The proposed $90 billion high speed train linking Toronto and Quebec City is facing growing opposition from farmers and rural communities.
A bullet-train line to rip through Eastern Ontario and make life more inconvenient for everyone
Nelson Zandbergen
Farmers Forum assistant editor
Remember when a cocksure Justin Trudeau, enraptured by net-zero zealotry, claimed there was no “business case” to export liquified natural gas from Canada’s east coast to Europe? It could have been generating real wealth for Canada today while helping our allies with energy supplies in these troubled times. Instead, in one of his last hurrahs as prime minister, Trudeau gifted us a promised trainwreck of a vanity project known as the Alto high-speed rail line. His successors are plowing full steam ahead, common sense be damned.
Talk about not having a business case! Alto will cost up to $90 billion, according to current estimates, and if you believe that’s the actual final price tag, the city of Ottawa has a crippled toy train set to sell you. As an aside, any country whose capital city is unable to competently build and reliably run an electric light-rail system has no business diving into a 1,000-km bullet train operation. Just sayin’.
Taxpayers never asked for high-speed rail service between Toronto and Quebec City, but the government is determined to impose it on the population anyway. And that’s over the objections of hundreds of rural residents livid at the prospect of having their farms, properties and communities severed by a completely fenced-off corridor to accommodate trains whizzing along at 300 km/h. Imagine the time added to ambulances and firefighters who have to drive the long way around a long stretch of fence.
Blistering opposition is served up on several Facebook pages, including ‘Alt-NO’, and ‘Concerned Citizens Against the Alto Southern Route.’
Beyond the enormous capital cost to taxpayers, Alto isn’t saying much about ongoing operating costs except that they’re “expected” to be covered by projected passenger revenues and “increased” ridership, which “could eliminate the need for subsidies.”
Sorry, but this is not the stuff of a reassuring, rock-solid business case. “Expected” and “could” sound like the bluster of a Crown corporation backstopped by taxpayer dollars, and they’re already acknowledging that rail ridership is too low before the thing is built. We’ve seen this movie before with another Crown cousin, VIA Rail, which operates year after year on subsidies from Canadian taxpayers. The per-passenger taxpayer contribution on a VIA ticket ranged from $35 on VIA’s busiest lines, to $535 between Montreal and Halifax, to $862 between Winnipeg and Churchill, Blacklock’s Reporter reported in 2022. The service posted a loss of more than $385 million in 2024. This is an old story. In 1989, then-transport minister Benoit Bouchard mused that it might be cheaper to fly passengers by helicopter rather than board one of the more heavily subsidized VIA routes. Does anyone really believe that grandiose Alto will buck the trend, that it won’t forever burn up truly spectacular amounts of taxpayer cash at high velocity?
History has a weird way of repeating itself. Alto’s parallels with the Mirabel Airport project — the infamous and unnecessary white-elephant boondoggle — and the disruption it caused farming families and rural communities, are obvious to anyone in the region. There hasn’t been a commercial flight from Mirabel since 2004.
Likewise, the very first section of the Alto line is supposed to be built between Ottawa and Montreal. It all has such a throwback 1970s vibe to when Montreal was fading fast as the reputed centre of Canada’s universe, though it still was for those Liberal Party elites riding in their limos on the newly extended Highway 417.
The planned first segment of the Alto line, between the nation’s capital and Montreal, is the icing on a nonsensical cake. A trip between the two cities on Trudeau senior’s 417 barely takes two hours by car. Are those motorists really going to ditch their vehicles to take Trudeau junior’s bullet train? In theory, they might save an hour on the ride itself, but that doesn’t include the time taken to park at the train station, or to hail a cab and finally arrive at their actual destination in the city of destination. If logic meant anything, the first section would connect Ottawa and Toronto. That might be a worthwhile alternative for a motorist to consider, although Alto won’t say if a ride on its new train will cost more or less than a VIA ticket — and goodness knows that current VIA prices are already a turnoff for the majority who gladly use their cars instead.
Also, only 7 stops are planned along the entire 1000-km route. The finished product will be of little use to rural people while they see their farms and communities sacrificed to a cross-province Berlin Wall. They will be forced to pay for it as the final insult.
And if the bullet train is eventually hobbled by extra security screening, like an airport — and I hate to say this is always a possibility in our troubled world — there will be even less incentive for anyone to use Alto.
Besides, rail-borne public transit over long distances seems like such an 1800s vision of the future. Have any of the decision makers given a moment’s thought to the inevitable arrival of autonomous vehicles that will efficiently use the roads in synchronized fashion?
One can’t help but suspect that the Alto system is mostly about serving the many central Canadian MPs located within Alto’s planned corridor, in their travels back and forth from Ottawa. They currently enjoy a free pass on VIA Rail, but it can’t be much of an ego-booster to rattle and chug along those conventional tracks. No expense should be spared making our elected representatives get the treatment they deserve as lawmakers of a G-7 nation, right?
