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  • Incompatible traffic types

    Coalition for Better Rail · ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · The HPR Research Report

    Two incompatible traffic types share one corridor

    Why North America’s freight railways work the opposite way from Europe’s—and what that means for the passenger problem.

    Chapter 3 · The HPR Research Report

    The Toronto–Montréal corridor’s passenger problem has a single physical cause: intercity passenger trains and heavy freight trains are competing for the same tracks. This chapter explains why that conflict is the real problem—and why the solution isn’t to build a new line somewhere else, but to separate the traffic on the corridor that already exists.

    3.1 · The Opposing Models

    North America and Europe run railways in opposite ways

    Europe’s model: Railways are run by the state or with heavy state support. The network is built around passenger service first—high-speed trains get priority over freight. Freight competes for capacity on a passenger-focused network and often loses money or relies on subsidies.

    North America’s model: Railways are private companies that own their own tracks. Freight is the core business, and it comes first. Intercity passenger trains are tenants that run in between freight movements. The freight railways have spent 30 years optimizing for moving more tonnage at lower cost.

    What the freight model bought. The clearest physical expression of the North American model is the size of the trains it runs. Because crew and locomotive costs are largely fixed per departure, length is leverage. North American freight trains routinely run beyond three kilometres and the longest exceed four, against a European standard of roughly 740 metres. The second and larger efficiency is double-stack, introduced in North America in 1984 and now carrying the majority of US intermodal traffic: two containers stacked vertically in a single well car, roughly doubling the container payload of a train of a given length. Europe cannot do either, because siding lengths, signalling design and overhead electrification on a passenger-first network cap both train length and loading gauge.

    The numbers tell the story. In the United States, freight carries roughly 40 percent of long-distance goods movement by weight—among the world’s highest. In Europe, it’s fallen to about 17 percent and still dropping. Why? Because Europe invested in passenger railways, and freight became the secondary user. North America invested in freight railways, and passenger service became secondary.

    This matters because

    Canada’s proposed Toronto–Montréal corridor would run on North American freight railway tracks owned by Canadian National Railway. That means it’s joining a corridor governed by North American logic: the freight railway owns the track, and its tonnage comes first. A passenger plan modelled on Europe won’t work here.

    3.2 · The Incumbent Railway

    CN is constrained, and its problem is capacity—not speed

    Canadian National Railway (CN) owns and operates the Kingston Subdivision, the main freight line through the Toronto–Montréal corridor. CN’s story over the past three decades is a master class in what makes private railways valuable: squeezing more output from existing track without building new infrastructure.

    When CN was privatized in 1995, it was a struggling Crown corporation. By the 2000s, under new leadership, CN adopted “Precision Scheduled Railroading”—moving individual cars on fixed schedules, cutting dwell time in rail yards, and lengthening trains. The operating ratio—the industry’s efficiency measure, where lower is better—fell from 76 percent to 56 percent. CN’s share price went up roughly 60 times.

    Chart of CN market capitalisation against operating ratio from 1995 to 2025, showing market capitalisation rising as the operating ratio falls
    Figure 3.1. CN market capitalisation versus operating ratio since privatisation, 1995–2025. Market capitalisation in CAD billions; operating ratio expressed ×100. The inverse relationship is this chapter’s central premise: as the operating ratio fell, market capitalisation compounded — value created by operating discipline on existing track, not by network construction. Sources: CN annual reports; Bloomberg; Railway Age.

    The lesson: The market rewarded CN not for building new railways but for extracting more value from the railway it already owned. This is the capital-light path to rail value: efficiency on assets in the ground, not greenfield construction.

    Why this matters to the corridor

    CN’s problem today is not speed—it’s capacity. Its three main intermodal terminals in the Greater Toronto Area are running at full capacity. It proposed a new terminal at Milton in 2015 and met a decade of local opposition, environmental assessment and litigation before construction could start; the approval was ultimately upheld on appeal and the terminal is now being built. This tells us something crucial: the cost of building new capacity in a populated landscape is measured in years, not just dollars — Milton took roughly a decade from proposal to construction on a facility of about $250 million — and community resistance is as big a factor as engineering difficulty.

    3.3 · The Other Railway

    What about CP? It runs on its own track

    CN isn’t the only major freight railway on the Toronto–Montréal axis. Canadian Pacific—since its 2023 merger with Kansas City Southern, now Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC)—also runs a line through the corridor. It’s reasonable to ask whether CPKC changes the picture. It doesn’t, and the reason is geographic.

    CPKC runs west out of Toronto on its Galt Subdivision. Its main Toronto–Montréal line is the Belleville Subdivision, which runs roughly parallel to CN’s Kingston Subdivision through the central part of the corridor, then turns north toward Smiths Falls and continues to Montréal on CPKC’s own tracks. CPKC’s eastern freight travels on its own metals, not on CN’s. Since the KCS merger, CPKC’s strategic focus has shifted decisively north–south—to the continental Canada–US–Mexico network that is now its primary growth story.

    Why this matters

    The passenger–freight conflict is specific to CN’s Kingston Subdivision, where VIA’s trains share track with CN’s freight. CPKC, on its separate Belleville Subdivision, is not a party to it—so the freight capacity that separation liberates accrues to CN, the line’s owner. The Belleville Subdivision matters in one further respect: it’s a second existing rail right-of-way running parallel to the CN line and Highway 401 through the corridor’s central section—further evidence that the ground HPR would follow is already a multi-track transport spine rather than open country.

    3.4 · The Root Problem

    Entanglement: two traffic types, one track

    VIA’s intercity passenger trains and CN’s freight trains share the Kingston Subdivision. They have opposite operating needs.

    Freight trains

    Long, heavy, slow to accelerate. Can tolerate delays. Run to commercial schedules. Need to be as long as possible to spread fixed locomotive costs across more cargo.

    Passenger trains

    Short, light, quick to accelerate. Cannot tolerate delays. Need frequent, reliable service. Need short platforms and quick turnarounds.

    Under the “host railway priority” rules that govern shared track across North America, when a freight train and a passenger train want the same track at the same time, the freight train proceeds and the passenger train waits in a siding. VIA cannot unilaterally add frequency because every additional passenger train needs to be negotiated around CN’s freight schedule. CN controls the dispatcher, and under this ownership structure nothing requires the track owner to give up freight capacity to improve passenger reliability.

    This creates a two-sided failure: every passenger path is capacity CN cannot use for freight; every siding meet is friction on a network built and operated to move tonnage without interruption. They are entangled—neither can be optimized without degrading the other. And the owner of the track whose traffic comes first has no incentive to give ground.

    The corridor’s real problem

    It’s not a shortage of speed. It’s not an engineering problem. It’s a structural conflict over who owns the capacity and whose traffic comes first. No schedule adjustment solves this while the two traffic types remain on one set of rails.

    3.5 · The Solution

    Separation: give each traffic type its own path

    If entanglement is the disease, separation is the cure—and it’s the single design principle behind HPR.

    The idea is simple: build a dedicated passenger path engineered for passenger requirements, and hand the shared corridor back to freight. Each traffic type then runs on infrastructure suited to it. The capacity conflict that produces the corridor’s present failure simply ceases to exist. This doesn’t ask a private freight railway to subordinate its tonnage to passenger priority—it removes the passenger trains from the freight railway’s tracks altogether.

    Separation can be achieved cheaply or expensively. The difference between the two approaches is the difference between HPR and ALTO.

    HPR pursues separation through a brownfield-led philosophy: Build the dedicated passenger path along the geometry of corridors that are already disturbed—Highway 401 and the existing rail right-of-way. Upgrade and reuse infrastructure wherever engineering permits; build new only where geometry or capacity genuinely demands it. This keeps the new passenger alignment adjacent to the freight corridor it is relieving.

    What that means in practice: a roughly 479 km new-build passenger spine from Pickering Junction to Dorval, plus about 200 km of upgrade on the VIA-owned Smiths Falls and Alexandria Subdivisions. The spine is the capital project; the upgrades extend it using track already in public hands.

    ALTO pursues separation through greenfield construction: Build a new high-speed line through Eastern Ontario, engineered for 300 km/h, away from the existing freight corridor. This imports the European passenger-first model—a dedicated high-speed line as an end in itself—into a North American freight corridor whose economics it doesn’t engage.

    3.6 · The Insight

    Build one, make one free: the dual-asset structure

    This is where HPR differs fundamentally from ALTO, and where the economics become positive-sum rather than single-purpose.

    When HPR moves passenger trains onto their own dedicated path, they vacate the Kingston Subdivision. The capacity they were consuming—the paths, the priority negotiations, the siding meets—reverts to CN as liberated freight capacity on the line it owns. That capacity bears on the operating ratio and the terminal congestion CN’s own public reporting identifies as central. CN has taken no public position on HPR, and none should be inferred here — the point is that the incentives run in the same direction.

    Think of it this way:

    • “Build one” is High Performance Passenger Rail (HPPR)—the dedicated passenger path. That’s the capital project.
    • “Make one free” is High Performance Freight Rail (HPFR)—the freight capacity liberated on the shared corridor the moment passenger trains vacate it. No additional construction required to create it. It falls out of the geometry of the build.

    One capital project produces two separable outputs. The passenger business case needs only to justify itself on passenger benefits. The freight-capacity dividend is surplus—untouched by any reference-class reduction of passenger ridership forecasts. This is a deliberate bias countermeasure against the benefit-shortfall failure mode that sinks megaprojects.

    Why this structure matters

    On the reference-class basis used throughout this report, ALTO builds one thing — a passenger-only line — at the corridor’s maximum per-kilometre cost of about $142M/km, and captures one benefit stream. HPR builds one thing at about $54M/km de-biased and captures two. The difference isn’t in execution quality; it’s in whether the design is aligned with the corridor’s actual economics and incentives.

    3.7 · Who Gains

    The freight dividend: how the freed capacity translates to real benefits

    The liberated freight capacity is not abstract. It lands on named, motivated beneficiaries:

    The host railway (CN)

    Recovers paths previously consumed by passenger service. Uncongested freight paths translate to higher network fluidity, more predictable transit times, and the ability to grow tonnage without hitting a capacity ceiling. Where clearance is addressed, it enables double-stack container operation—which roughly halves the per-container cost of moving goods by rail. A freight railway that no longer dispatches around passenger priority is materially more valuable on the same physical asset.

    Shippers and supply chain

    Reliable, uncongested rail capacity on the busiest goods corridor in the country is a resilience asset. It raises the ceiling on how much freight moves by rail and reduces variability that pushes shippers toward more expensive or higher-emission alternatives. Combined with on-dock terminal design of the kind the Montréal Port Authority is building at Contrecœur, it extends competitive intermodal service to a larger share of corridor flows.

    The public

    Freight capacity that would otherwise be unavailable on rail is capacity that can absorb goods movement currently carried by road. Each tonne shifted from truck to rail reduces highway congestion, road wear, and—most consequentially—carbon emissions, given the substantial per-tonne-kilometre advantage of rail over road haulage.

    3.8 · The Contrast

    Why ALTO cannot capture the freight dividend

    ALTO is also a separation scheme—it too gives passenger trains a dedicated line. But the freight dividend is not equally available to it, and the reasons are fundamental.

    First, routing: ALTO’s dedicated line runs away from the existing freight corridor, through new terrain in Eastern Ontario. It doesn’t reorganize the freight corridor; it builds a parallel facility through different ground and leaves the freight network’s configuration, congestion, and clearance constraints essentially as it found them.

    Second, design: ALTO is a single-purpose asset—a passenger-only line engineered for 300 km/h. It cannot carry freight and is not designed to. The only benefit it can capture is the passenger benefit.

    Third, accounting: ALTO’s own business case books no freight benefit at all. The freight dividend does not appear in ALTO’s appraisal because ALTO’s design does not produce it.

    Fourth, cost: ALTO solves the single problem it addresses — passenger throughput — at the maximum per-kilometre cost the corridor admits: a new greenfield high-speed alignment through sensitive terrain. The capital cost analysis in Chapter 4 places HPPR at roughly $39 million per kilometre as specified and about $54 million per kilometre on the de-biased central estimate, some $18.6B to $26.1B for the 479 km spine, against ALTO at approximately $142 million per kilometre on the same reference-class basis.

    On a like-for-like de-biased comparison, ALTO therefore costs roughly two and a half times as much per kilometre to produce one benefit stream — and considerably more in total, once its far longer corridor is counted. HPR’s lower-cost, corridor-aligned build produces two benefits, and leaves CN’s capacity and clearance problems measurably better than it found them.

    The core difference

    ALTO builds one and makes nothing free. HPR builds one and makes one free, at roughly two-fifths of the per-kilometre cost. The difference is not in how well each is executed; it is in whether the concept is aligned with the corridor’s actual economics and the incentives of the parties who own and operate it.

    Key Findings · Chapter 3

    The concept in eight parts

    3.1 — North America runs the opposite railway

    North American freight railways are private, profitable, vertically integrated, and freight-priority. Rail’s freight share is far higher in North America (~40% of US long-distance ton-miles vs ~17% of EU inland tonne-km). A passenger plan modelled on Europe imports passenger-first assumptions into a freight-first corridor.

    3.2 — CN is the incumbent, and it is constrained

    CN’s extraordinary returns came from efficiency on existing track, not construction. Its valuation has stalled; it struggles to add capacity (Milton took a decade from proposal to construction); and its corridor economics improve on uncongested paths and double-stack clearance.

    3.3 — CP is not a party to the conflict

    CPKC runs its own Belleville Subdivision on the Toronto–Montréal axis, parallel to the CN Kingston Sub, and shares no track with VIA. The entanglement, and the freight dividend, are CN’s. CPKC’s parallel line is also a second disturbed right-of-way in the corridor.

    3.4 — Entanglement is the root cause

    Passenger and freight share the Kingston Subdivision with opposite operating characteristics. The corridor’s failure—sub-64% on-time performance, four-hour schedules, low frequency—is one capacity conflict seen from two sides, on track owned by the party whose tonnage comes first.

    3.5 — Separation is the design principle

    Give passenger service its own dedicated path and hand the shared corridor back to freight—resolving the conflict with the North American model, not against it. HPR does this brownfield-led, along Highway 401 and existing rail geometry: a ~479 km Pickering Junction–Dorval spine plus ~200 km of upgrade on the VIA-owned Smiths Falls and Alexandria Subdivisions.

    3.6 — Build one, make one free

    One capital project—HPR—produces two separable assets: HPPR (the dedicated passenger path) and HPFR (the freight capacity liberated on the shared corridor), created at no incremental cost by the geometry of the build.

    3.7 — HPFR lands on a motivated beneficiary

    The liberated freight corridor benefits the host railway (fluidity, operating-ratio gains, double-stack where cleared), shippers (resilience, Contrecœur-style reach), and the public (road freight diverted to rail, with emissions and safety gains). It is carried as a measured quantity: a Chapter 8 benefit-cost stream and Chapter 5 emissions.

    3.8 — ALTO cannot capture it

    ALTO builds a greenfield passenger-only line at ~$142M/km against HPPR’s ~$54M/km de-biased (~$39M/km as specified) — roughly two and a half times the unit cost — and captures one benefit. HPR captures two. ALTO builds one at maximum cost and makes nothing free.

    Download Chapter 3
    The HPR Concept: Untangling the Corridor
    PDF · 3.2 MB · Full technical chapter with figures and tables
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    Coalition for Better Rail  ·  ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  beyondalto.ca  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  The HPR Research Report · Chapter 3
    Independent, non-partisan research on Canada’s proposed Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor. This chapter explains why North America’s freight-first railway model makes the entanglement between passenger and freight the corridor’s defining constraint, and why HPR’s separation principle—rather than ALTO’s European-modelled greenfield approach—aligns with the continent’s actual economics.

