Why doesn't Canada have more trains?

How bad ideas, bad leadership, and treating trains as elitist instead of populist are holding back opportunities for better intercity rail service.

The question of why doesn’t Canada have more trains is nearly universal across the country. Whether you’re in Digby, Lively, Swift Current or Golden that conversation is probably taking place at some point today and probably sounds much the same.

Nearly 4 decades ago there used to be a train track and trains heading down this corridor. It almost seems to be waiting for that day again. So what is stopping that from happening?

Now this was originally going to be a relatively measured and polite article that looked into just that question. But then a tweet emerged which was so infuriating that that I decided fuck it. The amount of arrogance, cluelessness, and the total disconnect many people have when it comes to trying to develop intercity rail is utterly maddening (though in some cases not surprising). Developing and building public support for modern, built for Canada today, intercity rail services should be an incredibly simple task and the fact that it is being bungled is really quite wild, and unacceptable. I will get to the tweet later but before going off, some context on intercity rail development in Canada today.

If you were to ask that question of why Canada isn’t moving forward on better train service in the 90’s or even early 00’s you could come to a reasonable conclusion as to why. Canadians were still super obsessed with suburbia and highways. There was the rise of a new urban generation starting to take emerge, but it was not yet a mass movement of people. Investments in public transport of any kind were a struggle, with the dollar amount and scale of projects just a fraction of what they are today. The price of airline tickets was still going down while gas was cheap, and would continue to remain that way. Trains simply didn’t fit into the ideal vision of where the majority of people wanted to see Canadian cities and society go. Not great if you liked public transport and trains, but it was the will of the people, within a democratic society.

Some 20 years later a lot has changed. Urban living has taken off. Public transport investments are at historic highs, with no less than CAD100 billion in projects set to start this decade, of which at least CAD50 billion will happen in Ontario alone, a number that will almost certainly increase. Laneway housing has become a thing in many Canadian cities which in some ways was the first baby step towards far more progressive changes, including the end of exclusionary zoning which is seriously being pursued in a number of places. Despite the often multi-year battles that are required, and fights against well funded homeowner associations and BIAs, bike lanes (real, protected ones, not just paint on a road), are becoming more common. Even smaller cities like Kingston have adopted progressive bike and parking policies.

Everywhere you look there are signs that the post-ware, pro car, status quo way of living in and building cities is falling out of favour. It isn’t an overnight change but cities, and towns, are changing, becoming more urban and with that means that different transportation systems are needed in order to make that lifestyle possible. Not since the 1960’s has the climate for substantive, meaningful intercity rail investments been this good.

So why the fuck is nothing happening?

Funny thing about that, and this is quite an important point. It turns out that there is some progress on intercity rail projects, they just don’t carry the VIA name plate nor are they being handled by the federal government. Many people outside the GTA may still think of GO trains as simply being a nine to five commuter system. And fair enough since that’s what it was for 50 years, alongside being one of the largest parking authorities in North America.

But that is changing. Throughout the 2020’s there will be at least CAD17 billion in investment going into the GO train networks infrastructure. And in reality, that amount will probably end up being closer to CAD20 billion as the decade rolls on. They are going to double track and electrify hundreds of kilometres of lines. Build new stations and modernize old ones. Extend lines. Add more service. Speed up trains. Improve local rapid transit connections.

By the end of the decade it is quite possible that you will be able to take a single train from Bowmanville to Niagara Falls, a distance that is a few kilometres longer than going from Ottawa to Montreal. Or with a single transfer at Union Station, you could go from London to Bowmanville, which is 20 km longer than going from Quebec City to Montreal, and just 25km shorter than Calgary to Edmonton. With continued upgrades travel times are decreasing and although trips will still be longer than what might be done on VIA, the flip side is tickets are much cheaper, even when you do luck out and find the cheapest VIA fare possible. There will be around 80 or more stations by 2030, meaning the network will go to many different cities, neighbourhoods and communities in the GTA and beyond, serving around 30% of Canada’s population. Kind of a big deal.

There is a second project, one I would consider equally interesting in its own right, also taking place in Ontario. The Ontario Northland rail service between Toronto and Timmins via North Bay is currently slated to be back up and running in the next 3 - 4 years. As it stands today it has CAD75 million allocated towards bringing this project to life. No one actually believes it will cost that little. The price tag has already gone up from CAD30 million in the early days of the proposal. And in reality that money will barely cover the cost of purchasing trains and reopening, modernizing, and making a dozen of the currently inactive stations functional and accessible again.

