian families are tuning up the minivans and mapping out road-trip getaways.

It's more vital this summer, however, that carloads of free-spending Americans make their annual expedition to our country. Coast to coast, there are Canadian resorts and lodges that are kept afloat by repeat U.S. visitors. If our tourism industry can bounce back this summer, so will the economy, as the theory goes.

This could be the most crucial summer in Canadian tourism history, so it's a shame our country looks so dreary on tonight's episode of The Bachelorette (ABC, CITY-TV, 8 p.m.).

Tonight's two-hour chapter of The Bachelorette might make viewers here wince. Jillian Harris - born in Peace River, Alta., currently residing in Vancouver - has made incessant reference to her Canadian heritage on the love-connection reality series. Now she gets to show off her home and native land with a rambling train ride across western Canada. What ever !

The train trip pushes The Bachelorette 's frilly quotient up a notch, if such a thing were possible on a series that dispatches its male contestants with a red rose and a hug.

Harris boards the famed train known as the Rocky Mountaineer for a 1,000-kilometre ride through the Canadian Rockies. The perky single gal has reduced the original throng of 30 suitors down to a more workable group of eight, all American fellas, of course.

In between stops at selected Canadian locales, the men vie for her affections on individual dates and one group date. During the train journey, three will be removed and each let off at a different station, presumably with bus fare.

Of course by this stage, sweaty male desperation has seized the bachelors on The Bachelorette . They practically scrap for the honour of dining with Harris in the train's swanky dining car; and in supposedly candid moments, they badmouth each other like nasty schoolboys. At night, one randy chap slinks outside Harris's sleeping cabin, which is a little creepy.

And what of Canada? The footage of the Rockies is lovely, but most of the country flies by like, um, scenery through a train window.

On one of the train's too-few stops, she chooses five of them for a woodsy march to a mountain lodge, where everyone sits around a fire and two bachelors try to position Harris for a smooch.

At some point Harris allows one lucky fellow to go snowboarding with her in scenic Lake Louise, followed by fondue. Later she takes another beaming dude for a stroll through the town of Banff. Do Mounties show up? Wait for it.

Desperation of a different odour arises from I'm a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! (NBC, MuchMoreMusic, 8 p.m.).

Now flagged in NBC press missives as "the summer series that has everyone talking," the celebrity version of Survivor is entering its final throes. More personally concerning: Why am I obsessed with this show?

The first week of I'm a Celebrity… was a hoot, thanks to the presence of the much-reviled Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag of The Hills . The irksome tabloid couple walked off the show, then came crawling back, then left again when Heidi caught a stomach bug. Nobody waved goodbye.

How stranger yet that these sort of famous people have cohabited in a Costa Rican rain forest for three weeks, and no human drama has surfaced. The only notable troublemaker was former model Janice Dickinson, who preened and fussed and fought with everyone at some point during her time on the jungle sleepover. She was mercifully removed from the competition last Thursday.

Otherwise, the social experiment has been rather peaceable, which is actually a nice change.

None of the semi-stars are shown scheming or forming alliances. Nobody is put in any real peril beyond having to roll in the mud or eat the occasional insect.

And now there are six. I'm a Celebrity … is building to this Wednesday's live finale, whereupon one will be crowned king or queen of the jungle, or something like it. The remaining players are Lou Diamond Phillips, former NBA player John Salley, American Idol reject Sanjaya Malakar, a lady wrestler and Stephen Baldwin, who used to act and is now a preacher. Oh, and also Patti Blagojevich, wife of you know who.

And why can't I stop watching? Like many viewers, or rubes drawn to a circus side show, I simply cannot look away.

Check local listings.

John Doyle returns July 23.

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