  • The wrong answer to the right question

    Coalition for Better Rail · ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · The HPR Research Report

    The Wrong Answer to the Right Question

    The corridor genuinely needs better trains. What it got instead was a project that grew far beyond its original plan during procurement — and that can’t be fixed with tweaks, because its problems come from how it was chosen, not how it’s being built.

    Chapter 2 · The HPR Research Report

    This chapter doesn’t dispute that the Windsor–Toronto–Ottawa–Montréal corridor needs better intercity rail. It does. What it disputes is ALTO — on grounds that are about method and evidence, not politics. We trace how a modest upgrade of a largely existing, disused rail corridor turned into a 300 km/h greenfield megaproject during a competitive bidding process, lay out four structural problems with the project as designed, and explain why none of it can be patched from the inside.

    Source Note

    Much of this chapter draws on documents obtained through Access to Information requests — internal board and executive records, procurement files, and the independent fairness monitor’s final report — along with the Initiative’s own independent cost, ridership, and route-friction models. Specific releases are cited by their file numbers throughout. Some key documents, including the internal slide where the project’s scope was reframed, remain withheld.

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    Chapter 2: The Wrong Answer to the Right Question (PDF)
    The full chapter, with footnotes and sourcing
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    2.1 · The Real Problem

    The corridor genuinely needs better trains

    The Windsor–Toronto–Ottawa–Montréal corridor connects Canada’s two largest metro areas and the national capital, and generates roughly half the country’s GDP. Despite that, intercity rail service on it is among the worst in any comparable wealthy country. VIA Rail shares track with CN freight, and freight trains get priority — when both need the same stretch of track, the passenger train waits in a siding. The result is slow, unreliable, and infrequent service.

    <64%
    VIA Rail’s on-time performance in 2023 — worse than Air Canada’s 63%, which itself ranked last among North America’s ten largest airlines
    4h+
    Scheduled Toronto–Montréal journey time — more than double a competitive flight, including check-in
    ~50%
    Share of Canada’s GDP generated in this corridor — the economic weight today’s rail service fails to serve

    Schedules are padded with hours of slack to absorb the delays that freight priority makes routine. The result isn’t competitive with driving or flying, and VIA can’t simply add more trains without bumping freight that has the contractual and legal right of way. So the question this report asks isn’t whether the corridor needs investment. It’s what kind of investment actually delivers it — at what cost, on what timeline, with what risk.

    2.2 · How This Happened

    A modest upgrade grew into a much bigger, much pricier project — during the bidding process

    ALTO’s cost and ambition problems didn’t come from ordinary planning drift. Records obtained through Access to Information show the project’s scope escalating in the middle of the bidding process itself — not through any public announcement or debate. Understanding how that happened explains why ALTO costs what it costs today.

    One thing to be clear about up front: this is not a claim that the procurement was run improperly. BDO Canada, the independent fairness monitor appointed in 2022, concluded in its final report of May 2025 that the process it observed was carried out in a fair, open and transparent manner, and recorded no fairness concerns at any stage. The problem is not that rules were broken. It is that a process run properly within its own terms produced a project no one had put to Parliament.

    What was on the table originally

    The project ALTO replaced was VIA Rail’s High Frequency Rail (HFR) plan: a dedicated-track plan running at up to 177 km/h, largely reviving a long-disused rail right-of-way through Peterborough, Havelock, and Smiths Falls — a separate, more direct route away from the CN Kingston Subdivision VIA still shares with freight today — delivered incrementally, segment by segment. Its own 2021 business case projected about 13.5 million riders a year, at a capital cost roughly a quarter to a third of what ALTO now proposes. That’s the baseline the public was never shown as a discrete choice against what came next.

    An open-ended bidding process

    The request for proposals went out in October 2023 without a settled route — internal records show the route was still being debated at the executive and board level as late as March 2024, five months after bidding opened. It also asked every bidder for two designs: one topping out at 200 km/h, and a second, more ambitious one with high-speed sections. The process then included 36 structured private meetings between the government and each bidder over eight and a half months.

    All three bidders proposed something bigger

    A Privy Council Office briefing note of 20 February 2025, released under access to information, records that as the bidding progressed all three shortlisted consortia put forward designs more ambitious than the high-frequency plan — new routes on largely new land, above 250 km/h. The jump in scope did not come from any one bidder. The winning consortium, Cadence — CDPQ Infra, AtkinsRéalis, Keolis, SYSTRA Canada, SNCF Voyageurs, and Air Canada — brings substantial experience in dedicated, higher-speed rail: its members built Montréal’s REM and operate France’s TGV network. What has never been published is the comparison the bidding process was set up to produce. The same briefing note credits an unnamed third party with concluding those bigger proposals would deliver greater benefits, and that analysis has not appeared in any release to date.

    Billions committed before the plan was finished

    The government committed $3.9 billion in the 2024 Fall Economic Statement before the business case was finalized and before a route was chosen. The internal slide that appears to document the scope escalation — titled “Level of Ambition Supported by Business Case” — remains withheld from public release. Once the funding commitment was public, there was effectively no way back to the smaller project.

    Selling the bigger, pricier version

    With the scope already locked in, the government faced a communications problem: a project that started as “VIA HFR” was now something much closer to European-style high-speed rail. Internal records show “high frequency” tested poorly with Ontario audiences, while the name “Alto” tested well with 18–34-year-olds and worked bilingually. A national ad campaign promoting the project’s benefits ran while the business case and route documents were still being withheld from information requesters.

    The pattern, stated plainly

    A project that entered the bidding process as a $9–12 billion, 177 km/h upgrade of a largely disused rail corridor came out the other side as a $60–90 billion (on the government’s own published figures — our independent estimate is materially higher), 300 km/h greenfield railway. That change in scope was never put to Parliament or the public as a choice. It emerged from the mechanics of the procurement itself.

    2.3 · Four Problems Built Into the Design

    Route, math, price tag, ridership — each one falls short

    Having won a mandate for a much bigger project than the one that went to bid, ALTO’s proponents faced four separate problems: a route through sensitive land, a business case that has to clear a federal investment bar, a cost estimate that has to hold up, and a ridership forecast that has to be believable. None of the four holds up well under independent scrutiny.

    2.3.1 · The route runs through some of the most sensitive land in the corridor

    ALTO’s proposed new corridor crosses the Frontenac Arch Biosphere Reserve — a UNESCO-designated ecological corridor — the Napanee Limestone Plain, habitat for several species at risk, and Leda clay deposits south of Ottawa with known engineering hazards at high speed. This wasn’t a routing choice made for technical reasons; it reflects a decision to build an entirely new, 300 km/h-optimized corridor rather than follow existing, already-disturbed infrastructure. In our Participant Experience Survey, only 2% of respondents received direct notification about ALTO, and 88% found the information they did get inadequate. Our Community Friction Index — which scores corridors on land conflict, municipal pushback, expropriation exposure, ecological sensitivity, and public mobilisation — puts ALTO’s corridor at 54 out of 100, in the high-friction range. That matters financially, not just politically: in our statistical model, community friction is a significant predictor of cost overruns.

    2.3.2 · The math doesn’t clear the government’s own bar

    The only published economic appraisal of this corridor is the December 2021 business case for the predecessor project. It puts the benefit-cost ratio at about 0.13 over a 30-year period — about thirteen cents of measured value for every dollar spent — rising to about 0.4 once two newer and less established benefit categories are added in. A separate calculation in the same document shows a net loss of $21.1 billion in present-value terms. These are the government’s own figures. A ratio of 1.0 is simply break-even, the point where benefits equal costs. Our independent analysis, which grounds every input in how comparable projects have actually performed rather than project-specific projections, finds the ratio is likely far worse still.

    ScenarioWhat it shows
    Published (Dec 2021 appraisal)
    30-year evaluation period    		Benefit-cost ratio ~0.13, or ~0.40 on the expanded basis
    Initiative reference-class estimate
    Cost assumed: ~$143B    		Benefit-cost ratio ~0.03–0.11
    Break-evenBenefit-cost ratio of 1.0 — benefits equal costs
    In plain terms

    ALTO fails its own government’s investment test on the government’s own numbers. Checking those numbers against how similar projects have actually performed makes the gap worse, not better.

    2.3.3 · The price tag is very likely too low

    ALTO’s published cost range of $60–90 billion comes from an early-stage estimate — the type quantity surveyors flag as accurate only to within roughly ±50%, which makes it a planning figure, not a firm commitment. Our own cost model, built from 16 comparable rail megaprojects worldwide and calibrated to those projects’ actual outcomes, puts ALTO’s realistic central cost at around $143 billion, with a worst-case scenario approaching $200 billion or more once cold-climate engineering risk (frost-susceptible clay, karst terrain, freeze-thaw cycles at high-speed tolerances) is factored in.

    2.3.4 · No independent study backs the ridership numbers

    ALTO projects 24 million riders a year by 2055. No car-dependent North American corridor without existing high-speed rail has ever come close to that. Research on transportation megaprojects generally finds ridership forecasts overstate actual results by about 51% on average. Our own bottom-up model — built from corridor population, trip-making patterns, and VIA’s own ridership data, tested under three different fare and subsidy scenarios — puts 2055 ridership at 3.7 to 17.2 million, with 9.2 million as the central estimate. ALTO’s 24-million target sits 40% above even our upper bound.

    Source2055 ridership estimate
    ALTO’s public target24 million
    ALTO’s internal Corporate Plan figure (by 2059)17 million — about 30% below the public figure
    McGill TRAM stated-preference study~19.7 million (year 50)
    Munk School (U of T) model18–19 million (year 30)
    Standard bias correction applied to ALTO’s own figure8.4 million
    Initiative bottom-up model, central case9.2 million (range: 3.7–17.2 million)
    The pattern here too

    Every independent forecast built from a published methodology lands within or close to our range. ALTO’s own public target is the outlier — and it’s the one figure whose methodology has never been disclosed.

    2.4 · Why Patching It Won’t Work

    These aren’t execution problems — they’re the project’s founding choices

    A different route doesn’t fix the business case. A revised ridership forecast doesn’t fix the cost problem. Tighter project management doesn’t undo the fact that funding was committed before the business case was finished, on a specification set by the bidding process rather than by public need. Four reasons why this can’t be corrected from within:

    It’s been treated as one-of-a-kind, so nothing gets checked against it

    ALTO’s documentation consistently describes the corridor as having no real comparator, which is exactly the reasoning pattern researchers have found opens the door to over-optimistic numbers. Every genuinely comparable project elsewhere in the world gets waved away as not relevant — leaving the project’s own estimate as the only “evidence” available.

    The most optimistic version of the numbers is the one that won

    In competitive funding processes, the most optimistic projection tends to win, because optimism produces a better-looking business case than realism does. A version built on our reference-class numbers — a benefit-cost ratio of 0.03–0.11 — could never have survived the funding decision. The optimistic version did, but only because the more realistic numbers weren’t available yet when the commitment was made.

    The first segment is too weak to stand alone — which is exactly the point

    The planned first segment, Ottawa–Montréal, is the corridor’s weakest market: roughly 98% of that travel is currently by road, and there’s barely any competing flight traffic for a speed premium to beat. It can’t pay for itself. Its economics only work if the network keeps extending toward Toronto — which locks in a public commitment to the rest of the corridor before its full price has ever been disclosed. Britain’s HS2 project shows how badly this can go if it doesn’t: two legs cancelled, leaving a line more than double its original budget serving less than half the original network. HS2 at least stranded into its strongest market. If ALTO’s later phases stall, it strands into its weakest.

    The alternative is quietly being closed off while this proceeds

    The report’s proposed alternative, HPR, would run alongside the existing Highway 401 corridor. Ontario’s ongoing 401 widening is already consuming the road margin that alternative would need, section by section. Every year ALTO’s planning phase continues is a year in which that door narrows further — a real cost that doesn’t show up in any of ALTO’s published figures.

    What’s Next

    What’s in the rest of this report

    This chapter has traced one argument in four parts: the corridor’s need is real (2.1); a modest upgrade became a much bigger project during procurement (2.2); the resulting project has four structural problems (2.3); and none of it can be fixed by refinement (2.4). The chapters that follow set out the alternative.

    Ch. 3
    The HPR alternative. How a passenger line built along the existing Highway 401 and rail corridor can free up freight capacity at the same time, instead of building an entirely new line elsewhere and leaving the freight problem untouched.
    Ch. 4
    Route and cost. Where the line would go and what it would cost, using the same cost model applied consistently to both ALTO and HPR.
    Ch. 5
    Environment and communities. How the two options compare on carbon emissions and disruption to the communities along the route.
    Ch. 6
    How many people would ride it. Ridership estimates built on the real-world pattern, checked four different ways.
    Ch. 7
    Running costs. The ongoing yearly balance between what it costs to operate and maintain the railway, and what fares plus any subsidy bring in.
    Ch. 8
    Is it worth it. A full cost-benefit and financial analysis across a range of scenarios, including the value of the freed-up freight capacity.
    Ch. 9
    Getting it built. How to phase construction, manage the risk of cost overruns, and keep the project accountable to the numbers in this report.
    Coalition for Better Rail  ·  ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  beyondalto.ca  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  The HPR Research Report · Chapter 2
    Independent, non-partisan research on Canada’s proposed Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor.

  • Deconstructing the Megaproject Playbook

    Coalition for Better Rail · ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · The HPR Research Report

    Deconstructing the Megaproject Playbook

    Why big rail projects almost always cost more and carry fewer riders than promised — and how to check a project’s numbers against the real-world record, not just its own promises.

    Chapter 1 · The HPR Research Report

    This chapter explains the method behind every number in this report. It’s based on the work of Bent Flyvbjerg, an Oxford researcher who has spent decades studying how big infrastructure projects around the world actually turn out, compared to what they promised. His findings have been confirmed again and again, across many countries and many kinds of projects. We use his method for every forecast in this report — and we’re explaining it here first, before any of our own results, so you can see the rules before you see the numbers.

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    Chapter 1: Deconstructing the Megaproject Playbook (PDF)
    The full chapter, with footnotes and sourcing
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    1.1 · The Track Record

    The iron law of megaprojects

    Here’s an uncomfortable fact: big public infrastructure projects almost always cost more, take longer, and carry fewer passengers than promised. This isn’t bad luck on any one project — it’s been true again and again, everywhere records have been kept, for decades. Researcher Bent Flyvbjerg calls this the iron law of megaprojects: over budget, over time, under benefits — over and over again, regardless of country, project type, or how sophisticated the planning was.

    1.40×
    What rail projects actually cost, on average, vs. what was first promised
    0.66×
    The benefits rail projects actually deliver, on average, vs. what was promised
    52%
    Average budget overrun for high-speed rail specifically
    106%
    How much rail projects overestimate rider numbers, on average
    9/10
    Rail projects that predicted more riders than they actually got
    +45%
    How much longer construction takes than planned, on average

    Our own analysis of ALTO finds the same pattern. The published benefit-cost ratio — a standard measure of whether a project’s benefits are worth its costs — is already far short of break-even. The December 2021 business case for the predecessor project put it at about 0.13 over 30 years, or about 0.4 once some newer and less established benefit categories are counted. A ratio of 1.0 is the point where benefits merely equal costs. Correct the cost and ridership numbers using the real-world track record, and that ratio falls further still. This doesn’t mean going over budget is inevitable. It means any assessment that ignores this well-documented pattern is starting from an unrealistic place — not by accident, but by leaving out the most relevant evidence available. ALTO’s risk profile isn’t an unlucky exception. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a project of this size, this type, and this level of political backing.

    1.2 · Two Reasons Forecasts Go Wrong

    Honest mistakes and strategic misrepresentation

    There are two different reasons a project forecast can turn out to be wrong — and it matters which one is at play, because they call for very different fixes.

