Mark Carney is fighting a growing wave of opposition to his plan for high‑speed trains between Quebec City and Toronto. Pierre Poilievre is on the warpath, but so are a lot of rural towns.
Updates from April, 2026 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The STM has closed three metro entrances in an effort to limit access to homeless people: the Belmont Street access to Square‑Victoria station, the de Maisonneuve entrance to McGill station and the northern entrance to de Castelnau station. It has already been locking the Cabot Square entrance to Atwater metro in wintertime for a couple of years.
CE
I wouldn’t be surprised if this happens at the Laurier entrance at Laurier station. Since there is no attendant there, over the last couple years I’ve seen pretty much everything you can imagine at the entrance and on the mezzanine above the platforms short of murder.
Nicholas
St Hubert entrance at Jean Talon. The other day I saw nine metro cops there in a circle with the leader talking to the rest and just as much stuff as usual going on down the corridor.
qatzelok
Alexis Nihon Plaza last week: I was yelled at by a schizophrenic man as I used the urinal, and then I was yelled at by a schizophrenic lady as I got up from a bench.
I wonder how the students of Dawson College are handling the recent takeover of their mall.
Kate
Nicholas, on reddit it’s been noted that the exit you mention has become a problem since they turned the Bain St‑Denis building around the corner into a warming station for the homeless.
I would also guess that the De Castelnau edicule and passage have become a problem since a small homeless shelter was opened a block away, in what used to be a sort of rooming house.
Ian
@qatzi it’s not recent. Alexis Nihon has been a hotspot for that kind of thing since the 90s at least.
@CE about 12 years ago I met a young man in the middle of an OD at that entrance. I sat with him until the ambulance arrived.Tim S.
The Atwater area is much worse, post-pandemic, than it has been in recent decades.
Jonathan
I use the St Hubert exit at Jean Talon every day. I feel that the situation has improved since they opened the warming station at the bain St Denis. There are usually a few unhoused people hanging around but other than just sometimes yelling at each other they don’t seem to be too disruptive. I do notice the place smells a bit uric.
As usual, waay too many cops hanging around doing absolutely nothing.
Chris
I was at Atwater recently: definitely worse than in the past.
I don’t use the metro much (I mostly bike) but the 10 or so times I’ve used it in 2026 every time I’ve wished I was back on my bike. It stinks of urine (or worse) absolutely everywhere. Not in the actual cars at least, but entrances, platforms, exits.
It’s gone way downhill. No doubt partly to a huge loss of revenue in recent years with less ridership.
Theo
They removed attendants a a variety of metro entrances as a money saving measure. Now they have storm troopers demanding guns and money… I guess they were blindsided.
The Atwater “difficulties” could be handled by removing the doors, or just keeping them open at all times during the winter.
But no one asked for my opinion.
Kate
Opinions are always welcome here, Theo.
Nicholas
Have any metro entrances lost attendants recently? The ones that don’t have attendants that I can think of, like Laurier north and St Hubert from Jean Talon, have been like that for 30, 40(?), 50(??) years. So you wouldn’t expect changes based on that.
Kate
I think Fabre lost its attendant more recently, but I don’t use that station often enough to be certain.
JP
I could be mistaken but when I first started using Henri-Bourassa metro about 15 (?) years ago, I’m pretty sure both exits had an attendant…a few years later the western exit attendant was removed.
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Kate
Bixi season is to start on April 15 with more stations and more bikes.
Meezly
The season had started early on March 30 with stations made incrementally available, but it should be fully operational on April 15.
EmilyG
They actually have Bixi stations within walking distance of my home in Pierrefonds now. I might check them out, if I feel comfortable getting on a bike for the first time in many years.
DeWolf
The summer season actually started last week so if you buy a seasonal pass, you can start using it right away. Also, don’t forget there are a million discount codes out there to get 10% off. If your school/company/etc. doesn’t offer one, Communauto and the ARTM have codes that can be used without email verification.
Kate
Yes. I walked past a station today. Lot of bikes, maybe two dozen. All shiny.
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Kate
Radio-Canada’s Enquête looked into the contracts signed by Toronto and Vancouver to host some of the matches in the impending FIFA World Cup, showing how wise Montreal was to stay out of it. The conditions imposed would blank out almost everything else the city does, all summer.
jeather
I knew the World Cup (like the Olympics) was a bad bet but I am amazed at quite HOW bad it is.
Tim S.
I’m proud of Montreal and Quebec for getting this right.
Ian
Pretty wild to think that there are FIFA events going down in L.A. where visitors are in danger of being whisked away by ICE to Honduran prison factories.
EmilyG 22:44 on 2026-04-07 Permalink
I’ve seen people outside of Ontario/Quebec objecting to the trains. Maybe because it doesn’t benefit them.
Tim S. 08:24 on 2026-04-08 Permalink
As 22 Minutes pointed out it last night, Poilievre is only in favour of expropriating rural property for pipelines.
