Conversation Corner: Is the VIA Rail model still relevant?

Looking at what role Canada's national passenger rail carrier should play in the 2020's.

Pretty much since its inception VIA Rail has struggled. A lot of it was due to factors beyond its control, such as suburbanization, more affordable airline fares, cheap petrol, and eventually easy access to credit to keep the car buying cycle going full tilt. Part of VIA’s challenges were also related to the fact that they were born out of desperation to avoid the complete collapse of passenger rail. They had to quickly build a national passenger rail carrier from the ground up, including maintenance facilities, reservation systems, branding, and get all the people needed to execute day to day operations. And of course there has also been the low levels of government funding, and all the years where the status quo was good enough for those in charge of the agency.

This has also lead to decades of conversation about how to fix VIA. Typically this involves one of two options, giving it more money (potentially helpful), or privatizing it (an absolutely horrible idea), and lots of debate about what should or shouldn’t be built, and what services should or shouldn’t be included. But the question that almost never gets asked is whether the VIA Rail model is even relevant anymore. And it is also worth asking if part of the reason VIA has struggled to get support, and funding, for improving intercity services is because they are simply not the right agency to do it in current day Canada.

It is important to note just how much passenger rail, and transportation as a whole, has changed in Canada since the 1940’s. In 1945 passenger rail was still very much a national affair. Cars were becoming more common, but they were still relatively fragile beasts of burden that were not ideal for long distance trips yet, not to mention the poor quality of many roads at that time (the TransCanada highway wasn’t even fully paved until 1962). Airlines did exist, but they were a mode of travel for the tiny segment of society that could actually afford the super expensive tickets. If you were a common, working class person, the train was still the main way to get around over longer distances.

By the mid-60’s, once cars were more reliable, there were more paved roads, some freeways, and at least the upper-middle class could afford to do a 9 hour flight from Toronto to Vancouver instead of a 4 day train ride, the role of passenger rail was guaranteed to change, and decline. There was nothing CN or Canadian Pacific could do about it. Cars and planes were the future people wanted at that time, and that is what they got.

The reality is that passenger rail will never play the same role that it once did. The geographic distribution of people has changed. Society and culture has changed. Technology has marched forward. That doesn’t mean that it will be less important. In fact it could become more important than ever. But the underlying nature of it will look very different. You can see it today with rail increasingly being employed for regional needs, and with much success to boot. And then there is VIA.

The nationalization of passenger rail in Canada was done in an era where it wasn’t yet known if passenger rail would recover and assume something closer to its once “glorious” role, or if the free fall would continue. There was public support for the creation of VIA, so at the time it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to assume that it would also translate into public money to modernize the service, and bring it into the 1980’s.

But that didn’t happen. VIA took over passenger services from CN and Canadian Pacific in 1977, painted trains blue, and did attempt to make some changes. But when it was all said and done, VIA really wasn’t really any different than what existed before nationalization. The only major difference was that it was the federal government losing money on the services instead of private carriers (although the federal government was heavily subsidizing many of their passenger routes so really it was just consolidating all of the loses with the government). And worse yet, the public was never really on board to spending the money needed in order to modernize the service. Planned obsolescence seemed to be an acceptable fate for it

From the late 70’s to the early 2000’s VIA was not the only public transport agency that struggled to get public support. While there was some urban public transport being built in cities, it wasn’t much, and when built they were rarely large scale projects. In the 90’s places like Toronto and the GTA even saw cuts to local and regional services. But that began to change. Public support began to grow and increasingly more politicians at the city and provincial level were willing to get behind much larger, and highly necessary public transport projects.

There was often incredibly tense and heated debate. In Ottawa you saw this in 2006 when Larry O’Brien was elected as mayor in large part because his platform included scrapping the planned LRT project that was going to run on the downtown streets in favour of one that used a tunnel. It was more expensive, but it was a better project and the public was on board with delaying the start a few years to do it properly. But that was part of a healthy, democratic process of deciding what should be built, and how much money should be spent.

Over the years Metrolinx has been able to advance its CAD15 billion expansion and modernization program forward because they developed a proposal that the public saw as useful and got behind. And then there is the incredible success of the Skytrains relatively short 36 year history. It’s not always a cakewalk but many agencies and cities have been able to get a lot done. It seems obvious but it’s worth saying that good projects will typically get a lot more support than bad projects, just as well run agencies will have more of the publics trust than poorly run ones.

So, what does all that have to do with VIA? All those various agencies were able to build public support, and get municipal and provincial politicians on board to spend public money on major projects. You also increasingly saw the federal government come to the table to support public transport in a big way, by offering up funding once everything was planned and ready to proceed. But VIA was never a part of that club. It was never “in vogue” to be a politician behind spending more money of the agency.

It hasn’t necessarily been for lack of trying. Since the early day of VIA there have been many attempts to try to move the service forward. In the early 80’s they bought new, modern LRC trains for the Quebec-Windsor corridor, and were trying to negotiate to bring trains back to Downtown Edmonton (instead of having to stop at the edge of the city which was a deterrent to growing growth on the Calgary to Edmonton corridor). They developed a high speed rail proposal in 1984 for the Toronto to Montreal route. The tested out a few European trains that might improve operations. Starting in the 00’s they started to replace cramped, aging stations, and renovated some of their more prestigious flagship stations. They recently bought all new, modern trains for the Quebec-Windsor corridor, are starting procurement for trains on the rest of their services, and have been advancing the HFR proposal, which has now received close to CAD1 billion in federal money and is entering the procurement phase.