    Optimism bias — the honest mistake

    Planners genuinely believe their numbers. They aren’t lying — they’re not even aware they’re being too optimistic. This is a well-documented pattern in psychology: people naturally focus on the details of their own project and forget to check how similar projects have actually gone in the past. It’s a fixable process problem — the fix is forcing real-world comparisons into every estimate.

    Strategic misrepresentation — telling people what they want to hear

    Costs get underestimated and benefits get overestimated on purpose, to get a project approved and funded. Writing about the research record as a whole, Flyvbjerg borrows a word from ethics and calls this what it is: lying. It’s an incentive problem — and it’s only fixed by changing what forecasters are rewarded and held accountable for.

    In real projects, both are usually present together, and the mix shifts with the stakes. For small, low-attention projects, honest mistakes tend to be the bigger factor. For large projects with strong political backing — the kind a minister or a Crown corporation needs approved — strategic misrepresentation tends to dominate, with honest optimism layered on top rather than absent.

    The pattern, stated plainly

    Underestimate the cost, overestimate the benefit, and you get funded. This isn’t random. It points in exactly the direction that wins the competition for a limited pool of money.

    1.3 · Structural Profile

    Where ALTO sits on the scale

    Flyvbjerg’s research lets us predict, in general terms, which kind of error is more likely for a given project — without needing to know what’s in anyone’s head. For small projects that don’t attract much political attention, honest mistakes are usually the bigger factor. For large projects with major political weight behind them, strategic misrepresentation usually is — with honest mistakes still layered on top.

    Diagram showing how the mix of honest mistakes and strategic misrepresentation shifts with project size and political pressure
    Figure 1.1. How the mix of honest mistakes and strategic misrepresentation changes as a project gets bigger and more politically important. Honest mistakes (dashed line) matter more for small, low-pressure projects and fade — but never fully disappear — as projects grow. Strategic misrepresentation (solid line) is close to zero for small projects but rises sharply and takes over for large, high-pressure ones. Large, politically backed projects competing for scarce funding sit at the right-hand end of this scale.

    ALTO checks every box that predicts heavy political pressure. It’s run by a federal Crown corporation with a multi-billion-dollar budget. It has had public backing from successive governments. And it’s competing against every other federal priority for a limited pot of money. By this framework’s own logic, projects in that position sit at the end of the scale where the research expects political pressure, rather than honest error, to account for most of the pattern across the class. The pressure to look good is strongest exactly where the numbers matter most for getting funded.

    Flyvbjerg calls this the survival of the unfittest: it isn’t necessarily the best projects that get built — it’s the ones that look best on paper. The approval process quietly rewards optimistic numbers over honest ones: a proposal with realistic costs and realistic ridership loses the funding contest to one that doesn’t. Seen this way, the fact that ALTO has survived several rounds of budget approval isn’t proof its numbers are wrong — but it is a reason to look at them carefully rather than take them at face value.

    To be clear

    None of this requires anyone at ALTO to be lying. An honest mistake would produce errors that go in both directions about equally — some projects under budget, some over. What actually happens, again and again, is that the errors all point the same way: costs come in higher, benefits come in lower. That one-directional pattern is the tell. It is why this report checks ALTO’s published figures against the real-world record instead of accepting them on their own terms. Nothing here identifies the cause of any particular number, and this report makes no claim about the honesty of any person or organisation.

    1.4 · The Uniqueness Trap

    Why “it’s different this time” doesn’t hold up

    One of the most common — and most costly — mistakes in big project planning is treating a project as one-of-a-kind, and therefore exempt from comparison with anything else. ALTO has been promoted as Canada’s first true high-speed railway, on uniquely Canadian geology, on an unprecedented corridor. That’s exactly the kind of claim researchers have found, again and again, opens the door to over-optimistic forecasting.

    Diagram contrasting a uniqueness claim, which leaves nothing to compare a project against, with the outside view, which checks the estimate against similar projects elsewhere
    Figure 1.2. The uniqueness trap. Claiming a project is unique (left) leaves nothing to compare it to, so all you can do is trust the project’s own estimate. Looking at similar projects elsewhere (right) means checking that estimate against real-world evidence instead. This report takes the second approach throughout.

    Here’s why the “unique” claim matters so much. If a project is truly one of a kind, there’s nothing to compare it to — which means the only evidence left is the very estimate you’re trying to check. Every comparable project, every real-world outcome from similar lines, gets waved away as not relevant. This report takes the opposite view: ALTO is one example of a well-studied category — high-speed and intercity rail megaprojects — and there’s plenty of real-world data on how that category actually performs. That data is the most relevant evidence available.

    What the disagreement is really about

    The disagreement between this report and ALTO’s own numbers isn’t really about any single figure. It’s about whether ALTO should be judged purely on its own terms, as a one-off case — or against how similar projects have actually turned out.

    1.5 · Risk of Bad Surprises

    Why standard contingency budgets fall short

    Standard project planning assumes cost risk is spread fairly evenly around a central estimate — like a bell curve — so a reasonable contingency budget can be calculated with simple statistics. The real-world data don’t support that assumption. Big infrastructure projects almost never come in significantly under budget, but they regularly come in massively over — by two or three times the original estimate in the worst cases. Statisticians call this a fat-tailed distribution: the chance of a very bad outcome is much higher than a normal bell curve would suggest.

    Chart comparing the real-world pattern of rail megaproject cost overruns to a normal bell-curve distribution, showing a much higher chance of large overruns
    Figure 1.3. The real pattern of cost overruns on rail megaprojects (solid line) has a much bigger chance of large overruns than a normal bell curve (dashed line) would predict. A typical 10–15% contingency budget looks safe against a bell curve — but against the real-world pattern, it may only cover half of projects, or fewer. The shaded area shows the range of bad outcomes a standard contingency budget doesn’t account for.

    This matters directly for how much money a project should set aside for the unexpected. A standard 10–15% buffer looks adequate if you assume a bell curve — but against the real-world pattern, it may only protect against half of possible outcomes, or fewer. That’s why this report carries three cost figures all the way through its financial model — the number as originally specified, a corrected central estimate based on similar projects, and a worst-case scenario — instead of relying on one confident number that history suggests is likely to be wrong.

    1.6 · The Fix

    Checking the numbers against the real-world record

    The standard fix for both problems above is simple in principle: find a group of similar past projects; look at how their costs, benefits, and ridership actually turned out compared to what was promised; then use that real-world pattern to sanity-check the new project’s own estimate, rather than taking that estimate at face value. This flips the usual burden of proof — the real-world pattern becomes the starting assumption, and anyone predicting something better has to explain why.

    World map showing the countries whose rail systems were used for comparison in this report's cost and ridership models, spanning Europe, East Asia, North Africa, and North America, with the ALTO corridor marked for reference
    Figure 1.4. Where the comparison projects are. They span Europe, East Asia, North Africa, and North America — different countries, different governments, different planning systems. That range matters: it shows the patterns we rely on aren’t specific to any one country’s way of doing things. ALTO’s corridor is shown for reference.

    What it costs

    We compared 16 real high-speed rail projects worldwideWe looked at what actually drove the final cost per kilometre on 16 comparable projects, and found two things matter most: how difficult the engineering is, and how much local resistance and land-use friction a project runs into.
    Local resistance is the stronger driver in our modelOf the two, local and political resistance is the stronger predictor of final cost per kilometre — carrying roughly twice the weight of engineering difficulty in the fitted model.
    What this means for ALTOBased on ALTO’s engineering difficulty and level of local resistance, this points to a realistic cost of around $142 million per kilometre, with a likely range of $76–264 million per kilometre.

    How many people would ride it

    We compared 12 real high-speed rail systems worldwideWe looked at how car-dependent a region is against how many people actually use rail there.
    No car-dependent region has high ridershipNot one of the 12 systems combines heavy car dependence with high rail ridership. ALTO’s corridor scores as heavily car-dependent.
    ALTO’s target vs. the realistic estimateALTO’s own target of 24 million riders a year by 2055 is far above what any comparable region has achieved. Three independent forecasts for this corridor instead cluster around 10 million riders a year.
    The standard this report holds itself to

    A forecast that looks better than the real-world pattern isn’t more accurate — it’s less accurate. This report’s numbers are, on purpose, less flattering than what a typical project pitch would produce for the same corridor. That’s the point: this report is built to hold up under tough scrutiny, which means accepting an honest, sometimes unwelcome, comparison to how these projects actually turn out.

    1.7 · Why Now

    Canada’s changed circumstances

    The case against ALTO isn’t only about method — it’s also about timing. ALTO was approved during a period of relative calm with the US, a stable trade agreement, extra federal money after the pandemic, low interest rates, and confident population-growth predictions that made ambitious ridership numbers easier to defend. Nearly all of those conditions have since changed. Today, Canada faces US tariff pressure, pressure to diversify trade away from the US, a tighter federal budget, and a public more focused on economic resilience than on amenity projects. A passenger project of this scale — on the Initiative’s reference-class estimates, $100–200 billion — has to clear a much higher bar today than it did when it was first approved.

    Line chart of Canada and United States income per person from 2000 to 2025, showing Canada nearly matching the US during the 2011-2012 resource boom then falling to roughly 61 percent of US income per person by 2025
    Figure 1.5. Canada’s income per person compared to the US, 2000–2025. Canada came close to matching US income per person during the 2011–2012 resource boom, then fell steadily as oil prices dropped. By 2025, Canada’s income per person is roughly 61% of the US level — a gap of about $35,000. ALTO was approved near the peak of Canada’s post-pandemic economic rebound, in conditions that have since tightened considerably. Sources: World Bank World Development Indicators 2000–2024; IMF World Economic Outlook, October 2025.
    The question this raises

    ALTO is a project built for good economic times. The question for Canada in 2026 isn’t whether high-speed rail would be nice to have. It’s whether this corridor is worth the cost — and whether this design is the right answer to the problem.

    The high-speed rail systems that have actually succeeded — in Japan, France, Spain, Taiwan, South Korea — share things the Toronto–Ottawa–Montréal corridor doesn’t have: low car use, dense cities at both ends, strong local transit, and a rail culture that already existed before high-speed rail arrived. What’s left, globally, are second-tier projects on car-dependent corridors where the ridership case relies on optimistic in-house projections rather than real-world evidence. California’s high-speed rail project is the best-known example: years behind schedule, billions over budget, and in political trouble, for exactly these reasons. On the real-world evidence, the Toronto–Ottawa–Montréal corridor shares that second-tier profile.

    What’s Next

    What’s in the rest of this report

    This chapter sets out the method. The chapters that follow apply it — to ALTO, and to the alternative this report proposes, HPR (High-Performance Rail).

    Ch. 2
    Why the current plan doesn’t add up. Checks the case for doing something about intercity travel on this corridor — which we don’t dispute — against whether ALTO’s specific design actually makes financial sense.
    Ch. 3
    The HPR alternative. How a passenger line built along the existing Highway 401 and rail corridor can free up freight capacity at the same time, instead of building an entirely new line elsewhere and leaving the freight problem untouched.
    Ch. 4
    Route and cost. Where the line would go and what it would cost, using the same cost model applied consistently to both ALTO and HPR.
    Ch. 5
    Environment and communities. How the two options compare on carbon emissions and disruption to the communities along the route.
    Ch. 6
    How many people would ride it. Ridership estimates built on the real-world pattern from this chapter, checked four different ways.
    Ch. 7
    Running costs. The ongoing yearly balance between what it costs to operate and maintain the railway, and what fares plus any subsidy bring in.
    Ch. 8
    Is it worth it. A full cost-benefit and financial analysis across a range of scenarios, including the value of the freed-up freight capacity.
    Ch. 9
    Getting it built. How to phase construction, manage the risk of cost overruns, and keep the project accountable to the numbers in this report.
    Coalition for Better Rail  ·  ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  beyondalto.ca  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  The HPR Research Report · Chapter 1
    Independent, non-partisan research on Canada’s proposed Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor. This chapter explains the method used throughout the HPR Research Report.

  • Canada’s rail exceptionalism

    Canada’s Rail Exceptionalism

    Why Canada’s passenger trains keep pulling over to let freight go by — and why almost no other wealthy country works this way.

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Comparative Brief · Published July 2026
    ⚠ New this week: Ottawa’s $1.95-billion train order

    On July 29, 2026, the federal government announced $1.95 billion to buy 45 new hybrid locomotives for VIA Rail, most of them to be assembled in Montréal. It is welcome news for jobs and for an aging fleet — but every dollar of it is about the train, not the track. Transport Canada   CBC

    A new locomotive doesn’t change who owns the rails or who goes first. On the routes this fleet will serve, VIA runs on tracks owned by the freight railways — and its shiny new trains will keep pulling into sidings to wait for freight, just as the last batch of new trains does today.

    The bottom line

    No G7 country has a law that makes freight trains more important than passenger trains. Where a law on the question exists at all, it does the opposite — it puts passengers first. The other big democracies reach the same result another way: a neutral company owns the tracks, or an independent referee decides who goes when, or freight is simply the guest on passenger-owned lines.

    Canada is the only G7 country with none of these protections. VIA Rail owns less than 3% of the track it runs on and travels as a guest on lines owned by the freight railways CN and CPKC, under private contracts, with no law giving passengers priority, no neutral track owner, and no independent referee. Freight priority isn’t written into Canadian law — it is simply what happens when nothing protects passengers. That is what makes Canada the outlier.

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    Canada’s Rail Exceptionalism — Full Brief (PDF)
    The complete comparison of freight-versus-passenger priority across the G7 and other high-income countries, with sources
    Download PDF
    The problem

    Canada’s passenger trains are guests on someone else’s railway

    Most people assume VIA Rail runs on its own tracks. It doesn’t. VIA owns under 3% of the track it uses. CN owns about 83%, and the rest belongs to CPKC and commuter agencies like Metrolinx. So across almost its whole network, VIA is a tenant — and when a VIA passenger train and a CN freight train want the same stretch of track, the freight company that owns and controls that track decides who waits.

    <3%
    of the track it runs on is actually owned by VIA Rail
    CBC News, 2024
    ~83%
    of VIA’s tracks are owned by the freight railway CN
    CBC News, 2024
    57%
    of VIA trains arrived on time in 2022
    CBC News, 2024

    You can see the result on the timetable. In 2022, only about 57% of VIA trains arrived on time. But on the one short stretch VIA actually owns, between Ottawa and Montréal, on-time performance jumps to roughly 90%. Same country, same trains — the difference is who owns the track. That is the whole story of this brief in a single comparison.

    A quick distinction

    Three different things people call “priority”

    Arguments about rail priority get tangled because “priority” can mean three different things. Keeping them separate is the key to an honest comparison.

    1. Priority written into law

    An actual law saying which kind of train goes first. This is rare. Where it exists — in the United States — it favours passengers, not freight.

    2. A neutral referee decides

    A neutral company owns the tracks and an independent regulator hands out timetable slots by published rules. This is how Europe and Japan work. Passenger trains are protected; freight gets fair, guaranteed access — but not the whip hand.

    3. Whoever owns the track wins

    What actually happens minute-to-minute when a dispatcher chooses. On freight-owned track, freight tends to win. Canada has only this third kind — with nothing above it.

    The comparison

    How Canada stacks up against the G7

    0 of 7
    G7 countries that put freight ahead of passengers by law
    it’s a null set
    6 of 7
    protect passengers — by law, a neutral track owner, or a referee
    every G7 member except one
    1
    the number of G7 countries with none of those protections: Canada
    the outlier

    Read down the list. Every other G7 country has at least one thing standing between passengers and the commercial interests of freight — a law, a neutral owner, or an independent referee. Canada has none.

