Credibility matters. That’s true especially when you’re in power in an elected government, overseeing budgets totalling tens or even hundreds of billions, and proposing to spend even more money on a plan to do a big, expensive, and maybe even important thing.
Last week, I wrote about acredibility gap that exists in this province and country. Live Nation Canada, an events company, has announced that it is going to open a new outdoor, open-air music and entertainment venue in Toronto by next summer. Dubbed Rogers Stadium, the facility will seat 50,000 and include the necessary amenities: bars, restaurants, washrooms, etc. Since the facility will be open-air, it can be built fairly quickly. The timeline of next summer might seem aggressive, but it seems to be viewed as credible by the entertainment industry — big acts arealready committing to play shows at a stadium that does not currently exist.
Credibility is amazing, ain’t it? When you’ve got it, you can use it. When you don’t...
Our governments don’t have it. They don’t deserve it. I’m not going to repeat this at length, since that was my column this week, but a few fresh stories this week reminded me anew of the problem.
The first was the news that the federal government is “seriously considering” high-speed rail in the most densely populated part of the country. I’m going to need to throw a bit of terminology at you here, so stay with me. Right now, Via Rail service between Windsor and Quebec City — and, critically, along the most travelled routes between Toronto and Ottawa and Toronto and Montreal — shares track with commercial rail freight companies. And the freight companies own the tracks. Via’s trains are therefore given lower priority, which results in slower service and many scheduling disruptions.
The federal government, which wants to develop rail in Canada as a pro-business and pro-climate effort, recognizes the above problem and has proposed “high-frequency rail” between Toronto and Ottawa and Montreal. This plan, which has been under discussion for... sigh, for a long time, okay?... would involve rehabilitating abandoned old lines or outright building new sections of rail to create a new link from Toronto to the capital and to Montreal. These lines would be controlled by Via and not shared with freight companies. This would allow Via to run more trains and faster trains with greater scheduling reliability. In theory, this would make trains a more appealing option for commuters.
The issue before the federal government, which will apparently select the final configuration of the new rail link soon (ahem, “soon,” sure), is how fast to make the trains. True high-speed rail, with sustained speeds of more than 200 kilometres/hour, is absolutely possible but would be more expensive, since the infrastructure required is more robust and complicated. In the final analysis, the government essentially will have to choose between high-speed rail, non-high-speed rail that may later be upgraded to high-speed rail, a line that is high-speed in parts, and a line that is not and will never be high speed.
But whatever it chooses, it’ll screw it up.
Sorry! I wish I had better news. But I am honestly fascinated to know whether there is anyone out there — literally anyone — who honestly believes that by, say, 2035 (or hell, by 2040!) we’ll have high-speed rail between Toronto and Montreal. I suspect that there are some people out there who think that we might have a lower-speed, high-frequency service on that timescale. Even I wouldn’t bet against it. But am I going to put $50 down today on my ability to ride a high-frequency train from Toronto to Montreal by, say, my 55th birthday? No. And I’d love to meet anyone who would make that bet. They’re probably an easy mark.
I throw my hands up. I really do. I don’t like being as cynical as I am. I don’t like being this skeptical about our ability to do things that other jurisdictions are able to accomplish without the difficulty we experience. I really want to believe in our ability to get things done. But credibility has been lost by governments in this country, and it’s not a renewable resource. It has to be actively earned back. It hasn’t been.
Enter story number two!
This is going to be a hard pivot, I admit, but I’ve been following along with the foreign-interference inquiry, and... yikes. The subject of recent testimony has involved trying to find out what happened to a warrant application filed by CSIS against targets of ongoing investigations. One warrant in particular seemed to just vanish into the ether for almost eight weeks. Also, it’s not clear what happened — or that anything happened — with a series of national-security intelligence briefings that were prepared and then… no one knows.
Ignorance is a recurring theme. No one quite seems to know what happened on either file, and the public is left with an unappealing choice between two explanations: the delays were politically motivated (since the subject was politically connected to the government) or were the result of simple incompetence. The government is probably going to assert the latter, which may be true but is hardly reassuring.
It’s also not a new defence: after the Johnston Report was released early this year, I wrote in a column that “what the Liberals have offered as their defences are actually just different kinds of confessions. ‘We’re too incompetent to be malicious’ is about where their own version of events is landing, and the hell of it is, it may well be true.”
On foreign interference and new rail-line dysfunction, that blame is fairly aimed at the feds. But on many other matters, whether it’s stalled transit projects in Ontario or animal carcasses and neglected parks in Toronto, the credibility problem lands on the other orders of government. No one looks good here. And every time we get a peek behind the curtains of how these governments are operating, it looks even worse!
We need our governments to find ways to be as credible as Live Nation, which is a sentence I never thought I’d type. But it’s true. Coldplay is confident the stadium will be ready by next summer. But I doubt they’d buy a ticket for Toronto-Montreal high-speed rail for 2040. That’s a problem we need to fix.