Canada’s recently approved high-speed rail project is only getting started, and it’s already creating a stir.
In late 2025, Ottawa greenlit plans for Alto, a Toronto to Quebec City rail line where trains could go up to 300 km/h.
This week, Tory MP Philip Lawrence told a parliamentary transportation committee that residents in his Eastern Ontario riding are concerned the new line will bifurcate their communities and lead to land expropriations.
“On Friday alone, I got two or three calls of people in tears with respect to the high speed rail,” Lawrence told the committee.
The residents’ fears were essentially confirmed by Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon.
“Should the expropriation provisions be adopted by Parliament, that land acquisition phase would begin almost immediately,” MacKinnon said at the meeting.
Locals’ concerns add to the mountain of reasons this ill-conceived project should be scrapped.
The project is estimated to cost a staggering $80 billion, according to a November report by McGill University.
The government has said high-speed rail would cut passengers’ travel times in half, increase tourism and housing development, and boost the economy. But it is unlikely these presumed benefits will outweigh the project’s vast costs.
The McGill report projects Alto would lose money for 47 years after the line becomes operational.
And even this long timeline may be too optimistic. Ahmed El-Geneidy, a McGill University professor and one of the report’s authors, told Canadian Affairs in December that this estimate was based on numerous generous assumptions.
“We gave them the benefit of the doubt [that] the demand is going to be really, really increasing very much,” he said.
In particular, they assumed actual ridership would match Canadians’ self-projected ridership levels.
In their survey, one-third of Canadians living near proposed high-speed rail stations said they would use the line at least once a year. Respondents also said they would be willing to pay, on average, just $20 more for a high-speed ticket than current Via Rail fares.
A number of factors here should give readers pause.
One is that people’s actual behaviours often differ from their stated ones. It seems possible, even plausible, that actual demand could come in much lower, especially if Alto’s prices are higher than projected, or if alternative travel methods become more attractive.
Self-driving cars and air taxis may sound like a thing of the future (or a Jetsons past), but are already operating in many parts of the world. Driverless taxis are available in about a half-dozen U.S. cities, as well as several cities in China. Even in Canada, Tesla’s EVs already have robust self-driving capabilities, though drivers are required to remain attentive.
If, a decade from now, self-driving cars are widespread, travel could look very different. Ask yourself: would you travel by train if your car could shuttle you comfortably from Montreal to Toronto while you watched Netflix in the backseat?
In short, conservative demand assumptions may be more appropriate. If so, Alto could lose money for well more than a half-century.
Another concern is the opportunity cost.
For what Alto is expected to cost, governments could complete rapid transit systems in most of Canada’s major cities, Matti Siemiatycki, director of the Infrastructure Institute at the University of Toronto, told Canadian Affairs.
Siemiatycki identified a laundry list of systems the government could complete for the same price: Toronto’s Eglinton crosstown extension; Vancouver’s SkyTrain extension; Montreal and Quebec City’s LRT projects; and Calgary’s Green Line.
Once those were done, you’d still have $10 billion to fix the existing VIA Rail network.
“This is just a staggering amount of money,” he said.
Think about the daily and widespread benefits such transit projects would deliver to the majority of Canadians who live in major urban centres.
By contrast, consider how few Canadians would benefit from this high-speed rail corridor. On top of this, it is primarily affluent and Eastern Canadians who would benefit.
This risks fostering regional divisions at a time when Canada can ill-afford more causes for them. Albertans (and others) would rightly be able to point to this project as yet another example of a federal policy decided by Laurentian elites that literally favours Laurentian Canadians.
To their credit, the Conservatives seem more attuned to this concern.
In a supplementary opinion to a 2024 transportation committee report, the party noted it was disappointed there had been “almost no discussion” of a high-speed rail project in Alberta.
“We strongly recommend that the Committee conduct future hearings on new passenger rail projects proposed for regions outside of the Toronto to Quebec City corridor,” the party said.
Alto is one of the infrastructure projects that will have the support of the Carney government’s Major Projects Office, an office created to selectively fast-track “nation-building” projects.
Alto, like the office itself, is ill-conceived. The office risks leading to politically appealing projects being blessed by government officials without being rigorously justified.
It is especially galling for the government to be moving ahead with this project now. There is so little demonstrated demand for it, a long list of nationally-distributed transit projects where the money could be better spent, and simmering separatist sentiment out West.
Alto isn’t a nation-building project. If anything, it’s the exact opposite.
I think the Alto project is going to be a big mistake for Canada, like most mega projects that governments fund it will be over budget. It will only benefit a small portion of Canadians and alienate the eastern and western provinces. If it were being built by a private group, I would support the government giving them tax cuts on building materials and equipment, much like the proposals for private companies building pipelines and other nation building projects. A nation building project should have some benefit for all Canadians, I don’t see any benefit for the Maritimes or any province west of Ontario.
Developing the Port of Churchill, another pipeline to Burnaby, the lower Churchill River and Canada’s electric grid would be beneficial to all Canadians. These projects would generate jobs and tax dollars to help healthcare, education, the military and infrastructure throughout the nation well into the future.
I totally agree with D. Kendall.
This project will only benefit a minute number of Canadians, if that. If it were to be a private enterprise then, that’s different.
As it is being proposed, it would be a tax burden on all Canadians for years with little benefit for the country. Also, I also agree that it would become an alienating topic in the future of a united country.
I say NO to this project!
If you want to see high speed transportation of people across the country, then we should be looking at Monorails. Overhead monorails do not require tracks or their costs.
Also, they do not interfere with road crossings. They can also travel in excess of 300km speeds easily and they are a non-polluting, low maintenance electrical form of public transportation.
Their speed and efficiency could be made coast to coast for all Canadians and easily replace air travel and its pollution.
Norman Augustine, former EVP of MartenMarietta wrote a book called “augustines laws”. The book looks at major technology and infrastructure expenditures and their many problems. Regarding large government projects or even large private sector projects, the book details how costs get out of control and escallate to ridiculous extents. An average large project can be expected to double in cost from the budgeted and contracted amounts. This is common. Where legal, social, labor, materials, energy, land, and other facts are not properly considered, and they aren’t in most large complex projects, doubling would be a happy state. Governments meddle, politics intrude, schedules if late are demanded to shorten, and the requirements are often fuzzy and poorly defined. In these cases costs of over 100 times budget have been documented. On the rail, start with 2X the 90 billion and with government oversite, expect it to escallate from there. Phoenix is a fine example and that was just software. Get Norman Augstines book (augustines laws) and see how the world actually works.