    Passengers first
    United States — Federal law has put passenger trains ahead of freight since 1973. (Freight railroads often ignore it in practice, which is why the U.S. keeps trying to enforce it — but the law is clear.)
    Passengers first
    Japan — The passenger companies own the tracks; the freight operator is the guest and pays to use them. Bullet-train lines carry no freight at all.
    Neutral referee
    United Kingdom — A neutral company owns the track and an independent regulator hands out the slots. Neither passengers nor freight can simply push the other aside.
    Neutral referee
    France — A neutral track owner and an independent regulator allocate capacity under published EU rules; express passenger trains rank at the top.
    Neutral referee
    Germany — Same European model: neutral track owner, independent regulator, no freight-over-passenger rule.
    Neutral referee
    Italy — Same European model again: neutral track owner and independent regulator.
    No protection
    Canada — No law giving passengers priority, no neutral track owner, no independent referee. Freight wins by default.

    Widening the lens beyond the G7 only makes the point sharper. Nearly every wealthy country runs on the neutral, refereed model. Switzerland is the clearest contrast: it builds its entire national timetable around passengers — freight is scheduled around passenger service, not ahead of it. The only rich country that really resembles Canada is Australia, and even there an economic regulator oversees track access, and there is almost no long-distance passenger service on the freight lines. Canada is alone in running a national passenger railway carrying millions of trips a year with none of these safeguards.

    The $1.95-billion question

    Why new trains won’t fix this

    This week’s investment is real and worthwhile. But it buys a better machine; it does nothing about the track — which is where Canada’s problem actually lives.

    What the $1.95 billion buysWhat it leaves untouched
    45 new hybrid locomotives, most assembled in Montréal, plus a new maintenance facility and about 1,200 jobs. Who owns the track. The routes these trains will run on still belong to CN and CPKC.
    A cleaner, more modern fleet to replace aging equipment on long-distance and remote routes. Who goes first. A new locomotive still pulls into the siding to let the freight train pass.
    The promise of better reliability from newer, more capable trains. The real cause of delay. On freight-owned track, punctuality is capped by freight priority — no train upgrade can override it.

    We already know how this ends, because Canada has run the experiment. The last new fleet — the Siemens Venture trains bought for the busy Québec City–Windsor corridor — is today slowed by speed restrictions CN imposes on its own track, a dispute now before the Federal Court. New trains, same track, same problem.

    There’s an irony worth noting: the new locomotives are Swiss-built. Switzerland is exactly the country whose trains run on time — because it built its whole timetable around passengers. Canada is importing the Swiss hardware without the Swiss idea. It is buying the train, not the timetable.

    The real obstacle

    This is a political choice, not a technical one

    None of this is destiny. Every tool Canada is missing already exists and is used routinely by its neighbours — and adopting any one of them would cost a tiny fraction of a single locomotive order. What is missing isn’t money or engineering. It’s political will.

    The fix has been put to Parliament again and again — and set aside every time. Since 2013, at least half a dozen bills have tried to give passengers priority or put VIA Rail on a proper legal footing:

    Defeated 2015
    Bill C-640 (and its earlier version C-614), the VIA Rail Canada Act — Philip Toone. Would have given passenger service preference over freight. Voted down.
    Died 2019
    Bill C-370, VIA Rail Canada Act — Irene Mathyssen. Never debated to a vote; died when Parliament ended.
    Never voted
    Bills C-251 and C-236, VIA Rail Canada Act — Elizabeth May, reintroduced across two Parliaments.
    Never advanced
    Bill C-371, the Rail Passenger Priority Act — Taylor Bachrach, 2023. Would have required freight to give way to passengers, with fines up to $250,000 per violation.

    The pattern is telling. Every one of these bills came from an opposition member; not one was ever taken up as government legislation; and the only one to reach a vote was voted down. The freight railways and their shippers have lobbied against each attempt — one shippers’ group dismissed passenger priority as “the tail wagging the dog” — even as VIA Rail’s own CEO has publicly asked Ottawa for exactly the U.S.-style priority these bills propose. The tools are drafted and the precedent is understood. What’s missing is a government willing to enact them.

    What would actually fix it

    Three tools — any one would help

    Canada doesn’t need to invent anything. It can pick from the same toolkit every comparable country already uses. Each of these is cheaper than a single locomotive order.

    A law that puts passengers first

    Like the United States since 1973 — a statutory right for passenger trains to go ahead of freight, with penalties for ignoring it.

    A neutral track owner

    Like the UK and the EU — so the company running the trains isn’t also the company deciding who waits.

    An independent referee

    A regulator that hands out timetable slots by published rules and can enforce on-time performance.

    The high-speed corridor project (ALTO) is, in part, a workaround for all of this — building brand-new, dedicated passenger track precisely because passengers can’t get priority on freight-owned lines. But dedicated track for one corridor doesn’t fix the national problem. The exceptionalism this brief documents is a policy choice, not a constraint — and closing it is a matter of political will, not engineering.

    Read the full brief

    The complete comparison, with sources

    The full brief works through the G7 country by country, the other high-income comparisons, the corridor evidence, and the decade of failed legislation — with every claim sourced.

    Download Full Brief
    Canada’s Rail Exceptionalism (PDF)
    Comparative analysis for policymakers, MPs, journalists, and anyone following the passenger-rail file
    Download PDF
    Sources

    Key sources

    1.
    Transport Canada, news release, “Passenger Rail Locomotive Assembly Returns to Canada Through a $1.95 Billion Government of Canada Investment,” July 29, 2026. canada.ca
    2.
    CBC News, “Feds announce almost $2B for 45 hybrid battery-diesel Via Rail passenger locomotives,” July 29, 2026. CBC News
    3.
    CBC News, “Work’s chugging along to try to prioritize people over freight on Canada’s rail lines,” December 23, 2023 — source for VIA owning under 3% of its track, CN owning about 83%, and 57% on-time performance in 2022. CBC News
    4.
    The Canadian Press, November 26, 2024 — on VIA’s application to the Canadian Transportation Agency and CN’s freight prioritization as the leading cause of VIA delay, with the Montréal–Toronto scheduled time lengthening to 5 h 33 m.
    5.
    Railway Age, November 2022 — noting that, unlike Amtrak, VIA Rail holds no government-mandated priority over freight.
    6.
    United States: 49 U.S.C. §24308(c), the statutory passenger preference originating in the Amtrak Improvement Act of 1973.
    7.
    European Union: Directive 2012/34/EU establishing a single European railway area (neutral infrastructure managers and independent regulators).
    8.
    Passenger-priority bills in Parliament — Bill C-640 / C-614 (Philip Toone), defeated 2015; Bill C-370 (Irene Mathyssen), 2017; Bills C-251 / C-236 (Elizabeth May); Bill C-371, the Rail Passenger Priority Act (Taylor Bachrach), 2023. parl.ca   openparliament.ca
    9.
    Transport Action Canada, “Taylor Bachrach Proposes Rail Passenger Priority Act,” and coverage in Trains (February 2, 2024), including VIA CEO Mario Péloquin’s call for Amtrak-style priority and freight-sector opposition. transportaction.ca
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  Comparative Brief  ·  July 2026
    Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high-speed rail corridor.

  • A deal that lost its other half

    The Billy Bishop Reversal
    A Deal That Lost Its Other Half

    Reporting says Ontario agreed to go along with ALTO in exchange for the Billy Bishop airport expansion. Ottawa has now pulled back from the airport — so if that account is right, what is holding up the province’s side?

    The short version

    A newspaper report describes an informal trade behind the scenes: the province would support the ALTO high-speed rail line, and in return Ottawa would let Billy Bishop airport expand. Ottawa has now pulled back from the airport. If the report is right, the reason Ontario was cooperating with ALTO has just disappeared — and that matters for every community along the route.

    What the reporting says

    In late July 2026, the Toronto Star reported that Ottawa’s decision to drop the Billy Bishop airport expansion was tied to a behind-the-scenes understanding: the province would go along with ALTO, and in exchange the airport expansion would proceed. One source put it plainly — “It’s Billy Bishop for Alto, that was always the understanding.”1 The paper reported the Premier and Prime Minister had even shaken hands on it. It also noted that the high-speed line — a 300 km/h train cutting through farmland in rural Ontario — has always been a hard sell to the province’s own members whose ridings it crosses.

    A private handshake can’t be independently confirmed, and the account rests on unnamed sources. But it was reported in detail, and it fits how difficult the corridor has been for the province to defend.

    What changed

    Ottawa has now pulled back from the airport expansion. In his July 24 statement, the Minister of Transport said the government’s focus is now only on the already-approved safety work, that Toronto voices would shape any future plans, and that it would not pursue anything that harms treasured public spaces, raises noise, damages the environment, or blocks housing — the effects opponents of the expansion had raised.2 The government cited more than 87,000 public responses;2 the Toronto Star reported that about 87 per cent were opposed.1 Some call the decision a cancellation, others a pause1 — but either way, the province is left holding, at best, a promise that has been put on hold. Whatever it was reportedly getting in return for supporting ALTO is, for now, gone.

    Why this matters for the corridor

    ALTO’s Ontario stretch can’t be built by the federal government on its own. It needs the province and local municipalities to cooperate on the hard, unglamorous parts: assembling land, approving where the line crosses roads, relocating utilities, and separating the tracks from local traffic. If that cooperation was really a trade — support given in exchange for the airport — then taking the airport away removes the reason for the support. That uncertainty lands squarely on the towns, farms, and landowners in the train’s path, who still don’t know whether or how the project moves ahead.

    One standard, for everyone

    Ottawa reconsidered the airport by listening: it counted the public responses, weighed the opposition, and set conditions rather than pressing ahead. Yet the same July 24 statement reaffirmed ALTO as part of the government’s integrated plan for the Greater Toronto Area, alongside the Pearson expansion.2 One waterfront project was reshaped by public feedback; the far larger rail project was restated in the same document without reference to any. Communities along the ALTO route raised their objections too, through the project’s own consultation, which closed on 24 April 2026. No comparable count of responses received, or of concerns raised, has been published for that consultation. If 87,000 responses were enough to change course on one waterfront project, the people who live along a much larger one are entitled to know how their objections are being weighed.

    Questions worth asking

    • Does Ontario still support ALTO now that the thing it was reportedly promised is off the table?
    • If the province’s support was tied to the airport, what is it tied to now?
    • Will the communities along the corridor get the same fair hearing that stopped the airport expansion?

    None of this is about one political party. Unease with ALTO crosses party lines. The Star reports the line has been a hard sell to the province’s own members whose ridings it crosses. This is a straightforward question of accountability: if the reported understanding was what it appeared to be, one public decision has knocked a leg out from under another, and the people in the corridor’s path deserve to know where that leaves them.

    How to read this page

    The trade described here is reported by the Toronto Star on unnamed sources. Neither government has confirmed it, and this page does not treat it as established. Everything that follows from it is written conditionally, because that is all the evidence supports.

    Everything else is quoted from the two named sources below and can be checked there: the Minister’s 24 July statement and its conditions, the figure of more than 87,000 responses, the reported 87 per cent opposition, and the reaffirmation of ALTO in the same statement. Where something has not been published, this page says so rather than inferring it, and makes no claim about anyone’s motives.

    Sources

    1. 1Robert Benzie, Ryan Tumilty and Mark Ramzy, “‘Disappointed’ Doug Ford spoke privately with Mark Carney after decision blocking Billy Bishop expansion,” Toronto Star, July 27, 2026.
    2. 2Hon. Steven MacKinnon, Minister of Transport, Statement on Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, July 24, 2026.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor citizenresearch.ca

  • Would an Alto stop help kingston

    Would an ALTO Stop Help Kingston?

    Kingston has one of the busiest stations on the network. The question that matters is not whether it gets a stop, but whether a stop would leave more people riding the train, or fewer.

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Policy Brief · July 2026
    ⚠ What has been said, and what has not been published

    On 22 July 2026 ALTO’s chief executive, Martin Imbleau, told CBC Radio’s Ottawa Morning that Kingston will probably get a station, and that most ALTO trains would pass through without stopping.1 Neither the timetable nor the location of the station has been published.

    Those two missing facts are exactly the ones that decide the outcome. This brief therefore tests the range: today’s railway, a faster conventional railway using the existing station, and ALTO with a station either inside the city or a twenty‑seven‑minute drive north of it, at normal fares and at fares 25 per cent higher. Every number that goes into the model is listed, so any of them can be argued with.

    The short answer

    Of the options tested, only one leaves Kingston with more rail trips than it has today: a faster conventional railway serving the existing station, at about 12 per cent more. The best ALTO case — a station inside the city, at normal fares — roughly matches today. Every other ALTO case comes out below today’s service, by 8 to 17 per cent.

    The reason is simple. Speed is only one part of what makes a train trip worth taking. ALTO’s faster run to Toronto is worth about 10 per cent more trips on its own. But cutting the number of daily stops from eighteen to eight gives that back. Charging 25 per cent more gives it back again. Moving the station twenty‑seven minutes north of the city costs another 6 to 8 points on top.

    Running more trains cannot rescue it by itself. Even at eighteen stops a day, matching what Kingston has now, an out‑of‑town station at a premium fare still comes out around 9 per cent below today. And about 8 per cent of Kingston’s trips — Belleville, Brockville, Cobourg, Napanee, Oshawa — have no ALTO equivalent at any frequency, because high‑speed trains do not stop at those places.

    Download
    Kingston’s ALTO Ridership Analysis — Full Brief (PDF)
    Full method, all parameters, sensitivity ranges and break‑even tables
    Download PDF
    The Comparison

    Six versions of Kingston’s railway

    The table below is the whole brief in one place. The first row is what Kingston has today. The second is a faster conventional railway from the same station. The last four are ALTO, differing only in where the station sits and what the ticket costs.

    +12%
    faster conventional railway, existing station, same number of trains, normal fares
    the only option that grows ridership
    0%
    best ALTO case: station in town, normal fares, eight stops a day
    matches today, does not beat it
    −17%
    ALTO station 27 minutes north, eight stops a day, fares 25% higher
    central case for an out‑of‑town station

    Table 1 · Headline comparison

    OptionTo TorontoStops a dayFare premiumAnnual tripsChange
    Today’s service135 min18none450,000—
    Faster conventional railway, existing station95 min18none502,000+12%
    ALTO, station in town80 min8none449,0000%
    ALTO, station in town80 min8+25%403,000−10%
    ALTO, 27 min north80 min8none416,000−8%
    ALTO, 27 min north80 min8+25%376,000−17%

    All four ALTO rows assume eight stops a day and that today’s conventional service is withdrawn. They differ only in where the station is and what the ticket costs. No fare structure for intermediate stations has been published, so both possibilities are shown rather than assumed. The faster conventional railway is the 240 km/h new‑build line proposed under the High Performance Rail framework, serving the existing station.

    Starting Point

    Why Kingston already rides the train

    Kingston’s place among the busiest stations on the network gets cited as the reason it should have a high‑speed stop. But what produces that ridership decides whether a different kind of station would reproduce it. Four things do most of the work, and a high‑speed alignment north of the city removes two of them.

    It gets two sets of trains, not one

    Kingston sits halfway along the Toronto–Montréal mainline, and the Toronto–Ottawa trains use the same track as far as Brockville. So Kingston collects two timetables instead of one, and ends up with a level of service beaten only by the three biggest cities on the corridor. Frequency matters to ridership on its own, quite apart from speed: in intercity rail, a 10 per cent increase in service typically brings 4 to 7 per cent more trips.

    The station serves a region, not a city

    Napanee, Gananoque, Amherstview and the western Thousand Islands have no intercity rail of their own, so people drive to Kingston to catch the train. Ridership credited to a city of 132,485 is actually generated by an area several times larger; the Kingston census metropolitan area is 172,546.6

    The population is unusually inclined to take the train

    Some thirty‑nine thousand post‑secondary students study in a city of 132,485: Queen’s enrols 32,585, St. Lawrence College about 4,000 full‑time equivalents at its Kingston campus, and the Royal Military College of Canada 2,418.5 That is about twenty‑nine students for every hundred residents — against roughly twenty‑three in Sherbrooke and twenty‑one in Guelph, the two Canadian cities most often set beside Kingston on this measure.7 Many come from the Toronto and Ottawa regions and travel without a car. Kingston also has a large retired population, for whom avoiding the highway is the point of the trip, and an unusually high share of hospital, university, military and public‑sector jobs where travel is expensed and defaults to rail.