But it doesn’t matter. No one is going to care when the costs increase because it is actually a very popular project. Some would cynically say that it only happened because the Ford government was using it as a tool for getting re-elected. And they are almost certainly correct. It also seems to have been quite a successful strategy with NDP strong hold Timmins voting PC and only one riding along the route outside of the GTA voting against Ford.

So Canada isn’t completely incompetent, nor is there something about trains that people inherently dislike that makes these kinds of projects impossible. People in the north seem to like them just as much as a Milton suburbanite. Those two examples might not be the fanciest of intercity rail services. But they will still be modern in a number of key ways (especially the GO service). But what about the holy grail rail projects, like modern service in the Quebec-Windsor corridor, or a connection from Calgary to Edmonton? What is the story there….

I will say that it is very easy to understand why people really like trains, especially the fast ones. Taking a high speed train elicits the same juvenile excitement that driving a high performance sports car brings out. It gives you the fizz and makes you want to put your hand down your pants and have a bit of a rummage. The look of the trains, the experience, it’s all very posh and just sexy as fuck. And if you have ever been on a high speed train and that wasn’t how you felt then I am sorry you were feeling so sad and I hope your doing better because it is a delightful experience. So it isn’t difficult to see why they have such an allure and call out like a sirens song, especially if you are someone who already lives a cozy, sophisticated, well to do urban lifestyle.

But the reality of why high speed was even developed in the first place was not sexy. It was pioneered in Japan because they had existing dedicated passenger rail lines that were at or near capacity and they needed a solution that would better help them move more people. Other countries started to do their own research and development partly because it wasn’t a bad idea, and also because of geo-politics and a still simmering hatred of the Japanese. Even when it was employed elsewhere, it was still a tool to provide additional capacity in corridors where, what were modern at the time, dedicated, intercity passenger rail lines were hitting their limits. The idea of high speed rail as an altruistic endeavour, instead of being a practical and petty one, is a myth that has been slowly built up since the 80’s.

Canada has never had a modern passenger rail network. Passenger rail always functioned on freight lines, and was secondary to the freight business because freight made money and passenger rail didn’t. The only reason passenger service remained so long on a lot of lines was hefty government subsidies. VIA might own some of its own tracks heading in and out of Ottawa, but it has never really done anything with them. The GO network is by almost all measures going to be the first time the country has ever had a dedicated passenger rail network that could be defined as modern on the global stage.

Of course why it has taken so long to get to the point of even one modern passenger rail network is very much a point that is often debated and somewhat complex. But the simple answer is that Canada is a sparsely populated and suburban nation. It does not have the same population levels as Europe (even in the much vaunted Quebec-Windsor corridor). It does not have the same densities. And it is only now, with 2 or 3 decades of actual, sustained, urban growth, alongside across the broader population increases, that dedicated passenger lines in a few parts of the country are actually starting to marginally make sense. This is just the reality that comes when European cities grew for hundreds of years longer (at more) and in the time before cars, while most Canadian cities have seen 60 - 95% of their growth happen in the automobile age. That is how things unfolded and that is the context Canadians have to work with.

Over the past 3 decades there has been a cultish obsession with trying to jam high speed rail into the Quebec-Windsor and Calgary-Edmonton corridors. At least a dozen studies have been done with the idea coming up every 2 or 3 years like clockwork. And every single one of them has failed. There hasn’t even been a modicum of traction when it comes to the idea. Reports are written, a few news stories are filed, and then they end up as dusty reports in Archives Canada where hard working staff struggle to even find them at this point.

While they all offered their own flare and nuances there was one thing in common between all of them. They ignored almost every community in between the major cities. Maybe there was a suburban stop in Toronto and Montreal and maybe Kingston was lucky enough to get service (though sometimes that meant it would be at a station in the middle of nowhere north of the city). But the services were primarily about downtown to downtown service. No one else in between mattered.

Here is something that might surprise some folks. People outside of major cities, be they suburbanites, working class people, dirt bag hosers like myself living in rural Ontario, also like trains. In fact Kingston, with a population of just 150,000 has the second highest per capita ridership of all the VIA rail stations (Cobourg is number one by quite a margin, for those who are wondering). So it shouldn’t be a surprise when projects are met with indifference or negative reactions by people in smaller cities and towns who feel like they are being ignored (a rational response since they are literally being ignored).

And this is part of the reason why when VIA’s High Frequency Rail project was first announced in 2015 it actually got an okay response from the public. It wasn’t going to address the problems faced in the Lakeshore or South Shore corridors, because it was going to be a largely new route to the north. But it was going to serve communities who hadn’t seen passenger trains in 30 years. It wasn’t super cheap, it would still cost CAD4 - 6 billion, but that was a far cry from the CAD20 billion of the last high speed rail proposal in 2018. It wasn’t a banger project, but it was actually alright.

