When Transport Minister Omar Alghabra appeared before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities on January 12, he said he wasn’t hiding from the multiple meltdowns of Canada’s airlines and VIA Rail over the Christmas holidays. But he was.
Alghabra and his government are hiding from an inevitable confrontation with more than a century of political and corporate blunders that are now cumulatively causing Canada’s transportation “chickens” to come home to roost. The storms that hit B.C. and eastern Canada at Christmas revealed we have a disjointed, ineffective and subsidy-soaked system that lacks resiliency and reliability.
Decades of indiscriminate public funding, self-destructive competition between the modes and little accountability are just a few of the reasons for a series of transportation failures affecting Canada economically, socially and environmentally.
It started at the dawn of the railway era in the mid-19th century. Promoters required public assistance to build costly railways in a far-flung, sparsely populated and physically punishing country. Pliant governments provided land grants, cash subsidies, loans and bond guarantees for these capital-intensive lines, often because they saw votes in railway building. Their quid pro quo for this public assistance included route changes to serve certain ridings and freight rate reductions to buy voter favour.
If politicians couldn’t get private railways to take on politically expedient railways, they created government corporations to do it, usually with dire financial, patronage and operational consequences. Two examples were the poorly located Intercolonial Railway from Quebec to Halifax and the recklessly optimistic National Transcontinental Railway from Moncton to Winnipeg on a route through traffic-thin northern Quebec and Ontario.
When all but the Canadian Pacific (CP) strands of this overbuilt web of rails collapsed between 1917 and 1923, Ottawa created Canadian National (CN) to fuse and fix the bankrupt railways and the government lines … and then encouraged further network growth.
As the 1933 Royal Commission on Transportation observed, CP responded “in the ways habitual to all competitive railways” by expanding, often with public assistance.
By the time this second overinflated railway scheme deflated in the depression of the 1930s, the automobile was well on its way to a position of mass popularity. Provincial politicians rushed to fund highways to ensure votes by breaking what they invariably described as the railway monopoly. Trucking went along on this taxpayer-funded ride, gobbling up more and more railway freight revenue as the highway system grew at public expense.
Soon after the subsidized highway steamroller was born, the feds began to generously fund airports and air services. Transport Minister C.D. Howe quashed a CP/CN plan to launch a jointly-owned airline coordinated with their trains, steamships and hotels. Instead, he compelled CN to help establish a government-owned airline, Trans-Canada Airlines (TCA), which competed with the struggling passenger trains of both railways.
To keep this predecessor of Air Canada financially aloft, Howe ordered much of the mail shifted from the trains to his loss-making airline at a high cost to the post office, starting with the high revenue first class mail, even on routes where TCA’s planes couldn’t get it to its destination any faster than the network of overnight trains then being operated by CP and CN. This infuriated the postmaster general, who had to explain the high costs and low revenues of this “all-up” first-class mail program when he was grilled by the unenlightened members of various parliamentary committees.
The political rush to fund aviation and highways not only drove transportation spending skyward before and after the Second World War, but it also made a mockery of the concept of reasonable cost recovery from public investment and destabilized the railways.
This toxic transportation brew has been repeated many times since. It continues today. Billions in non-recoverable funding went to so-called pandemic relief support for some portions – but not all – of the transportation system. This has been accompanied by announcements of public-private partnership mega projects, such as VIA’s high-frequency rail proposal for the Quebec-Windsor Corridor. This dream scheme has received nearly $1 billion in federal advances and commitments without even producing a plan. If built, it would require an amount the transport minister refuses to even estimate.
“One of these days, somebody will have to sit down and figure out what transportation we need, and what we can afford,” a member of the Board of Transport Commissioners told a reporter in 1961.
Sixty-two years later, that overdue decision still hasn’t been made. Instead, Transport Minister Alghabra offers platitudes and promises of dazzling future projects when corrective, non-partisan action is urgently required. The Christmas travel meltdowns and rising public anger prove that.
Will this long-standing national transportation dilemma ever be decisively resolved? Will our elected officials ever smarten up and perhaps take some rudimentary courses in transportation and public finance? Hiding from the truth and rearranging the deck chairs on Canada’s transportation equivalent of the R.M.S. Titanic yet another time isn’t the answer. It never was.
A national Rail Strategy Is Needed Now
Global warming is real.
Climate change is real.
We need an affordable alternative to the car and airplane.
Rail is the only answer.
Sadly, in Canada government is anti-rail, except when it provides a good photo-op at election time.
The Canadian government’s view of a passenger railway
Railroaded: A National Train Wreck
I don’t think the VIA Rail High Frequency Rail Plan is bad at all and it’s well thought out. VIA has to own its track to be competitive. VIA’s main problem is that it plays second banana to freight trains and can’t maintain the anemic schedule it has in the Quebec-Windsor Corridor because of freight trains slowing them down. Yes, sometimes weather and VIA’s own internal issues cause major problems, having taken many, many Corridor trains over the years I can say the majority of VIA Rail issues are freight related. The railway tracks VIA uses survive on freight, passenger service was an afterthought.
Passenger service rarely made money in the old days, it was each railway’s premier service and always came before freight. As soon as those railways got out of the passenger business freight was king. What made money in passenger service was mail and packages. That’s why major stations always had a mail processing facility or was directly connected to a Canada Post facility, or in the case of several cities, Toronto for example, not only was there a postal facility in Union station (now the Bay Street GO Train Concourse) there were tunnels connecting it to Toronto’s main postal facility as well (now The Canadian Tire Centre,).
VIA Rail is simply rebuilding the old Ontario-Quebec Railway Corridor, originally purchased by the CPR in the 1880’s and abandoned in sections through the 1990’s and early 2000’s. Most of the Ontario section is a snowmobile trail parallel to Ontario’s Hwy. #7. The main complaint is that high speed trains weren’t immediately part of the package. VIA Rail realized it’s more important to have frequent services first and build up passenger numbers, then make systematic high speed sectional improvements over time.
One of the main problems of high speed railway proposals in the past is that they want it all in one shot, which is stunningly expensive. For example, currently you guys in Vancouver don’t have anywhere near the number of passengers that, high speed trains need for a line between Vancouver, Seattle and Portland. Even before COVID 19, passenger numbers barely supported the 2 to 3 Amtrak trains each way per day. You needed pre COVID 19 Quebec-Windsor Corridor numbers to even start considering high speed rail. At the time (2019 Amtrak data) on average, each train leaving Vancouver or each train from the USA, bound for Vancouver, had only enough Vancouver passengers to partially fill 2 passenger cars (an average of 160 passengers per train per direction). That’s nowhere near enough to even think of considering high speed rail service.
The Eurostar Services between London and Paris needed 800-900 passengers per train or it was cancelled and those passengers moved to the next train. There were 12 trains per day in each direction, with each train having between 16 and 22 coaches. Even at that level, 15% to 20% of the annual operating cost was subsidized by the UK and French governments.