    But that ridership is hard to charge a premium for

    This travel is not spread evenly. It piles up at term boundaries, Thursday and Sunday afternoons, reading weeks and holidays, and it creates a matching flow of families travelling to Kingston. These are the travellers most sensitive to how often trains run and how far the station is from where they are going, and the least able to just drive instead. They are also the least profitable: peaked, price‑sensitive, and largely outside the weekday business hours a high‑speed operation’s revenue depends on.

    Two things worth being clear about

    The ridership figure itself is not published. Kingston’s standing as one of the busiest stations rests on statements by the operator and the Minister, not on released station‑level data. That is the first item on the list of things that should be published, at the end of this brief.

    Existing demand is not the same as new demand. Busy today proves Kingston already travels by train. It does not prove that a different station would generate additional trips. Only new trips add ridership to the corridor.

    There is also no flight from Kingston to Toronto. Elsewhere, high‑speed rail wins its premium passengers off aircraft. In Kingston those passengers are already on the train, so there is nobody to convert. Extra trips can only come out of cars, or be created from nothing.

    Both of the things that built Kingston’s ridership — frequent trains, and a station within the city, roughly ten minutes from the core and the university — are the two things a high‑speed alignment north of the city takes away. That is what the model is built to test.

    Method

    How the numbers were worked out

    Every trip is priced in minutes. Add up the time on the train, the time getting to and from the station at each end, the waiting created by having fewer trains, and the fare converted into minutes using what an hour is worth to that kind of traveller. Time spent driving to a station or standing on a platform counts for more than time sitting on a moving train, because people dislike it more. Journeys that involve changing trains carry an allowance for the change. That matters for one market in particular: ALTO reaches Montréal from Kingston by way of Ottawa, so some of those journeys involve a change, where a direct lakeshore railway does not.

    That total is the real cost of the trip. If it goes up, fewer people travel. If it goes down, more do. The response used here is roughly one for one: make the total 10 per cent better and you get about 10 per cent more trips.

    Travellers are split into four destinations and four types, each divided by whether they have a car available: thirty‑two groups, each worked out separately and then added up. That matters because a student without a car and an expensed public‑sector traveller react to a distant station in completely different ways.

    Table 2 · Everything the model assumes

    InputValue used
    Trips today450,000 a year through the station (tested from 400,000 to 550,000)
    Where people goToronto 58%, Ottawa 22%, Montréal 12%, other corridor stations 8%
    Who travelsStudents 30%, seniors and leisure 25%, public sector 20%, other 25%
    Share without a carStudents 85%, seniors and leisure 50%, public sector 15%, other 20%
    Worth of an hour$14, $20, $48 and $24 respectively, in the same order
    Time on the trainToday 135 / 120 / 160 min; ALTO 80 / 45 / 105 min (Toronto / Ottawa / Montréal)
    Getting to the stationExisting station 10 min by car, 20 by transit; ALTO 27 by car, 35 by shuttle
    How that time is weighted1.5 times if a car is available, 2.0 times if not
    WaitingHalf the gap between trains, weighted at 0.5, across a fifteen‑hour day
    ALTO fare premium25% in the central case; 0% and 40% also tested
    Sensitivity of demandOne for one in the central case (tested from 0.8 to 1.2)

    Far‑end access time is held identical in every scenario, which is a conservative choice: it gives ALTO the benefit of the doubt at the Toronto and Ottawa ends.

    Two possible futures for today’s trains

    Every service level is tested twice, because the answer depends less on ALTO than on what happens to the service Kingston already has.

    Replacement

    ALTO becomes Kingston’s rail service to Toronto, Ottawa and Montréal, and conventional service is withdrawn or cut below a useful level. Trips to Belleville, Brockville, Cobourg, Napanee and Oshawa lose their train altogether.

    Both together

    Today’s service keeps running at present frequency and ALTO is added on top. Travellers pick whichever is cheaper in total, and only the improvement over the better of the two creates new trips.

    What is assumed rather than known

    Four inputs are estimates, not published data: the number of trips today, where those trips go, ALTO’s journey times (the alignment for this stretch has not been published), and where the station would be. All four appear on the list at the end of this brief. The model also applies a constant response to a very large change in trip cost, which is at the outer edge of where this method behaves well. The direction of the results is solid. The exact sizes are indicative.

    Result One

    Where the speed gain goes

    Start with today’s service and change one thing at a time. This is the clearest way to see why a faster train can still end up with fewer passengers.

    Table 3 · One change at a time

    StepAnnual tripsChangeEffect of this step
    Today’s service, as it runs450,000——
    Cut the Toronto run to 80 minutes, change nothing else496,000+10%+10 pts
    Cut stops from 18 a day to 8449,0000%−10 pts
    Add a 25 per cent fare premium403,000−10%−10 pts
    Move the station 27 minutes north376,000−17%−6 pts

    The second row is the entire value of high‑speed running time at Kingston: about 10 per cent. Each of the three things that come with it takes back as much or more. This calculation already leaves out trips to other corridor stations, which a high‑speed line cannot serve at any frequency.

    Result Two

    More trains cannot fix it on its own

    Suppose the number of stops is the thing that gets negotiated. Hold the station twenty‑seven minutes north and the fare 25 per cent higher, and vary how often ALTO calls.

    Table 4 · ALTO at a station 27 minutes north

    Stops a dayAnnual tripsChangeRangeIf today’s trains stay
    6359,000−20%−17% to −24%0%
    8376,000−17%−13% to −21%0%
    10387,000−14%−10% to −18%+0.2%
    18408,000−9%−4% to −14%+1.6%
    12 (six each way)394,000−12%−9% to −17%+0.5%
    16 (eight each way)404,000−10%−6% to −15%+1.3%
    20 (ten each way)411,000−9%−3% to −14%+1.9%

    The range covers the whole plausible span of the model’s assumptions, at a 25 per cent fare premium. The bottom three rows read six, eight and ten as stops each way, which is the most generous reading available. It improves the result without changing the sign. The last column is the “both together” case, where today’s service survives: ALTO then adds almost nothing, because travellers only switch when it is genuinely better for them.

    The fare premium matters more than the timetable

    Table 5 · What moves the answer

    Stops a dayNormal faresFares +25%Fares +40%Station 25 min outStation 45 min out
    6−12%−20%−24%−17%−23%
    8−8%−17%−21%−13%−20%
    10−5%−14%−19%−10%−17%

    The last two columns hold the fare premium at 25 per cent and vary the drive from the station to downtown; the central case is 27 minutes. Notice that going from normal fares to a 25 per cent premium costs more than doubling the distance to the station.

    How many trains would it actually take?

    The more useful question is what it would take for an out‑of‑town ALTO station to be no worse for Kingston than the service it already has. At normal fares the answer is nine stops a day for everyone. At a 25 per cent premium, the answer falls apart.

    Table 6 · Daily stops needed just to match today, Toronto trips

    Who is travellingAt normal faresAt a 25% premium
    Public sector and institutional (expensed)913
    Other business and leisure927
    Seniors, leisure, visiting family948
    Students and young adults9no number works

    Forty‑eight stops a day is a train every twenty minutes all day. For students, no frequency at all makes up for a distant station plus a premium ticket, because their time is worth less than the fare increase costs them.

    One case runs the other way and should be said plainly: expensed public‑sector travel between Kingston and Ottawa is better off under ALTO in every scenario tested, because today’s service on that pair is slow and indirect. It is a real gain, and it is a small share of the total.

    Under the friendliest assumptions available — normal fares, a station twenty‑five minutes out, today’s trains kept running alongside, ten stops a day — the best figure the model will produce for an out‑of‑town Kingston station is about +8 per cent. Getting there means giving up the premium pricing the revenue case depends on everywhere else.

    Result Three

    What if you just made today’s trains faster?

    Now reverse the test. Keep the existing station, keep eighteen stops a day, keep normal fares, and change nothing but speed on the existing route.

    Table 7 · Speed alone, from the existing station

    Toronto journey timeTime savedAnnual tripsChange
    135 min, as it runs today—450,000—
    118 min, reliable 160 to 177 km/h13%471,000+4.6%
    95 min, a 240 km/h conventional railway30%502,000+11.6%
    80 min, upper bound for this station41%525,000+16.6%

    The last row applies high‑speed running time to the existing station. It is there to separate speed from station location, frequency and fare, not as a proposal.

    The comparison that matters

    Eighty minutes to Toronto from the existing station, eighteen stops a day, normal fares: about +17 per cent. The same eighty minutes from a station twenty‑seven minutes out of town, eight stops a day, fares 25 per cent higher: about −17 per cent.

    The time on the train is identical. The two outcomes are thirty‑four points apart, and every one of those points is station location, frequency and fare.

    Speed gives diminishing returns

    Roughly speaking, every 1 per cent cut in journey time buys about 0.4 per cent more trips. A 30 per cent time saving buys about 12 per cent more passengers. For most of Kingston’s travellers, time on the train is a minority of what the trip really costs them — fare, getting to the station and waiting make up the rest, and speed does nothing about any of those. The gain concentrates where an hour is worth most: on a 95‑minute conventional railway, public‑sector travel grows about 17 per cent, business and leisure 13, seniors and leisure 12, students 10.

    A conservative figure, and a warning

    These figures are cautious. The response to journey time implied here is weaker than the rail literature usually finds, because the fare term in the calculation dampens it. Using a more standard figure, the same 30 per cent time saving would give about +22 per cent rather than +12. Table 7 should be read as a floor, with the 95‑minute case plausibly worth anywhere from +10 to +25 per cent. The comparisons earlier in the brief are unaffected, because they compare like with like.

    The warning is that fares erode the gain fast in either direction. Raising tickets 10 per cent to help pay for an upgrade cuts the benefit from about +12 per cent to about +7 — two‑fifths of the speed gain eaten by a 10 per cent fare rise. That is the same mechanism that sinks the high‑speed cases, working here on the alternative. It is an argument for funding an upgrade from capital rather than from the farebox.

    What It Means

    A stop is not the same as service

    Three things set whether Kingston gains or loses, and speed is not one of them: how far the station is from where people are actually going, what the ticket costs, and whether today’s trains survive. Frequency cannot rescue the result on its own. At eighteen stops a day, matching today, an out‑of‑town station at a premium fare still comes out around 9 per cent down.

    A public debate about whether Kingston gets a station, and how many trains stop there, is a debate about the wrong variables.

    The two things ALTO has said do not fit together

    A station justified by strong ridership, but served by a minority of trains, has its timetable set by the express service rather than by the demand used to justify it. Table 6 shows why that is not a workable compromise: the frequency needed to make the station work at a premium fare is far above what an express pattern tolerates. The usual international answer is two tiers, express and semi‑fast, which needs somewhere for fast trains to overtake at the intermediate station. Whether the cost estimate includes that overtaking capacity is a question with two possible answers, and both are informative.

    A conventional railway does better here

    A new conventional railway built for 240 km/h, running typically at 200, serves Kingston without moving the station, without the fare premium high‑speed operation needs, and without cutting the number of trains that stop. It captures a smaller share of the theoretical time saving and a larger share of the ridership. That is the trade the tables above quantify.

    What Would Change the Answer

    Three commitments, and four documents

    None of this is a prediction that a Kingston station must fail. The results turn on assumptions, and those assumptions are all things the project could settle.

    Would help
    A station much closer to the core, or a frequent connection to it that is committed and timed to the trains rather than hoped for.
    Would help most
    Normal fares on Kingston journeys. Table 6 shows this is the single decisive variable. A premium fare is what makes the arithmetic unrecoverable for students, seniors and leisure travellers.
    Would help
    A binding commitment that service on the existing line is maintained, which turns the replacement case into the both‑together case, plus a published timetable, so frequency becomes a fact instead of an assumption.

    Four things that should be published

    Before any of these figures are treated as more than an order of magnitude, four inputs should be replaced with real data:

    Not published
    Station‑level boardings and destinations. This alone would settle both the number of trips today and where they go. A matter for the operator.
    Not published
    The calling pattern assumed for the Toronto–Ottawa segment — how many trains actually stop, and where.
    Not published
    The fare structure for intermediate stations. On the evidence above, this matters more than anything else on the list.
    Not published
    The station location, with the assumed travel time from it to downtown Kingston.

    The first sits with the operator. The other three sit with the project and its joint project office, whose report and business case remain unpublished.

    The finding that matters

    It is not that a Kingston station would fail. It is that the service Kingston already has is the benchmark the project has never been asked to beat — and on the assumptions set out here, it does not beat it.

    How to read the numbers on this page

    Every number here other than the two quoted statements is output from our own model, built on the parameters listed in the full brief. Those parameters are assumptions, not measurements, and the four listed above as needing publication are the ones that move the result. The model is set out so that any parameter can be replaced and the arithmetic re-run: the direction of the findings holds across the ranges tested, the exact magnitudes are indicative.

    Where ALTO has not published something — a timetable, a station location, a fare — we say so rather than inferring it, and we make no claim about why it has not been published.

    Sources
    1.
    CBC News, “Kingston probably getting high-speed rail stop, says Alto CEO,” 22 July 2026 — interview with Martin Imbleau on CBC Radio’s Ottawa Morning. He says Kingston will probably receive a station, citing ridership, and that most ALTO trains would pass through without stopping, along with Laval and Trois-Rivières, to preserve express service between the larger cities. cbc.ca
    2.
    City of Kingston, Council Meeting Minutes 2026-06, 17 February 2026, Resolution 2026-73, carried as amended 9–2 — support for a southern route contingent on Highway 401 corridor development and on a stop being added in Kingston, as close to the urban core as possible. Examined in the companion brief Which Trains Stop in Kingston?
    3.
    Elasticity ranges: intercity frequency elasticities of +0.4 to +0.7 and journey-time elasticities of −0.6 to −0.9 are the conventional ranges in the rail demand literature, used here as reference values rather than as findings of this brief. The generalised-cost elasticity of −1.0 central, banded −0.8 to −1.2, is our own choice and is tested across that band throughout.
    4.
    Current journey times are as timetabled by VIA Rail. ALTO journey times are our assumption, since no alignment has been published for the Toronto–Ottawa segment.
    5.
    Queen’s University, 2025–26 Enrolment Report, as at 1 November 2025 — 28,561 full-time students, plus 1,704 part-time undergraduate, 1,389 part-time graduate and 931 online undergraduate, giving 32,585 in total. St. Lawrence College reports about 4,000 full-time equivalents at its Kingston campus. Royal Military College of Canada: 1,209 full-time and 587 part-time undergraduate, 276 full-time and 346 part-time graduate students, giving 2,418 in total. RMC’s part-time and graduate enrolment includes serving officers studying at a distance, so it is counted here on the same all-enrolment basis as Queen’s rather than as a resident population; on full-time enrolment alone the city total is about 38,000, and the ratio is about twenty-nine per hundred either way. macleans.ca queensu.ca (PDF)
    6.
    Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population — City of Kingston (census subdivision) 132,485; Kingston census metropolitan area 172,546, comprising the City of Kingston, South Frontenac, Frontenac Islands and Loyalist Township. statcan.gc.ca
    7.
    Comparators, on the same all-institutions basis where the data allow. Sherbrooke: about 40,000 students across eight institutions in a city of 172,950, roughly twenty-three per hundred residents. Guelph: 29,617 full-time equivalents at the University of Guelph in a city of 143,740, roughly twenty-one per hundred — a figure that excludes the Conestoga College campus and is therefore a floor. ocul.on.ca
    Download Full Brief
    Kingston’s ALTO Ridership Analysis (PDF)
    Full method, all thirty‑two market segments, sensitivity bands and break‑even calculations
    Download PDF
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  Policy Brief  ·  July 2026
    Independent, non‑partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high‑speed rail corridor.

