Montreal City Weblog

Kate 21:04 on 2026-04-07 Permalink Reply  

• 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…