Unlike previous proposals that would have benefitted an elite urban class who could afford high speed rail prices and very few others, HFR was different. Like the Ontario Northland project to Timmins and like GO expansion it was a populist project. It was a project for people, even people living in smaller cities and towns along the way, as well making travel from Toronto to Ottawa and Montreal and Quebec faster and more reliable than it is today. It wasn’t about speed and profit. It was about creating a service that you could actually rely on. A service where you didn’t have to cushion trips by 4 or 5 hours in case your train was delayed by freight traffic just so that you could make sure you got home in time for your kids soccer game.

This project should have been a slam dunk. Yes the price tag was going to go up from its original cost. But if it had largely been left as is, it still would have been a hit, and set a real life standard for what modern intercity rail could be in Canada. Instead, as I am sure was said at some point on Trailer Park Boys “shits gone got all fucked up”.

It was turned into a scheme to move towards privatizing VIA services in the Quebec-Windsor corridor. Only a few new stations remained. After an initial study was done the money started flowing but there have been no visible or tangible results. In the early days of the project CAD3 or 4 million dollar allocations were accounted for. Now there are announcements of CAD400 or 500 million with no indication what is happening with it. As it stands today there is around CAD880 million allocated to the project with no public accountability as to what is being done with it. Is some of it being used to get a head start on upgrading lines VIA already owns? Is it going to consultants? Is it being spent in house at Transport Canada? No one knows. And for a political party that gets ruthlessly attacked and harassed for every little thing they do even when it has nothing to do with the job of governing, its kind of mind-boggling they are not taking more care to stop peoples minds from wondering if this is going to be another sponsorship scandal, but this time benefitting engineering and construction consultants.

HFR has essentially turned into every other proposal before it and as a result public opinion is turning. Maybe there is a brilliant plan being developed in the background that will be so thoughtful and well designed it will make all this nonsense worth while. But we don’t know because we are being told nothing. All that is seen in the public eye is a project where fewer people are set to benefit from something with a rising price tag and public money going into a black hole. And despite what is often written, by people of all political stripes, the public isn’t stupid. They don’t need to know every single little detail of a project to know when something is off and they are being taken for a ride.

Now before talking about this aformentioned tweet there is one thing to note. Some peoples eyes probably glossed over as I started to throw out terms like populism and elitism. But here is the reality. In the Quebec-Windsor corridor 94% of travel happens by car, and only 3.2% happens by plane (according to HFR documents). And the reason so many people travel by car, aside from the flexibility in trips you can make, is because its cheap. If you already own a car, the cost of a trip is gas (or electricity which is even cheaper) and parking. And if you pair up a trip with a free park-and-ride and taking the GO train, or even OC Transpo for the last leg of a trip, you can often make it even cheaper, and avoid driving in city traffic. If people are taking a plane its because they are doing so on work expense accounts (so probably not fork lift drivers or baristas), or they have the kind of income that allows them to afford to fly on their own dime.

It is also not clear if that 3.2% also includes people who are flying within the corridor because their Ottawa to Austin trip starts with a flight to Toronto first. The value of a train is that you dont have to go to an airport at all. If you have to fly to your final destination no matter what, then what is the point of making the trip longer (even if it was on a high speed train) and adding an intermodal transfer, especially when there are no on-site, Schipol style rail stations at any airport in Canada? If any number of that 3.2% includes people who are actually just flying within the corridor because they need to transfer, that is going to reduce the number of people you might actually have a chance of getting out of planes.

Okay, lets go off now.

When high speed rail is proposed it is often done so wrapped in an environmental argument. This is the first sign that what someone is saying might be complete bullshit. Yes, trains and other public transport are more eco-friendly. Everyone knows that. But people dont take metros or trams because of altruistic, I’m saving the earth reasons. They do so because they like living in a vibrant, urban city, or need to get to work, and public transport is simply a requirement for making urban places work. Its not special. Its simply a necessary tool and its popularity is centred around peoples lifestyle and economic choices, not altruistic ones.

The second sign is when they say high speed rail can help get people out of planes because as was stated above this is actually a very small number of travellers that they would be targeting, and a very specific well off, elite class of people on top of that. And the third sign is when they talk about fast travel between the major cities because it means they dont actually care about anyone in between.

And then sometimes, you not only get the trifecta with all three of those together, but some great bonus content where they explicitly say the quiet part out loud.