  • Which trains stop in kingston

    Which Trains Stop in Kingston?

    A probable station, an unpublished route, and the conditions Kingston City Council actually set.

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Policy Brief · Published July 2026
    ⚠ New Statement: ALTO CEO on a Kingston Stop

    On 22 July 2026, ALTO chief executive Martin Imbleau told CBC Radio’s Ottawa Morning that Kingston will probably receive a station, citing demand — It’s doable, the ridership is very strong — because Kingston is a large community. In the same interview he said that most ALTO trains would pass through Kingston without stopping, along with Laval and Trois-Rivières, in order to preserve express service between the larger cities. CBC News

    No alignment has been published for the segment that would carry the station. ALTO has said the Montréal–Ottawa route goes to public feedback this autumn, with the Toronto–Ottawa segment — the one containing Kingston — to follow.

    Critical Finding

    The two statements cannot both carry the weight assigned to them. If Kingston’s demand justifies building a station, it justifies serving it; if the timetable cannot absorb the stop, something other than the ridership case is driving the decision. But the more consequential question is not whether Kingston receives a platform. It is how many useful trains Kingston has the day the line opens, counting both operators — and on that question the announcement is silent.

    Kingston City Council’s support is not unconditional and never was. Resolution 2026-73, adopted 17 February 2026 by a vote of 9–2, makes support for a southern route contingent upon development along the Highway 401 corridor around the South Frontenac and Kingston region and on a new stop being added in Kingston. It further asks that the route and stop sit as close to the urban core as possible, and resolves that if there is no station in Kingston, council formally opposes the southern route. Of these, the 22 July statement addresses one, provisionally. The 401 contingency and the urban-core request are not addressed at all.

    Meanwhile the service Kingston already has is exposed from the other direction. Transport Canada’s 2025–26 estimates record funding to support the planning and eventual transfer of VIA Rail’s Québec City–Windsor corridor operations to the private partner. More than 80 per cent of VIA Rail’s revenue comes from that corridor. A station served by a minority of ALTO trains, combined with a thinned conventional service on the existing line, can leave Kingston with fewer useful daily trains than it has today.

    The Arithmetic

    What an intermediate stop costs at 300 km/h

    A station call on a high-speed line is expensive in a way that is easy to underestimate. The train must decelerate from line speed, dwell at the platform, and accelerate back to line speed. On comparable systems the round-trip cost of a single intermediate stop is on the order of four to six minutes, before any allowance for the slower alignment geometry often required to reach a city-centre location.

    That penalty falls on every through passenger, on every train that stops. Because the project’s commercial proposition is journey time between the anchor cities, the timetable resolves the conflict in the predictable direction: the stop is retained, and most services are routed past it. This is what the chief executive described on 22 July, and it is a rational operating decision given the design speed.

    What it does not resolve is the capital exposure. The station, its platforms and approach works, and whatever alignment concession is required to bring the corridor within reach of Kingston are paid for in full, irrespective of how many trains call. A station served by a minority of services carries close to the full cost of one served by all of them while delivering a fraction of the utility. The frequency a passenger actually experiences — not the presence of a platform — determines whether a station changes travel behaviour.

    This is not an argument that Kingston should be excluded. It is an argument that a stop and a useful service are different commitments, and that only the first has been signalled.

    The Municipal Record

    What Kingston City Council actually resolved

    9–2
    council vote adopting Resolution 2026-73, as amended
    17 February 2026, meeting 2026-06
    33
    weekly Kingston stops the deferred VIA express pilot would have removed
    September 2025 proposal
    2029
    end of the development phase, after which the federal government decides whether to proceed
    ALTO briefing to council, February 2026

    In March 2025, on a motion from the mayor, Kingston City Council voted unanimously to withdraw its support for ALTO. The stated grievance was the change from VIA Rail’s earlier High Frequency Rail proposal, under which Kingston was to have been a regional hub.

    On 17 February 2026, council reversed that position. Senior ALTO representatives briefed council that evening, immediately before the vote. Eight delegations spoke to the motion — among them Queen’s University, Kingston Health Sciences Centre, the Downtown Kingston Business Improvement Area, Kingston Accommodation Partners and the Corridor Train Alliance; the minutes record none opposed. A motion to defer consideration to the March meeting was lost 3–8. Resolution 2026-73 then carried as amended, 9–2, with Councillors Glenn and McLaren opposed.

    The adopted text is more specific than the public discussion of it has generally been. Its four operative clauses:

    Clause 1 — the request

    Calls on the federal Minister of Transport to enhance ALTO’s mandate to include the addition of a Kingston stop on the proposed ALTO High-Speed Rail Southern Route between Peterborough and Ottawa.

    Clause 2 — the contingency

    Expresses support for a southern route contingent upon development along the Highway 401 corridor around the South Frontenac and Kingston region, and provided there is a new stop added that is in Kingston.

    Clause 3 — the location request

    Requests that the southern route and planned stop be located as close to the urban core of the city as possible.

    Clause 4 — the trigger

    Resolves that if there is no station in Kingston, council formally opposes the creation of the ALTO southern route as one that would bypass Kingston and offer no benefit to the city or Eastern Ontario.

    Clauses 1 and 2 do not describe the same corridor. The first asks the Minister to add a stop to the proposed southern route — the alignment already on the table, which despite its name still passes north of the city, and on which a station would sit roughly 25 to 30 minutes by road from downtown Kingston. The second makes support conditional on a Highway 401 alignment. The 401 contingency entered by amendment (carried 8–3); a second amendment (10–1) softened clause 2’s endorsement of the existing route, and left clause 1 as drafted.

    The word “southern” has caused some confusion locally. It describes a route that is southern relative to the Havelock alignment through Peterborough — not one that approaches the lakeshore or the existing rail corridor through Kingston. The practical question for the city is therefore not downtown versus not-downtown. It is whether a Kingston station would be co-located with the existing VIA Rail station, inside the city and inside the existing network, or built new on the far side of it.

    That is the inconsistency the two dissenting councillors identified on the night. Their objection was that language open to interpretation would be interpreted by others, and that Kingston risked breaking faith with South Frontenac Township — whose own council had days earlier opposed the line through the township and backed a route through Kingston instead.

    “The details do still matter.”Councillor Conny Glenn, on the February motion — reported in The Kingston Whig-Standard, 18 February 2026

    Five months later, ALTO can satisfy clause 1 without satisfying clause 2. A probable stop on the existing proposed southern alignment answers the request while leaving the contingency untouched — and nothing said on 22 July distinguishes between them.

    What Resolution 2026-73 conditions support onWhat the 22 July statement provides
    A new stop in Kingston (clauses 1, 2 and 4). Absent one, council formally opposes the southern route. A station described as probable, three years ahead of the federal decision on whether the project proceeds at all.
    Status Signalled, not committed
    Development along the Highway 401 corridor around the South Frontenac and Kingston region (clause 2) — the express contingency on which support rests. Not addressed. The Toronto–Ottawa segment is third in ALTO’s publication queue and has not been released for feedback.
    Status Not addressed
    Route and stop as close to the urban core as possible (clause 3). Not addressed. On the currently proposed southern alignment, which passes north of the city, a station would sit some 25 to 30 minutes by road from downtown and outside the existing rail network.
    Status Not addressed
    Service levels. Not addressed in the resolution, though its recitals rest on Kingston’s established rail demand and on a stop enabling meaningful shifts from passenger vehicles. Most trains would pass through without stopping. No daily calling frequency has been stated.
    Status Unstated on both sides

    The resolution was circulated to the Prime Minister, the Minister of Transport, ALTO’s chief executive, area MPs and MPPs, the Mayor of South Frontenac, and the Eastern Ontario Mayors’ and Wardens’ Caucuses. Its conditions are on the record with every party who would need to honour them.

    The Other Half of the Equation

    A new station is a gain only if the service Kingston has survives

    Transport Canada’s 2025–26 estimates record funding to VIA Rail to support the planning and eventual transfer of its Québec City–Windsor corridor passenger services to the private partner. That transfer is stated federal intent, not conjecture. More than 80 per cent of VIA Rail’s revenue and more than 90 per cent of its passengers are in that corridor.

    The consequence for Kingston follows directly from ALTO’s own numbers. The project’s ridership forecast depends substantially on diverting existing corridor rail passengers — travellers who, by definition, stop buying VIA tickets. The economics of the Kingston Subdivision would then rest on intermediate-point traffic alone, having lost the end-to-end market that carries them. Either frequencies fall, or subsidy rises, or both. This is an observation about the project’s arithmetic, not an accusation about anyone’s intentions.

    The commercial logic has already been demonstrated once

    In September 2025, VIA Rail announced a pilot running four daily trains non-stop between Montréal and Toronto, bypassing intermediate Eastern Ontario communities. For Kingston it would have removed 33 weekly stops and the first five morning departures, leaving an 11 a.m. first eastbound train and making same-day travel impractical. Kingston, Belleville and Napanee councils passed motions opposing it. It was postponed on operational constraints with CN — not withdrawn — and VIA stated it would continue pursuing direct Montréal–Toronto service.

    The same reasoning, ten months later, from the other operator

    What ALTO’s chief executive described on 22 July is the same commercial logic, applied to the same city, by operators whose corridor business is slated to converge under the transfer. Kingston’s downside case is not speculative. It was tabled ten months ago, quantified, and shelved rather than abandoned.

    The arithmetic Kingston should be doing is net

    A platform served by a minority of ALTO services, combined with a thinned conventional service on the existing line, can leave the city with fewer useful trains than it has today — while being announced as a gain. No party is presently negotiating the second half of that equation, and Resolution 2026-73 does not address it.

    The View From a Supporter of the Project

    A long-standing advocate for high-speed rail reaches the same conclusions

    On 15 July 2026, Transport Action Canada wrote to the Minister of Transport about the Kingston alignment; the letter was published by the organisation’s Ontario division on 22 July — the same day as the chief executive’s remarks. Transport Action Canada describes a decades-long record of advocating for high-speed rail in this corridor and welcomed the federal commitment to build it. Its letter is not an objection to the project. It is a warning about how this station is being contemplated, and its lead condition is that any ALTO stop in Kingston be co-located with the existing VIA Rail station.

    Access time cancels the time saving

    Transport Action Canada’s position is that any Kingston station must be co-located with, and fully integrated into, the existing VIA Rail network. Sited instead on ALTO’s currently proposed southern alignment — which they put at approximately 25 to 30 minutes by road from downtown Kingston — it would, in their assessment, likely fail to generate the anticipated ridership and modal shift, because the time spent reaching the station negates the journey-time advantage the line exists to deliver.

    The net effect on both operators

    The same letter states that such a station would divert passengers from VIA Rail, reducing ridership on existing services and increasing VIA Rail’s operating subsidy requirements — what the organisation calls a lose-lose scenario for both services. This is the net-frequency problem set out above, reached independently by an organisation that wants the project delivered.

    Existing corridors before new right-of-way

    The letter closes on the alignment question directly: of the two existing rights-of-way between Montréal and Toronto, one remains largely suitable for high-speed operation while the other could accommodate redirected freight if track capacity were restored. Every opportunity to use existing corridors, it argues, should be explored before undertaking the cost and disruption of an entirely new right-of-way. The letter also notes that the economic rationale and business case for the selected project — including the long-promised Joint Project Office report — have still not been published.

    Read alongside Resolution 2026-73, the letter sharpens what Kingston should be asking for. Council’s condition was a station; the more exacting question is which station — one that joins the network the city already uses, or one that starts a second, thinner network beside it.

    The Design Question Underneath

    “We cannot stop in all the communities” is a choice, not a constraint

    Asked about a possible stop at Smiths Falls, ALTO’s chief executive said VIA Rail remains an option for smaller communities, and that the project cannot serve every community if it is to remain fast and economical.

    The first half of that answer describes a two-tier corridor whose lower tier has no identified funder, no committed frequency, and no infrastructure pathway. The communities on that lower tier — Oshawa, Cobourg, Port Hope, Trenton Junction, Belleville, Napanee, Kingston, Gananoque, Brockville, Cornwall, Dorval — have, with one exception, no viable airport. For most, conventional rail is the only intercity connection to healthcare, post-secondary institutions and economic centres.

    The second half is presented as a constraint of physics. It is better understood as a consequence of a design choice. The number of communities a corridor can serve is a function of its design speed: the higher the speed, the more costly each stop becomes in schedule terms, and the fewer stops the business case will tolerate. A 300 km/h line is committed to skipping intermediate cities. A 200 km/h line is not.

    That is the case for High Performance Passenger Rail as an alternative approach — a lower design speed permitting intermediate communities to be served on the fast network itself, rather than skipped and then handed back to a legacy service whose future funding no one has described. It produces a slower headline journey time between Toronto and Montréal, and a materially better network for the roughly one million people living between them.

    Implications for autumn 2026

    What could still be settled before the Toronto–Ottawa route is published

    ALTO has stated that the Montréal–Ottawa alignment goes to public feedback this autumn, with the Toronto–Ottawa segment to follow. Kingston’s window to convert a signalled station into a specified one closes when that segment is published, not when it is built. The outstanding items divide into two categories.

    Within ALTO’s authority to answer now

    Whether the 401 contingency is being met Council’s support rests on development along the Highway 401 corridor around the South Frontenac and Kingston region. Confirming whether the segment under study satisfies that condition is a disclosure, not a study.
    Station location, co-location and access time Where the station would sit, whether it would be co-located with and integrated into the existing VIA Rail station, and the door-to-door journey time from downtown Kingston.
    Daily calling pattern at opening How many services call in each direction, and what commitment exists that the pattern survives timetable optimisation after opening.
    Station capital cost and its treatment The cost of the station and its approach works, and how it is carried in the business case.

    Requires a federal decision

    Conventional service after the corridor transfer What service operates on the existing Kingston Subdivision once corridor operations transfer, at what frequency, funded by whom, and under what protection. This sits with Parliament and the Minister, not with ALTO.
    Net frequency guarantee A commitment that a new station is additive to, not substitutive for, existing service — the demand advanced against the September 2025 express pilot, which applies unchanged to the pattern now described for ALTO.
    Whether the project proceeds at all The development phase runs to 2029, after which ALTO reports to the federal government and the decision to continue is taken. Every commitment discussed above is made in advance of that decision.
    Where things stand · July 2026

    Summary ledger

    Measured against the conditions Kingston City Council itself set:

    Signalled
    A new stop in Kingston. Described as probable by ALTO’s chief executive on 22 July 2026. No decision has been confirmed, and the mayor has said as much.
    Not addressed
    The Highway 401 contingency. Council’s support is expressly conditional on development along the 401 corridor around the South Frontenac and Kingston region. Nothing said on 22 July speaks to alignment.
    Not addressed
    Proximity to the urban core, and co-location. Whether a Kingston station would join the existing VIA Rail station and network, or be built new outside the city on an alignment passing north of it, determines its catchment, its access time and its ridership. The statement does not distinguish them.
    Contradicted
    Service frequency. The ridership justification and the express-running plan point in opposite directions. No daily calling pattern has been stated.
    Not addressed
    Conventional service after the corridor transfer. Frequency, funder and protection all unstated, on a line whose revenue base ALTO’s own forecast is designed to divert.
    Not addressed
    Net useful services. Whether Kingston has more usable daily trains after opening than before, counting both operators, is the only measure that answers the question residents are actually asking.
    Deferred
    The project decision itself. The development phase runs to 2029; the federal government decides afterwards whether to proceed.