Kate 08:25 on 2026-04-08 Permalink
I was actually expecting to see more about western Conservatives being mad about the plan to spend so many billions on a train for Quebec and Ontario. That seemed like a natural issue for Poilievre to pick up on.
Tim 08:31 on 2026-04-08 Permalink
I live in Montreal and I’m against it.
$90B for a measly 1.5 hour decrease in travel time does not pass the smell test. The finance minister has had to recuse himself from the whole process. The private consortium chosen to build and operate the system includes: Alto (Via), AtkinsRéalis (formerly SNC), La Caisse, Air Canada and a family of French rail companies.
The whole thing stinks.
Chris 09:42 on 2026-04-08 Permalink
Who would you expect to be involved in such a consortium? It’s not like Canada has an excess of relevant companies around with the skills, money, and size to do such a thing.
DeWolf 10:48 on 2026-04-08 Permalink
@Tim Alto would take 3 hours to travel between Montreal and Toronto. Currently, the absolute fastest train takes over 5 hours, which is almost never the case because it’s constantly delayed. It’s a total crapshoot as to how long it will actually take.
Is there a country in the world that built high-speed rail that actually regrets it? Japan, China, France, Spain, Italy — in all of these cases it completely transformed the economy and improved mobility beyond measure.
Besides, how else are you going to deal with the fact that there are more than 20 daily flights between Montreal and Toronto that collectively produce 150,000 tonnes of carbon emissions per year? Even if you improve reliability on the existing rail service, you’re not competing with these short-haul flights, and you certainly wouldn’t have cause to ban them like France has done.
Josh 11:19 on 2026-04-08 Permalink
I know this is a Montreal blog but the number of people who will ride this regularly is vanishingly small, and almost entirely located in solidly Liberal ridings in Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto and Ottawa. It’s not for the working class, not even really the middle class. It might juice tourism a bit, but I struggle to imagine that people will plan new trips out of nothing to Canada on account of it. As a deliverable, it’s way in the future.
The politics of it are absolutely terrible for the Liberals (it could even turn a bunch of comfortable rural/small town Liberal seats competitive (Peterborough, Kingston, other places along the St. Lawrence). I don’t know why Carney is chasing it. As Scott Reid said on Curse of Politics yesterday, right now, all that the people in those places know is that there are maps circulating with big lines on them showing which properties might(!) be expropriated at some point in the future (who knows when!), so it’s hard to blame them for rallying opposition to the whole thing.
Kate 12:51 on 2026-04-08 Permalink
So, another Mirabel airport?
Mark 13:45 on 2026-04-08 Permalink
Has the train left the station on this project, pun very much intended? I am all for high speed electric rail but it should have been built 40 years ago. Now the hurdles and cost look a little too steep.
Tons of expensive expropriations, notably in the same area as Mirabel, and I feel for families and farmers in that region that had to deal with that mess. They will be ready to block this, so this means delays, court cases, cost overruns.etc.
No clear plan on getting these trains to downtown Montreal, short of digging a massive tunnel from Laval…at that point, use those funds and that tunnel boring machine to expand the metro.
No clear pricing plan…will it be fixed, or dynamic, or even competitive.
90B is a lot of….electric inter-city buses? There are a ton of them coming to market soon and for a couple billion, you could probably pick up at least 300-400 of them, meaning departures every 15 min, and you’ve checked the carbon emission box…..it’s not as comfortable as the train and slower than the airplane, but with all that money saved, you could make everything really nice ( fancy buses with spacious seating and desks, a couple nice stations, maybe build/expand reserved lanes in some parts of Mtl and TO to save time, etc.)
The real question is why is our train construction costing 10x more per km than in Europe.
I hate siding with PP on this one because his criticism of this project comes in part from a BS anti-woke pro-pipeline ideological agenda, but questions need to be asked to avoid another…Mirabel.
Josh 14:32 on 2026-04-08 Permalink
Some people in the projected path of this thing might also recall the Pickering Airport that never happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickering_Airport_Lands
Tim S. 16:49 on 2026-04-08 Permalink
I just got back from a trip to Toronto over the weekend, and the highway was packed all the way with passenger vehicles. There was a literal traffic jam to get into the highway rest stops. And that was with gas at 1:70-85ish in Ontario, 1:90-99 here. Of course, we’ll have to see the pricing, but I’m pretty sure there’s a potential market.
René F. 17:15 on 2026-04-08 Permalink
VIA’s two people return Montreal to Toronto cheapest fare right now is $818 with tax.
At that price, driving is, by far, the preferred choice for the average person.
And I note that every Via trip has a $100 federal gov’t subsidy per ticket baked into the price, so an additional $400 goes to VIA beyond the $818.
What do you think the ticket price will be for an Alto TGV trip to Toronto?
