An embattled Liberal party changes leaders, replacing one who’d outlasted his welcome with a new face pledging to get major transportation projects built — including a major high-speed rail line. That notion, however, runs headfirst into rural opposition where landowners and communities worry about what will happen when new tracks are laid down to accommodate the trains that will, in some cases, be severing farmers from lands they work, and, in any case, aren’t really being built to serve rural residents at all.
Canada 2026, meet Ontario in the late 2010s. Kathleen Wynne proposed to build a high-speed rail line between Toronto and London, in theory complementing the federal plan for a similar line between Toronto and Quebec City. The seriousness of that Liberal proposal is certainly debatable: somehow it only ever became a major government priority in the periods leading up to the 2014 and 2018 elections. When it appeared to be a serious prospect, however, the Liberals quickly discovered they had a problem: a policy that was at least somewhat intended to revive the party’s fortunes in southwestern Ontario was regarded with suspicion by many rural residents there. This was all admittedly a minor part of the Liberal defeat in 2018, but when Doug Ford cancelled even the prospect of a high-speed rail line in the southwest, he certainly wasn’t punished by voters throughout the region: Tory MPPs have continued to win their ridings handily.
Nearly a decade later, and it’s Mark Carney’s turn to try and get a fast train built. He’s facing more or less the same political problem, except this time in eastern Ontario. Rural landowners are coalescing in opposition to the Alto high-speed rail project, which would run from Ottawa west to Peterborough and from there to Toronto. Currently the federal agency commissioned to build the project is consulting on one of two routes on the Ottawa-Peterborough stretch: one alignment would swing south closer to Belleville and Kingston, while a northern alignment would pass through Kaladar and Marmora.
One immediate point to mention is that in neither case would the train, as currently envisioned, actually stop in communities along either the northern or southern route. The whole point of a high-speed train is to limit the number of stops and maximize the amount of time travelling at those high speeds. This is a political problem for the Liberals, one the provincial party already faced: rural communities are being asked to bear the genuine nuisance of a major new infrastructure project when it’s being designed from the ground up to offer minimal benefits to them. It’s not like these trains will hurry rural residents to jobs in the city or bring urbanites out to spend their disposable income in the hinterlands.
Pierre Poilievre clearly sees a political opportunity here, announcing this week that a Conservative government would cancel the Alto project. “Liberals want to blow $90 billion on another Liberal illusion that will come late, go over budget and leave taxpayers stuck with the bill, if it even gets built at all,” Poilievre said in a release from his party earlier this week. Instead, Poilievre says he would expand the Billy Bishop airport in Toronto and fund road expansions in Ontario.
The Conservatives can, without dishonesty, point to the now-substantial history of construction projects gone awry both federally and provincially to buttress their skepticism of this project. It’s certainly true that even if everything goes right, it’s going to take longer just to get construction started than it once took to get major pieces of infrastructure built in total. Alto won’t start construction for another four years; the core of Toronto’s Bloor-Danforth subway line went from groundbreaking to fare service in less time. France’s first high-speed rail line from Paris to Lyon took five years to build from 1976 to 1981. Despite being massively wealthier and more technologically sophisticated than Canada in the 1960s or France in the 1970s and 80s, nobody seems to think we can match these accomplishments.
It does nothing to point out that Canadians generally support Alto, and that support even includes a majority of Conservatives. This is an actual problem for progressive governments that want to build things and it should genuinely frustrate voters who want to see these things get built: even if the Liberals survive in the current Parliament for the normal four-year lifespan of a majority government (still in question) and they manage to get re-elected in 2029 (at least as questionable) it’s possible that Alto will still be far enough away from serving actual customers that a Conservative government in the 2030s could still cancel it without political cost. To put it more succinctly: as currently practiced, major civil works in Canada carry an implicit assumption that Liberals keep winning elections forever, and that assumption does not match reality.
Which is not to say the Conservatives would be right to cancel this project. We need to disenchant ourselves from the delusion of immaculate construction. The stuff that already exists around us did not spring magically from the earth fully-formed in its current perfect shape. The roads and subways and trains and power lines and pipelines that keep us housed and moving and heated all had to be built, and that building was, in its time, disruptive in its own way. Alto would provide more benefits to Canadians if it were cheaper and built faster, and Mark Carney’s allies should be louder than anyone on that topic. But a high-speed rail line between Toronto and Quebec City has made sense for generations and the answer to prior failures is to learn to do better, not write off the idea of better altogether.