    None of these questions presumes the project fails. Each asks only that the analysis behind the statement be disclosed — and, in the case of the 401 contingency, that a condition Kingston placed on its own support be answered before the Toronto–Ottawa alignment is fixed. Until then, what has been announced is an intention, not a service.

    Sources

    Primary documents and statements

    1.
    CBC News, “Kingston probably getting high-speed rail stop, says Alto CEO,” 22 July 2026 — interview with Martin Imbleau, CBC Radio Ottawa Morning. cbc.ca
    2.
    City of Kingston, Council Meeting Minutes 2026-06, 17 February 2026 — Resolution Number 2026-73, “Support for Alto High Speed Rail Southern Route, as Amended,” carried as amended 9–2; amendment votes 8–3 and 10–1; deferral motion lost 3–8; ALTO briefing and delegations recorded. cityofkingston.ca
    3.
    Elliot Ferguson, “Kingston city council supports a southern high-speed rail route,” The Kingston Whig-Standard, 18 February 2026 — contemporaneous report of the council debate and the dissenting councillors’ objections. thewhig.com
    4.
    Christena Lawrie, “Council votes to withdraw support for federal high speed rail project,” CFRC / Local Journalism Initiative, 13 March 2025 — unanimous withdrawal of support, and the regional hub commitment under the earlier High Frequency Rail proposal. cfrc.ca
    5.
    Kingstonist, “South Frontenac says no to high-speed rail line through township,” February 2026. kingstonist.com
    6.
    Transport Canada (2025–26). Supplementary Estimates: High-Speed Rail Initiative — funding to VIA Rail supporting the planning and eventual transfer of Québec City–Windsor corridor services to the private partner. tc.canada.ca
    7.
    Transport Action Canada, “VIA Rail launches Montréal–Toronto express trains but cuts service to lakeshore cities,” September 2025. transportaction.ca
    8.
    CBC News, “Via Montreal–Toronto pilot that skipped eastern Ontario postponed,” 29 September 2025. cbc.ca
    9.
    Kingstonist, “Pilot Pains: VIA Rail insists Kingston will remain among ‘best served’ cities in country,” 31 October 2025 — Belleville and Napanee council motions. kingstonist.com
    11.
    Tariq Khan, President, Transport Action Canada — letter to the Honourable Steven MacKinnon, Minister of Transport, “Re: Alto Kingston Alignment,” 15 July 2026. Published by Transport Action Ontario as “General Support for Alto Kingston Alignment, but Concerns Exist,” 22 July 2026. ontario.transportaction.ca   letter (PDF)
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  Policy Brief  ·  July 2026
    Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high-speed rail corridor.

  • Two point two trillion

    Two Point Two Trillion

    ALTO’s headline economic claim is true of the Canada that existed in 2019. It is presented to the public as today’s.

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Economics Brief · Published July 2026
    ⚠ Two studies, two summaries

    ALTO has commissioned two economic studies and published both. Aviseo Consulting produced a computer model of the effect of high-speed rail on the whole Canadian economy. CPCS, working with HDR, produced a study of its effect on tourism. Both reports are careful. Both state their limits plainly. Both are free to download from ALTO’s website.

    This brief is not about those studies. It is about the difference between what they say and what ALTO says they say. That difference is where the public numbers come from — and it is what a travel trade article repeated to a wide audience on July 20, 2026, without opening either report.

    What we found, in one minute

    The famous 1.1 per cent is 1.1 per cent of Canada’s 2019 economy. The Aviseo report says so on page 13, in those words. ALTO’s public pages drop the year and call the money “today’s value.” Canada’s economy is now about a third bigger than it was in 2019, so the same claim in today’s money would be about $36.5 billion, not $24.5 billion — or, if you keep the dollar figure, about 0.74 per cent, not 1.1.

    Almost all of it is one assumption. Of the $24.4 billion the model produces, $21.0 billion comes from assuming businesses in and around Toronto, Montréal, Ottawa and Québec City become 3 per cent more productive. Change that one dial to 2 per cent and the answer is $13.8 billion. Change it to 5 per cent and it is $34.5 billion. ALTO publishes the middle figure and not the range.

    The two studies disagree with each other about tourism. Aviseo counts international visitors only and says domestic tourism is mostly people spending money they would have spent anyway. CPCS builds its headline on domestic travel within the corridor. The two use different methods that cannot be added together. Neither of ALTO’s summaries mentions the other study.

    And in the tourism study’s base case, the small towns get nothing at all. Under the scenario where no extra tourism policy is put in place, Peterborough and Trois-Rivières receive zero additional visitor spending and zero additional GDP. The blog post announcing that study is titled “How High-Speed Rail Will Boost Tourism from Big Cities to Small Towns.”

    The Arithmetic

    1.1 per cent of which year?

    ALTO’s website puts the claim in one line: a “1.1% increase in Canada’s GDP ($24.5 billion in today’s value)”. GDP means the total size of the economy — everything the country produces in a year.

    Work backwards from those two numbers and you can calculate how big the economy would have to be for both to be right at once.

    $24.4B
    the benefit the study actually reports
    Aviseo report, Table 1
    1.1%
    the share of the economy that represents
    Aviseo report, page 13
    $2.22T
    the size of economy where both are true
    $24.4 billion divided by 1.1 per cent

    Statistics Canada measures the economy every three months. In the first quarter of 2026 it came to $3,321,588 million — about $3.32 trillion. That is roughly $1.1 trillion more than the figure the two numbers imply. Statistics Canada

    Two notes on these figures. Nobody has claimed that Canada’s economy is $2.22 trillion. That number is our own division of the two figures ALTO publishes together, and it is here because it is what those two figures imply about each other. And the benefit appears on this page as both $24.4 billion and $24.5 billion: the first is the number in Aviseo’s own table, the second the rounded form ALTO uses on its benefits page. They are the same estimate.

    The study explains why, and it is not hiding anything. The Aviseo model is built on Statistics Canada’s 2019 picture of the economy, chosen because 2020 and 2021 were pandemic years and the data from them is not reliable. Page 13 then states the result carefully: the gain is about $24.4 billion, which is roughly 1.1 per cent of Canada’s 2019 GDP.

    That is the whole finding. The study says 2019. ALTO’s website says “today’s value.”

    If you use the 1.1 per cent

    Applied to today’s economy, the benefit would be about $36.5 billion a year. ALTO’s published dollar figure understates its own claim by roughly a third.

    If you use the $24.4 billion

    Measured against today’s economy, that is about 0.74 per cent — not 1.1. The headline percentage is too high for the dollar figure beside it.

    There is a further wrinkle worth knowing. The model is what economists call static. It does not project forward year by year. It asks a single question: what would 2019 have looked like if the railway had already been running? The report says so directly. That means there is no discounting and no present-value calculation anywhere in it — so the phrase “in today’s value” describes a piece of arithmetic the study never performed.

    Where The Number Comes From

    Almost all of it is a single dial

    The model adds up three separate effects. The report breaks them out, so we can see exactly how much each one contributes to the $24.4 billion.

    ChannelContributionShare of total
    Productivity — businesses getting more done because cities are better connected$21.0B86%
    Labour supply — people working more hours because commuting is quicker$2.7B11%
    Tourism — extra spending by international visitors$0.8B3%
    Total$24.4B100%

    Nearly nine tenths of the headline comes from the productivity line. So it is worth knowing exactly how that number was produced.

    The modellers picked a figure from the international research for how much more productive businesses become when a fast rail link arrives. The research offers a range. They chose 3 per cent for their middle case, then applied it to the economies of four metropolitan areas: Toronto, Montréal, Ottawa and Québec City.

    Those four metros produce roughly a third of Canada’s economy. Three per cent of a third is about one per cent. The headline is close to being arithmetic from the assumption rather than a discovery about railways.

    What happens when you move the dial

    The report tests three settings. At 2 per cent, the total is about $13.8 billion. At 3 per cent, it is $24.4 billion. At 5 per cent, it is $34.5 billion. Across everything the report tests, the full range runs from $14.8 billion to $41.0 billion. ALTO’s blog post and website give one number from the middle of that range and no range at all.

    And note which places are in the calculation

    Toronto, Montréal, Ottawa and Québec City. Not Peterborough. Not Trois-Rivières. Not Laval. The model gives the productivity benefit — nearly nine tenths of the whole claim — to the four largest cities on the line and to nowhere else.

    The research the modellers drew on says these effects concentrate within about 30 kilometres of a station. Because nobody knows yet where the stations will be, the study used each city’s whole metropolitan area as a stand-in for that 30-kilometre circle. The report is open about this. It means the 3 per cent boost is applied to every business in those metros, including the great many that will never go near the train.

    Study Versus Summary

    What the reports say, and what the blog posts say

    Both studies are honest about their limits. Both blog posts announcing them are not. This is the pattern at the centre of this brief.

    What the report saysWhat ALTO’s summary says
    Aviseo: the gain is roughly 1.1 per cent of Canada’s 2019 GDP.ALTO’s blog: the analysis concludes ALTO will permanently uplift Canada’s GDP by 1.1 per cent. No year. ALTO’s benefits page: $24.5 billion in today’s value.
    Not carried:The base year
    Aviseo: results run from $14.8B to $41.0B depending on which assumptions are used.One figure, from the middle. The range appears in neither the blog post nor any public ALTO page.
    Not carried:The range
    Aviseo: the study deliberately excludes construction and operating costs, looking only at long-term effects.Presented as the economic case for building the railway. A study that excludes costs cannot tell you whether a project is worth its price.
    Not carried:The scope limit
    CPCS: the scenarios are illustrative, order-of-magnitude, and “should not be interpreted as forecasts.”ALTO’s blog: CPCS developed forecasts, and the report includes tangible projections giving real-world, objective results.
    Contradicted:The report’s own caution
    CPCS: three scenarios — $177M, $1.0B, $3.9B in added GDP, depending on how much tourism policy is coordinated.The middle figure only. The low scenario, roughly six times smaller, is not mentioned.
    Not carried:The low case
    Both reports: commissioned and paid for by ALTO. Aviseo’s cover states the work was undertaken on ALTO’s behalf. CPCS notes the opinions are the authors’ own.Both blog posts describe the consultants as independent — in the same passage that says ALTO engaged them.
    As stated:The word “independent”

    To be clear about who did what

    Neither consultancy has done anything wrong here. Aviseo tested six different sets of economic assumptions and two labour-market conditions, ran close to a hundred simulations, reported ranges throughout, and stated its base year. CPCS labelled its scenarios illustrative and warned against reading them as forecasts. The reports are the careful part. The summaries are where the caution disappears.

    Two Studies, One Question

    The two reports disagree about tourism

    Both studies estimate how much extra economic activity tourism would bring. They arrive at similar-looking numbers by opposite routes, and the two cannot simply be added together or compared.

    Aviseo — $0.8 billionCPCS — $1.0 billion
    Counts international visitors only. The report says domestic tourism is largely people spending money they would have spent somewhere else in Canada anyway, so it has limited effect on the national total.

    Uses a model of the whole economy, which subtracts activity drawn away from elsewhere.    		Its middle scenario is driven mostly by travel within the corridor — exactly the domestic tourism Aviseo set aside.

    Uses a simpler method that adds up ripple effects through suppliers and wages without subtracting what was displaced. This produces larger figures by design.
    Result:Two numbers that cannot be combined

    There is a third figure in circulation. ALTO’s FAQ page advertises $800 million a year in tourism revenue. That matches Aviseo’s contribution-to-GDP figure, which is not the same thing as revenue — and it matches no revenue figure in either report.

    So ALTO’s public materials carry a tourism benefit that is variously $0.8 billion of national output, $1.0 billion of national output, and $800 million of revenue, drawn from two studies using incompatible methods, one of which discounts the category the other relies on. Neither blog post mentions that the other study exists.

    The Small Towns

    In the base case, two station cities get zero

    The CPCS tourism study models three futures. The railway is identical in all three. What differs is how much extra tourism policy governments put in place around it — last-mile transit, regional shuttles, coordinated visitor information. The low coordination scenario is the one where the railway gets built and nothing else changes.

    CityLow coordinationHigh coordination
    Toronto$37Mup to $1,500M
    Québec City$50Mup to $500M
    Montréal (incl. Laval)$44Mup to $900M
    Ottawa-Gatineau$21Mup to $560M
    Trois-Rivières$0up to $25M
    Peterborough$0up to $35M

    Zero. Not a small amount — nothing. The report’s GDP table records the same: Peterborough unchanged at $475 million, Trois-Rivières unchanged at $318 million.

    Even under full corridor-wide coordination, Peterborough reaches up to $35 million against Toronto’s $1.5 billion — roughly 43 to 1. The blog post announcing this study is titled “How High-Speed Rail Will Boost Tourism from Big Cities to Small Towns.”

    The Initiative has examined this study in full elsewhere — its scope, the conditions attached to its scenarios, the rural corridor regions left outside its frame, and the cost side it does not count. Benefits for Stations, Costs for the Corridor

    The Missing Side

    A study that cannot tell you if it is worth it

    The Aviseo report states in its introduction that it deliberately leaves out construction and operating costs, in order to focus on long-term effects. That is a reasonable choice for the study. It has a consequence.

    A benefit figure with no cost beside it cannot answer the only question that matters: is this worth building? The report never claims to answer it. ALTO’s summary presents it as though it does, and the trade coverage went further still, running the entire economic case without a single dollar of cost anywhere in it.

    The cost side is not a mystery. It is simply somewhere else. ALTO’s published figure is $60 to $90 billion — a range its own chief executive has described as a working assumption rather than an estimate, with real numbers not expected until 2027 or 2028, after the route is chosen. The Initiative’s analysis of the full ledger puts ALTO’s central benefit-cost ratio at about 0.11, against the 1.0 that marks a project paying its way. Financial Analysis

    The shape of the published record

    The benefit is modelled in detail by two consultancies, published to two significant figures, and repeated by every outlet covering the project. The cost is a range spanning $30 billion, described by the proponent as an assumption, and resolvable only after the decision it is meant to inform has been taken. That asymmetry is the finding, not the individual numbers.

    This is the pattern the Oxford researcher Bent Flyvbjerg documents across large infrastructure projects worldwide: benefits arrive early, precisely, and in dollars; costs arrive late, as ranges, after commitment.

    The Chain

    Six weeks, and the reports were not cited

    The article that prompted this brief promised readers what others are missing about ALTO’s economics, and led on tourism. Here is what had already been published.

    2019
    The year of the economy the Aviseo model is built on. Everything downstream is expressed in this year’s terms.
    2024
    Aviseo runs the model. ALTO supplies its passenger forecasts in May and June.
    June 8, 2026
    ALTO publishes “How High-Speed Rail Will Boost Tourism from Big Cities to Small Towns,” with the full CPCS tourism report attached for download.
    June 2026
    The Aviseo report is uploaded to ALTO’s website.
    July 13, 2026
    ALTO publishes “How Alto Will Reshape Canada’s Economy,” with the full Aviseo report attached for download. It states the 1.1 per cent without the year, the range, or the cost exclusion.
    July 20, 2026
    A travel trade site publishes a long article on ALTO’s economics and tourism benefits under a headline promising what others are missing. Its two themes are the two blog posts. It cites neither report, calls the analysis independent, and contains no cost figure of any kind.

    Seven days after one blog post and six weeks after the other. The tourism angle presented as the overlooked discovery had been the subject of an entire ALTO blog post and a 42-page commissioned report, both freely available, for a month and a half.

    Why this matters more than one bad article

    Each outlet in a chain like this can be cited by the next as confirmation. A figure that has never been independently checked ends up looking like something everybody agrees on, purely because it has been repeated. In this case the answer was not hidden. It was a click away from the two blog posts the article’s themes are drawn from.