Alto talks over and over again about affordability and that the economy ticket fare will be affordable, but affordable for who?
Anyway, imo the federal carbon tax should be paying for this, but the carbon tax was cancelled and here we are.
LJ 18:29 on 2026-04-08 Permalink
That cost seemed high to me, as I recently did a return trip to Toronto for $99. So I just went to the Via site to check, and I see prices as low as $45 per direction (maybe a bit more with tax etc, but no where near $409 per person.
Ian 21:46 on 2026-04-08 Permalink
Assuming your 4-person vehicle gets about 9/100 mileage, you’re looking at about 110 litres of gas.
Assuming you plan well and fill up in Kahnawake and Nipissing, you’re looking at about 170 bucks return to Toronto from Montreal, or just over 20 bucks each way per person. Sure it takes 6 hours minimum but for the train to match that is highly unlikely. I’m not going to pay presumably a hundred bucks each way just to halve the time.
Then again, I suspect most of the people doing this run would be business travellers – I know people that commute 3 hours each way to Toronto, and have for many years because it’s that much cheaper to live in Cambridge or whatever. When you factor in all the differences in cost of living it’s not actually super different between here and Toronto, so unless you really like Montreal’s vibe it’s hard to imagine why people would live in Montreal but commute Toronto every day… would there be enough to make this worthwhile? Maybe. I do know people that drive from Kingston to Montreal every day.
Personally I’m just in favour of rail becasue I think the country should have more rail. Is it more cost effective? I have no idea. Is it a good option for people that don’t want to drive or fly? Absolutely. Heck, if there are fewer drivers on the road it might make the drive faster. (just kidding, most of the slow traffic is trucks and there’s no getting around that with our current trucking-centric distribution system)
Kate 23:25 on 2026-04-08 Permalink
And most of the reason the existing passenger trains are slowed down is freight on the same line.
Tim 09:10 on 2026-04-09 Permalink
@Dewolf: no arguing that high speed rail can be a boon. But this project is not going to transform the economy or measuably improve mobility. The 150k tonnes of carbon on that one flight sounds large until you compare it to the 800M-900M tons of carbon attributed to air travel globally. If that flight gets killed, all flights in this country will become even more expensive given that’s probably the most profitable route for Air Canada.
@LJ: you scored an excellent deal through Via, probably booking well in advance on a sale. Rene probably booked last minute with no sale. My experience with Via recently is that it’s around $100 each way. As noted above, traveling by car will still be much cheaper for anyone with 2 or more people.
@TimS: I drive to Toronto a couple of times a year. Exploring a little outside of the On Route stops is fun and far less crowded/stressful. Even if you have to drive a couple of kilometres, it’s worth it. Cheapest gas this past weekend (and usually) is Flying J (or the service station across the street) in Napanee.
bob 10:47 on 2026-04-09 Permalink
Perfect is the enemy of good. And in this case good is the enemy of “at all”. We’ll be lucky to get :”at all”. Whatever rail gets built in this country will be vastly overbudget and overschedule because our engineering and finance people are, effectively, together with politicians and senior civil servants, a racket. So we’re going to spend tens of billions of dollars over decades on high speed rail that could be built for a quarter the price and in a tenth the time in a developing country, and we’ll get a line half the quality. Given the kinds of rail projects we’ve seen recently in Toronto and Montreal, our “high speed” rail will travel at about 20kph, assuming there is no snow, or rain, or wind, or sun. Everything I’ve seen about this project is promising to make it a monument the the mediocre depravity of the Canadian elite, which is to say it is entirely in keeping with the projects of the politicians and businessmen who founded modern Canada in the late 19th century on the grounds of graft, theft, corruption, and fraud.
dwgs 11:56 on 2026-04-09 Permalink
@Rene F I just checked and I can book a ticket for two to Toronto return for $298 all in, maybe you need a better travel agent.
Joey 13:30 on 2026-04-09 Permalink
Opponents of HSR are really throwing everything at the wall here ($400 minimum for a Via ticket to Toronto?). Abacus polled 1500 Canadians three weeks ago: 62% in favour, 20% unsure, 18% opposed. This is hardly “a growing wave of opposition.” Support in Ontario and Quebec is higher than the national average (67-17-16 for/unsure/against in Ontario and 65/18/17 in Quebec). Only 25% of Conservative voters are opposed – and regional opposition is only somewhat strong in SK/MB (32% opposed. Even in Alberta only 20% of respondents were against the project.
Look, NIMBYs are gonna NIMBY hard on this project and make their voices heard, but a large majority of Canadians of all regions and political persuasions are in favour.
Details here: https://canadianpolling.substack.com/p/canadians-want-high-speed-rail-built
Tim 12:01 on 2026-04-10 Permalink
Nimby Andrew Coyne’s analysis: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-on-canadas-high-speed-rail-plan-the-numbers-just-dont-add-up/
Somehow he did not reference that poll…