Trudeau pitches high-speed rail, putting surprising new decarbonization options on the table

Connecting the Toronto-Quebec City corridor with high speed rail could shave 39 million tonnes of carbon pollution in the coming decades, the equivalent of taking nine million gas powered cars off the road for a year, according to project documents. 

Transportation experts interviewed by Canada’s National Observer said a high-speed rail network in Canada is good news from a climate perspective, and not just because of its direct pollution cutting potential. The longer term benefit is it could open up deeper decarbonizing options that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. 

For example, in France, where cities are well connected by high-speed rail, the country was able to pursue policies like banning short-haul flights to cut pollution on routes that could be done in more efficient ways. Similarly, Spain has put forward plans to ban short-distance flights, while Germany and Belgium have increased taxes on domestic and other short-haul flights in recent years to disincentivize travellers from flying. 

Nate Wallace, clean transportation program manager with Environmental Defence, said with a high-speed rail network in place, Canada could consider policies like a frequent flyer tax for travel between cities with high-speed rail connections to help convince people to take the train by making air travel more expensive. Key to these measures is the availability of existing alternatives. Without high-speed rail as an alternative to air travel in Canada, policies like that would be politically impossible. 

Another less obvious benefit of high-speed rail is that it can aid the adoption of electric vehicles, he said. 

A paper published this month in the U.S.-based National Bureau of Economic Research, found high-speed rail has played a vital role in China’s electric vehicle adoption. Some people will not buy an electric vehicle, even if it meets an overwhelming majority of the person’s daily needs, if there’s that “small sliver of a chance they might take a road trip one day,” and they worry about range anxiety with an incomplete charging network, Wallace said. High speed rail can significantly address those range anxiety concerns.

Researchers looked at the relationship between high-speed rail and electric vehicles, and found that between 2010 and 2023, “the expansion of [high-speed rail] can account for up to one third of the increase in EV market share and EV sales in China… with effects particularly pronounced in cities served by faster [highspeed rail] lines.”

“About 95% of all cities over half a million people are connected by high speed rail in China, and that has significantly relieved [EV] range anxiety,” Wallace said.

Long time coming

Connecting Southern Ontario to Quebec, a corridor home to about half of Canadians, with high-speed rail has been studied since at least 1970, with over two dozen studies completed but never implemented. 

Since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took the helm of the federal government in 2015, high-speed rail has been floated to voters in repeated elections to no avail. 

But it appears to be inching closer. At a press conference in Montreal Wednesday, Trudeau, flanked by Transportation Minister Anita Anand and Martin Imbleau, the CEO of the Crown-corporation responsible for managing the public-private partnership to build the railway, acknowledged it has taken his government three mandates to get to the point of greenlighting high-speed rail, but at last, it is becoming reality for Canadians. 

“Today’s announcement of Alto, a high-speed rail system between Toronto and Quebec City, will transform our economy — drastically shortening commute times for millions of Canadians, turbocharging economic growth, creating thousands of good-paying jobs, improving productivity, and reducing emissions,” Trudeau said. 

But politics could still get in the way, given the Alto project is still years from reality. 

“The government has signed off on this agreement but that doesn't mean the next government couldn’t step in and cancel it,” said Clarence Woudsma, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo with over 30 years of transportation research under his belt. With years before shovels are in the ground, there’s a big window to maintain public support, he said. 

Woudsma added that a high-speed rail project is a “very tangible and physical symbol of a commitment to decarbonization.”

“High-speed rail with sustainably sourced electricity would be certainly walking the talk as it were,” he said. 

On Wednesday the federal government announced $3.9 billion over six years for the “co-development” phase of the project to be done with a consortium of companies called Cadence. The group includes CDPQ Infra — which is building Montreal's light-rail system — as well as AtkinsRéalis (formerly known as SNC-Lavalin), Paris headquartered Keolis, multinational SYSTRA, Air Canada and SNCF Voyageurs, a subsidiary of France’s nationally owned railway.

Similar to how Ontario Premier Doug Ford scrapped the provincial Liberals’ plan to connect Toronto to London with high-speed rail within months of taking office in 2018, it is entirely possible the high-speed rail project to connect Toronto to Quebec City could be severely curtailed or cut altogether by a future federal government. 

Philip Lawrence, the Conservative Party’s shadow minister for transport, called the announcement a photo-op for a “lame duck government.” 

“The Liberals had nine years to make progress on high-speed rail, and all they can point to is money spent on high-priced consultants,” he said in a statement. “They’ve been talking about this project as far back as 2016, have already spent $1 billion, and they have nothing to show for it.  

“Today’s announcement is yet another promise with no details that will take years and $3.9 billion on planning and bureaucracy, without laying a single piece of track.”

Carney said Wednesday that the high-speed rail project has “all the potential” to be the type of public-private partnership “the country needs,” but stopped short of confirming he would see it through. 

In a statement, NDP transport critic Taylor Bachrach said when Canada’s economy is being threatened by U.S. tariffs, the government should require that the high-speed rail line is built with Canadian steel and aluminum — a position echoed by the United Steelworkers union. 

Bachrach put the public-private partnership in his crosshairs.

“Privatizing passenger rail between Canada’s biggest cities puts the profits of the Liberals’ corporate friends ahead of affordable transportation for Canadians,” he said. “While the private model has been shown to drive up costs and cause project delays, we want to see high-speed rail built publicly, for the public good.”

Research shows that the way Canada builds major projects, typically with the public-private model, frequently leads to cost over runs not seen in other developed countries. 

“Developed nations such as Italy, Turkey, Sweden, Finland, Spain, and South Korea deliver transit projects comparable to those in Canada at as low as one-tenth the price per kilometre,” found a University of Toronto study published in December. “Our study contends that high transit construction costs are not an inevitability; rather, they are the result of a project delivery regime antithetical to global best practices.”

The study found that countries in the Anglosphere experience the highest costs for building transit due to overbuilding and overdesigning. In contrast, other jurisdictions that build cheaper, make cost-effectiveness the first priority “instead of allowing design choices to be driven by risk aversion or external stakeholder interests.”

The most recent infrastructure cost-escalation Canada has witnessed is the Trans Mountain expansion project, which ballooned from a 2017 estimate of $7.4 billion to nearly $35 billion.

On the board of directors of Alto is Marie-José Nadeaum, who also serves on the Trans Mountain board. 

John Woodside / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada’s National Observer