And yet, all that has resulted are some modest gains in ridership (mostly due to the incredible marketing expertise of the Montreal based ad-agency Cossette) and not much else.

In Ontario, it has been other agencies that are actually figuring out how to grow intercity passenger rail and intercity bus services. In the Greater Golden Horsehore, it is GO who is modernizing and expanding service. Places like Kitchener and Guelph have seen train ridership grow dramatically, but it has been because of the venerable GO train, not VIA. Niagara Falls is becoming another market in which this is happening. And even the town of St. Mary’s, which is now being served by GO’s rather slow Toronto to London train, in addition to some VIA trains, could see its overall train ridership grow substantially as a result of this new service (the early numbers were during the last major wave of the pandemic so it is hard to know for sure, but they seem to indicate a lot of future potential at that station).

For Northern Ontario residents it has been Ontario Northland doing all of the heavy lifting to improve public transport access throughout the massive region. Their bus service now extends from Ottawa to Winnipeg, and Toronto to Hearst. Plans are moving along to restart passenger rail service from Toronto to North Bay and onwards to Cochrane. VIA operates the limited stop Canadian and the three times a week Sudbury to White River service, and that’s it.

Map showing current bus and limited passenger rail service offered by Ontario Northland. Image from My Espanola Now.

If Metrolinx and Ontario Northland have been able to garner the kind of public support that is allowing them to start getting serious about regional and intercity passenger rail, along with intercity bus services, then why hasn’t VIA been able to do the same?

Consider this. When a new LRT or subway or Skytrain line is proposed, it is done at the city, or maybe regional, level because local people understand local needs. It would be insane if the federal government suddenly swooped in to propose an all new transit line for Montreal or Calgary.

Yet, that is how intercity passenger rail is still planned and approached. A good example is the case of Southwest Ontario (the area from Windsor and Sarnia to Toronto). There are no national implications for that area (cross border service might be one exception but it is such a small, niche market that it really doesn’t matter much). VIA service either has to rely on freight lines, or lines that Metrolinx owns. And Metrolinx reach is slowly expanding into that region. So why should passenger rail service be planned by Ottawa, instead of local agencies that are better equipped to integrate it into the larger, and growing regional transportation network?

Across Canada there are other cases where routes or lines are very much a regional matter. Vancouver Island was an isolated network and its function was purely for local island needs. Services from Montreal to Jonquiere, Hervey and at one point in time Gaspe, are inherently regional in nature, just as a route between Calgary and Edmonton would be, or improved service in the Maritimes.

The suggestion here isn’t that VIA should simply pull out of most markets and call it a day. The agency should still be a backstop where provincial and regional agencies don’t exist, such as the Winnipeg to Churchill route. But, if you look at Ontario, it seems like it would make sense for Ontario Northland to be the operator of the Sudbury to White River service so that it could it properly integrate it into its growing network. The same is true of Metrolinx expanding its roll in Southwest Ontario to at least take over Toronto to London service via Kitchener, and maybe even London to Sarnia service. Quebec has already spent around CAD145 million on repairs to the rail line to Gaspe for freight service and it has been suggested that maybe the province simply run the service itself.

If provinces and regions are already taking matters into their own hands, why not support that trend? Just like urban public transport, the federal government should come to the table with funding to help with the transition of services, along with capital investments in modernization of the infrastructure so that it can actually be a viable transportation alternative. And initially, the federal government should probably provide the overwhelming majority of the funding. Provincially lead projects in Ontario, or even Quebec could become a model that other parts of Canada, and more importantly the residents and taxpayers of those regions, find easier to implement and get behind since they are planned by people in those areas.

None of this is meant to be a firm proposal. And there are challenges associated with transferring services and responsibilities. It requires local/regional/provincial agencies to be on board with the idea as well. And it raises questions about what kind of an impact it would have on people who currently work for VIA. Would they be able to stay on with VIA in a different capacity, or would they lose years of service and have to start off elsewhere, and how would unions be able to mitigate those sorts of negative impacts? There are other factors such as whether exemptions would be made for a provincial agency running an interprovincial service? There is a lot to consider.

But it is clear that VIA Rail is still struggling. Even the rather benign HFR proposal hasn’t garnered much excitement, and is turning into a hot mess at this point. It is time to consider that the VIA Rail experiment has largely failed and that new models for publicly funded passenger rail need to be seriously examined. Society and cultures evolve and maybe an all encompassing national carrier focus made sense in the past, but it really doesn’t seem be the right fit anymore. If the goal is to make passenger rail, and complimentary intercity bus services, more desirable, affordable, and accessible to a larger part of the population, are provincial or regional agencies the ones who will be most adept at making this happen?

It is not necessarily an indictment of those working at VIA or within the federal government. They have always done what they can, within the systems and organizations that are in place. And it isn’t as though VIA Rail will disappear completely. If anything this could free up VIA to focus on remote services, tourist trains, and skipping the pretence that their corridor trains are affordable travel. They could even turn their service into something modelled after Porter Airlines and ditch economy class all together while other agencies focus on transport that is actually within a majority of peoples budgets, and competitive with the cost of driving.

The time seems to have come where Canadians should consider whether or not the VIA Rail model is relevant. If after 45 years they haven’t managed to gain widespread public support and make it work, while other agencies are out there growing, it is reasonable to wonder if VIA as it exists today will ever be a viable, effective concept.

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