There is a lot going on with that tweet and it is some of the most disconnected trash I have heard in a long time. But there are two things to really highlight here. The “this is not about a slightly faster milk run” is the quiet part out loud where it is just flat out admitted they don’t care about any of the communities along the way that might also see some benefit. Just so people are aware, trains are not forced to stop at every station they pass. Smaller communities can have a few trains a day that actually stop and the rest can simply drive on through, just as cars don’t have to get off the freeway whenever they come across an interchange. If a train passes through, or near, a community there is no technical reason why they cannot have a station and still allow for express services, and the cost of doing so is going to be less than a single highway interchange. The choice to ignore them is purely ideological.

What makes this so much worse is the fact that this was a former minister who was part of the government when HFR was first being advanced. And it really points to the complete disfunction that seems to inevitably happen anytime the federal government actually tries to advance the idea of modernizing intercity rail. It turns into legacy building and weird petty bullshit like this tweet where you get warring factions that dogmatically fight for “their” vision, while Canadians just have sit around twiddling our thumbs, watching it, just left to wonder what the fuck.

When people talk about politicians and leaders being out of touch, this is a textbook case. This tweet doesn’t read like it is someone who actually cares about the environment, or wants better intercity rail for the masses. This is someone who runs in the circles of Ottawa’s elite and wants a fancy high speed train when heading to their meetings in Toronto and Montreal because they dont like flying and because a more bog standard train that may also have the ability to stop at smaller communities is simply “not good enough”. It is a narrow, exclusive vision and what else can you say but “something smells rotten in Denmark”. In fairness this attitude is not unique to McKenna, she just happens to have been the one to sum it up best.

Out in the prairies, in July 2021, there was a private consortium composed of EllisDon and AECOM that proposed a CAD7 to 9 billion dollar high speed rail line between Calgary to Edmonton. The plan was nothing noteworthy, aside from claiming it would be entirely privately funded (the idea that any major rail project can be done without any public money or resources is a fantasy). What was most interesting was some of the reaction to it. An opinion piece in Calgary Sun, a particularly conservative, right wing paper, even by Sun standards, summed up the frosty reception the project got. The concern wasn’t with it being a train, or even a high speed train necessarily. Instead the problem was why build a fancy new line if it doesn’t serve local communities along the way. If the point is to get people out of their cars, how do you do that if they don’t have a local station to drive too?

The answer is you don’t. And that is the point of those projects.

People often bash the Mulroney conservatives and the Harper reformers for cutting VIA budgets and services. And that is fair because they did just that. But there is an odd flip side where it has been conservative populists like Doug Ford who have actually funded and moved intercity rail projects forward in Ontario. PC premier John Robarts lead the government that launched the GO train in 1967.

This is certainly not an endorsement for Ford or any federal conservative leader (the CPC in particular is a just a dumpster fire of a party). But when it comes to intercity rail, and having projects that actually happen, and actually yield results in offering an alternative to driving, it hasn’t been social democrats or liberals who have made the biggest gains, and it hasn’t been at the federal level. And it probably isn’t because they fundamentally like trains more than other political party, or care about the environment and sustainability.

These are politicians who understand that doing popular things are great for winning elections. In the case of Ford it is wins all around since the GO expansion in particular is going to be a super amazing time for all his developer buddies who now have thousands of acres of under-utilized land next to future rapid transport stations that is going to skyrocket in value. And populist trains, the kind of “milk run” trains that certain segments of society deride, actually seem to be really popular with people. Not just because they actually serve communities, even if they are home to dirt bags instead of stylish urbanites. But because they also have a chance of being built in a reasonable time, unlike high speed rail which will be a technically complex project involving all kinds of complicated land acquisition, expropriation and lawyering that will take a decade of planning before it can even start to be built.

So if you are wondering why Canada struggles with building intercity rail, it is because so many politicians, leaders, advocates, real estate developers, consultants, and anyone else with their hand in the pie continue to push bad ideas. They propose trains that they would like, that would suit their lifestyle, and then get bitchy and upset when the public isn’t onboard with something they would see no benefit from. Now who knows. Maybe one day a person will emerge from the shadows; a salesperson who is a mix of Steve Jobs and a sexy twenty-something Tik Tok personality who’s cadence and charm will suddenly shift peoples opinion.

But until that happens it is time for leaders to stop being assholes and just move ahead with the kind of populist projects that people are more than happy to get behind. When it comes to why there isn’t any movement towards a reimagined, modern, built for todays Canadian cities, towns and communities rail service, its not us, it’s not the public, its you.