Alto: $200 Billion to save a few hours?

Context

Another year, another high-speed rail proposal for central Canadians.

Alto has been proposed to cover the Toronto to Trois Riviere corridor.

Projected costs are $60 to $90 billion. With that much fudge factor involved, expect the final price tag to be somewhere in the $200 billion mark.

Don’t believe me?

When did ANY mega project with public funds come in on time, on budget?

(crickets)

Planning

When do you plant a tree? Twenty years ago.

In the case of provincial planning for high speed rail, it’s more like 70 years ago. Expropriation was happening on a grand scale for the 400-series of highways in Ontario and for the Trans National Highway for Canada, but the process didn’t suck up a disproportionate amount of public funds.

The payoff has been spectacular, especially for car companies appealing to ‘roamers’ – those folks who feel a great sense of liberation from driving kilometer on kilometer regardless of cost to the environment and their own pocketbooks – and trucking companies who downshifted from rail usage to the more flexible 18-wheeler.

European countries have all been able to lean into high-speed rail because they already have the infrastructure. Thousands and thousands of kilometers of track already existed, some of which was no longer needed for rail deliveries. Moderate population density helped.

Asia has its own niche when it comes to forging ahead with rail superiority. Japan is a relatively small, but densely populated chain of islands, making mass transit the most appealing mode of travel. China just says ‘we’re building HSR here and there’s nothing you can do about it’ and it’s done.

Rejection

North America is all about sprawl. Canadian population density is substantially lower than almost anywhere else in the world.

Of course, the southern parts of Quebec and Ontario are the most densely populated, but is the rest of Canada ready and willing to support a transportation system that will inevitably wind up costing substantially more than projected?

No.

It would result in a political and financial nightmare.

Vast tracts of environmentally sensitive areas would be destroyed, along with some of the best agricultural lands in the world.

Along the southeast corridor of Ontario, we’re already seeing lots of resistance to the idea.

• https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/1r89jy5/why_canada_needs_to_rethink_its_highspeed_rail/
• https://thereview.ca/2026/01/30/opposition-and-questions-about-alto/
• https://lanarkist.com/2026/02/22/proposed-northern-route-for-alto-high-speed-rail-sees-mixed-reaction-in-lanark-county/

Just a reminder, folks: opposition is not ‘grassroots’. It’s people and their children who are being asked to foot the bill for this thing.

Calling it grassroots makes us sound like a bunch of burned out hippies singing Kumbaya holding hands around a small fire in the middle of the woods.

We’re everyday people that don’t have access to politicians like developers and contractors do.

Alternatives

We need to think about improving mass transit right here, right now.

VIA always has been almost good enough.

All we need to do is make a commitment to make it better.

As I said, it’ll probably be $200 billion before it’s anywhere near complete.

This is good public money going from our pockets to that of private companies.

No thanks.

VIA Rail generates about $500 million per year from passenger tickets and other fees (parking, food, etc).

They still require about $1.3 billion per year in public subsidies from the federal government.

Let’s just say the public has to fund an additional $1 billion per year to keep the line going.

$200 billion would go an awful long way towards making the current infrastructure more efficient.

Suppose we decide that public transit and non-car transportation is a primary objective.

What would happen if we bumped up the spend to something more like $5 billion per year?

Here are some ways we could do that:

• (a) reduce ticket fares for VIA (ie. increased subsidies to VIA);
• (b) expand VIA’s network to what is was and make it bigger;
• (c) add more departures;
• (d) free parking at VIA lots;
• (e) organize a comprehensive ONE pass for users of other public transit (eg. GO train); and
• (f) added protections along the VIA corridors to ensure that ‘accidents’ (ie. people being hit, derailments, snow issues, etc) are significantly reduced.

That would *barely* amount to a couple of billion per year and we’d get a lot more people using the train.

What About Other Deliveries?

How about we start thinking strategically about this for a change?

Canada Post has come under fire for being ‘inefficient’. The actual reality is that it’s too busy subsidizing junk mail for it to be an efficient mail delivery service.

That said, what if we turned VIA and Canada Post into partners, shipping packages of Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) in the retail space across the country?

All of a sudden we have both an efficient public transportation system AND a solid justification for Canada Post offering a more comprehensive range of services to small retailers across the country.

Finally, what if we allocated some of the expenditure under the ever-expanding Department of Defence military budget? Hardware, personnel and other military needs could be met, all the while adding financial rationale to supporting our existing rail infrastructure.

Score. Score. Score.