    What the article contains, and what it does not

    The article cites neither report. It describes the analysis as independent. It contains no cost figure of any kind. Its two themes are the subjects of two ALTO blog posts published seven days and six weeks earlier, each with the full commissioned report attached for download on the same page.

    Summary · July 2026

    Where things stand

    Wrong year
    “$24.5 billion in today’s value.” The study says 1.1 per cent of Canada’s 2019 GDP. In today’s economy the same claim is either $36.5 billion or 0.74 per cent, not $24.5 billion and 1.1 per cent.
    Wrong kind
    “Today’s value” describes a calculation the study never did. The model is static and contains no discounting. Its results are annual, not a one-time total.
    Not carried
    The range. Aviseo reports $14.8B to $41.0B. CPCS reports $177M, $1.0B and $3.9B. ALTO publishes one figure from the middle of each.
    Not carried
    The scope limit. Aviseo excludes costs by design. The study is presented as the economic case for a project whose price it never considered.
    Contradicted
    “Should not be interpreted as forecasts.” CPCS’s words. ALTO’s summary calls the same scenarios forecasts, tangible projections and objective results.
    At odds
    Benefits for small towns. Under the scenario where only the railway is built, Peterborough and Trois-Rivières receive $0. The blog announcing that report is titled “from Big Cities to Small Towns.”
    Unreconciled
    Two tourism figures. $0.8B from one study counting international visitors, $1.0B from another counting domestic travel, by methods that cannot be combined — plus $800M of “revenue” on the FAQ that matches neither.
    As stated
    “Independent.” Both consultancies were engaged and paid by ALTO. Both blog posts state this in the same passage that calls the firms independent, so a reader who takes the word to mean “not commissioned by the proponent” is reading it in a sense the passage itself rules out.
    Fragile
    Eighty-six per cent of the claim rests on one assumption — a 3 per cent productivity gain applied to four metropolitan economies. At 2 per cent the total is $13.8B; at 5 per cent, $34.5B.
    Sound
    The studies themselves. Both are careful, both state their limits, both are published in full and free to download. Our argument is with the summaries, not the analysis.

    What we are and are not saying

    We are not saying high-speed rail cannot bring economic benefits, and we are not criticising the consultants who did this work.

    We are saying that ALTO commissioned two careful studies and then published summaries that removed the base year, the ranges, the scope limits and the warnings — and that the resulting figures now circulate as settled facts. On the arithmetic, the position is narrow and easy to check: 1.1 per cent and $24.5 billion cannot both describe today’s Canada, and the study says which year they describe.

    ALTO could correct this in a sentence. Adding the words “of 2019 GDP” to its benefits page would make the claim accurate.

    How to read the numbers on this page

    Every figure attributed to Aviseo, CPCS, ALTO or Statistics Canada is quoted from the source listed below and can be checked there. Every other figure is our own calculation from those published inputs: the $2.22 trillion implied economy, the $36.5 billion and 0.74 per cent restatements in current terms, the observation that 3 per cent of roughly a third of national output is about 1 per cent, the 43-to-1 Toronto-to-Peterborough ratio, and the benefit-cost ratio of about 0.11, which comes from our own financial analysis and not from either commissioned study.

    Where a study or a summary does not state something, we say so rather than inferring it, and we make no claim about why any particular qualification was or was not reproduced.

    Download
    Two Point Two Trillion — Full Brief (PDF)
    The complete analysis, with all figures, tables and sources
    Download PDF
    Sources

    Where our figures come from

    1.Aviseo Consulting, An Overview of the Structural Economic Impacts of Alto: Computable General Equilibrium Modelling Approach, June 2026. Prepared on behalf of ALTO. Source of the 2019 calibration, the $24.4 billion figure, the 1.1 per cent of 2019 GDP statement (page 13), the $14.8B–$41.0B range, the channel breakdown, and the productivity settings of 0.02, 0.03 and 0.05. altotrain.ca (PDF)
    2.ALTO, “How Alto Will Reshape Canada’s Economy,” blog post, July 13, 2026. States the 1.1 per cent without the base year or range, and describes the commissioned report as independent. Links the Aviseo report. altotrain.ca
    3.CPCS, in association with HDR, Tourism in the Alto Corridor: Current Conditions and Potential Impacts, June 2026. Prepared for ALTO. Source of the three coordination scenarios, the per-city spending and GDP tables, the statement that the scenarios should not be interpreted as forecasts, and the finding on business spending declines. altotrain.ca (PDF)
    4.ALTO, “How High-Speed Rail Will Boost Tourism from Big Cities to Small Towns,” blog post, June 8, 2026. Reports the medium scenario only, and describes the scenarios as forecasts and tangible projections. Links the CPCS report. altotrain.ca
    5.ALTO, “Discover Alto’s Many Benefits,” project benefits page. Source of the “$24.5 billion in today’s value” phrasing and the construction and operational jobs figures. altotrain.ca
    6.ALTO, “Answering your questions.” Source of the $800 million annual tourism revenue claim. altotrain.ca
    7.Statistics Canada, Gross domestic product, income and expenditure, first quarter 2026, released May 29, 2026. Table 1 gives gross domestic product at market prices, seasonally adjusted at annual rates, of $3,321,588 million for the first quarter of 2026. Underlying series: Table 36-10-0103-01. Table 1  ·  Table 36-10-0103-01
    8.Rituparna Dutta Choudhury, “Canada’s Toronto–Québec City High-Speed Rail Could Unlock GDP Growth: What Others Are Missing About Alto’s Billion Dollar Economic Transformation,” Travel and Tour World, July 20, 2026. travelandtourworld.com
    9.ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, ALTO Financial Analysis. Source of the benefit-cost ratio of approximately 0.11, the cost-per-kilometre model, and the achievable ridership frontier of 5 to 12 million annual trips against ALTO’s 24 million target. citizenresearch.ca
    10.ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, Tourism Study brief, June 2026. Examines the scope of the CPCS study, including the exclusion of rural corridor regions. citizenresearch.ca
    11.Bent Flyvbjerg, on optimism bias and reference-class forecasting in the appraisal of large infrastructure projects.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  Economics Brief  ·  July 2026
    Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor.

  • Introduction: What is HPR

    Coalition for Better Rail · ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · The HPR Research Report

    What is HPR?

    An alternative built around the journey people actually take — not the top speed on the brochure.

    Introduction · The HPR Research Report

    High Performance Rail (HPR) is a plan to modernise passenger and freight rail along a corridor that already has track. Instead of one brand-new high-speed line built from scratch, HPR treats the whole corridor as a single system and asks what the smartest fix is for each part. That means new track where new track earns its place, upgrades to existing lines where they deliver more per dollar, and added freight capacity so passenger and freight trains can each run to their own schedule. The goal is a trip that beats driving door to door, reaches city centres and the towns in between, and gets built in affordable stages.

    Download
    What is HPR? — Introduction (PDF)
    The HPR framework in full: the three-part structure, the 10 Guiding Principles, and the case for a made-in-Canada alternative to greenfield high-speed rail
    Download PDF
    The Framework

    Three parts, one corridor strategy

    HPR is not one thing but a whole-system approach with two working halves. It combines a passenger spine and a freight dimension into one corridor strategy, assessed together and built step by step, so each mode can grow on its own terms instead of being forced onto the other’s infrastructure.

    Three names for three things, used consistently across this report. The corridor is the Toronto–Québec City route Alto proposes. The triangle is the Toronto–Ottawa–Montréal network HPR proposes in its place. The spine is the 479-kilometre Pickering Junction to Dorval element of that triangle, on the Toronto–Montréal axis, which is where the new-build cost concentrates. Where a chapter names one of the three, it means that one.

    HPR — High Performance Rail · the framework

    The whole-system approach. HPR combines the passenger spine and the freight side into one corridor strategy, assessed together and delivered in stages.

    HPPR — High Performance Passenger Rail · the spine

    The physical passenger railway. New-build and grade-separated where the corridor requires it, engineered to run reliably across a 177–240 km/h band, with 240 km/h (150 mph) the alignment’s design maximum, serving downtowns and the communities along the route.

    HPFR — High Performance Freight Rail · the freight dimension

    The capacity that separates freight from passenger obligations. Freed from passenger schedules, freight can run to a more flexible timetable and operate longer trains. Those are the levers that lower a railway’s operating ratio, so each mode can grow without crowding out the other on shared track.

    The 10 Guiding Principles of HPR

    What HPR is built on

    01
    Look at the whole system. Treat the rail network as one system rather than a set of separate projects, and respect the different business models freight and passenger operations run on. Avoid a single project that monopolises the funding and starves the many smaller improvements that would together deliver more.
    02
    Build for communities. Make sure the towns along the route benefit from the railway, not just the big cities at each end. A railway that brings those places in rather than bypassing them meets less local opposition, carries less political risk and, in the end, costs less.
    03
    Separate freight from passengers. Build the capacity to give each its own space, so neither has to run to the other’s schedule.
    04
    Go fast enough, not the fastest possible. Target speeds of 177–240 km/h. That is fast enough to compete with driving or flying door to door, without the cost of fully new, arrow-straight high-speed lines. A 240 km/h maximum is also the more practical option in extreme Canadian heat and cold (±30 °C).
    05
    Make the ride safe, comfortable and useful. Grade separation and modern rolling stock make rail among the safest ways to travel, and generous space lets passengers work, rest or talk on the way. Time on the train is usable time, which driving can never offer.
    06
    Be frequent and on time. Compete on turn-up-and-go frequency and dependable punctuality, with on-time performance above 90% sustained through Canadian winters. Reliability, not peak speed, is what earns a traveller’s trust.
    07
    Reach downtowns and smaller towns. Put stations in city centres and serve the communities along the route, not only the two endpoints.
    08
    Mix new construction with upgrades. Use whichever delivers more value for the money: new track, or improvements to what is already there.
    09
    Share the tracks. Let regional, commuter and intercity trains use the same tracks, with freed freight capacity as a deliberate co-benefit.
    10
    Build it in stages. Invest where the benefits can be demonstrated, phasing improvements so each stage earns its place, instead of concentrating all the cost and risk in one megaproject.
    How HPR Differs

    A North American solution

    The defining difference is what the railway is optimised for. A design that chases 300-plus km/h commits, almost by necessity, to a new greenfield alignment: long straight sections, wide curves, and bypasses that route around the very communities and city centres a passenger service exists to reach. The speed gained on open track is paid back in access time, capital and carbon.

    HPR takes the opposite approach. By accepting typical speeds of 177–240 km/h, it can follow the existing corridor, upgrade what already works, and go straight into downtowns, all while freeing up capacity for freight. The result is competitive door to door at a fraction of the capital exposure, in stages that can be re-scoped as the evidence matures.

    It is also a difference of origin. A greenfield high-speed line is essentially an imported design. The French passenger-rail model was built for a temperate, densely settled country on a network that carries no freight. North American railroading is the opposite: freight-dominated, shared-track, and tested by hard winters and long distances.

    HPR is engineered for those conditions — made in Canada, for Canadian ones. It builds domestic expertise that transfers to later Canadian projects rather than importing it. HPR is best understood not as a slower high-speed railway but as a different answer for a different continent. The question it sets out to answer is this: how do you move the most people and freight, to the most useful places, at prices that compete with driving, for the most defensible investment at the lowest risk?

    Travel Time, Not Speed

    The clock, not the speedometer

    A journey is not a single dash between two stations. It is a chain: getting to the station, waiting for the departure, the run itself, and then getting to the final destination at the far end. Top speed touches only one link in that chain. Once the time at both ends is counted, the run itself is a fraction of the door-to-door total, and shaving it returns less and less. The gap between 240 and 300 km/h saves minutes on the segment that is already the smallest part of the trip.

    Worse, the alignments that allow the highest speeds tend to push stations out of city centres. That adds time at both ends, which can outweigh whatever the faster run saved — so a train that is quicker on paper can be slower in practice. Frequency compounds the point: a train leaving soon beats a faster one you have to wait an hour to board.

    The measure that matters

    Over a corridor drive of some 540 kilometres, the car is the real competitor. Measured the way travellers actually experience the journey, what counts is the reliable door-to-door clock — not the number on the fastest stretch of track.

    The Price Lever

    Pricing for a car-centric market

    In a car-centric country, the railway’s real competitor is not the airplane or the existing train. It is the private car. Against a car someone already owns, a trip is judged on the fairly small extra cost of just driving it. That makes price the most direct lever on whether people switch.

    A line built at megaproject cost has to recover that capital somewhere. Fares set to service debt push budget-conscious travellers straight back into their cars, hollowing out the very ridership the business case assumed. HPR’s lower capital cost is therefore not only a fiscal virtue but a demand strategy: a railway that costs less to build can price to fill trains rather than to service debt.

    Frequency, downtown access and reliable door-to-door times create the conditions for people to switch. Price is what converts them into boardings — and where most trips default to the car, the fare is often the difference between a full train and an empty one.

    What HPR Is Not

    Neither political, nor all at once

    HPR is not a political project. Its route, its staging and its scope follow the evidence — engineering, economics and demographics — not political convenience or partisan preference. Where a claim cannot be grounded in that evidence, it is not made.

    Nor is it everything at once. Stage 1, the scope of the current report, is deliberately limited. It does not detour via Peterborough, it reaches Ottawa over upgraded existing lines rather than costly new-build, and it leaves Québec City to a later stage. Each further stage is added only when the evidence and the need justify it.

    The Pitch

    A case built to be checked

    HPR does not ask to be believed. It asks to be checked. Every figure in its case is meant to be traced to a source, tested against what comparable projects actually cost and carried, and stated with its uncertainty rather than at its best case. Where a promotional business case leads with a single confident number, HPR leads with a range and the reference class behind it. The honest way to forecast a railway is from the record of railways already built, rather than from a proponent’s own projections for the one not yet built.

    The result is a stronger case, not a softer one. Compared with a conventional greenfield high-speed line, HPR offers four things:

    Passengers
    A service that beats driving on door-to-door time, for a fraction of the cost of a from-scratch high-speed line.
    Freight
    Upgrades that help freight operators instead of competing with passenger trains for track space.
    Delivery
    Benefits that arrive in proven stages, each one demonstrated before the next is committed.
    Whole life
    A cost and environmental picture that improves, rather than worsens, once the entire lifespan of the asset is counted.

    None of that needs an optimistic ridership forecast or heroic cost control to stand up. That is the pitch: not the fastest railway that can be drawn on paper, but the one that will actually get built, get used, and pay its way.

    Coalition for Better Rail  ·  ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  beyondalto.ca  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  The HPR Research Report · Introduction
    Independent, non-partisan research on Canada’s proposed Toronto–Québec City corridor. This introduction describes the HPR framework. Later chapters cover corridor geometry, capital cost, ridership, operating economics, environmental impact and benefit–cost analysis.

  • Development ethics for Alto

    Guest Submission · Development Ethics

    Development Ethics for Alto

    Brief to the Alto online public consultation

    JD
    Jay Drydyk
    Professor Emeritus, Carleton University
    Past President, International Development Ethics Association
    Publisher’s Note

    The ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative is pleased to publish this guest brief with the author’s permission. It is reproduced as written; the analysis, rankings, and recommendations are Dr. Drydyk’s own. Footnotes appear as endnotes at the foot of the page.

    Section 1

    The contractor and the public

    Suppose our roof is damaged, and we are restricted by our bank to dealing with only one contractor for the repair. The contractor tells us there are two options, A and B, both of which are risky and expensive. Then we find out there is a third option, which is not so risky or expensive. The contractor has not only concealed this from us but now refuses to talk about it.

    Is this an ethically acceptable way of doing business? No, it seems to violate basic values of honesty and transparency.

    By analogy, this seems to be how Alto has tried to do business with us as a public. The roof is our broken inter-city transportation system. The two expensive and risky options are two new high-speed rail [HSR] corridors put forward in the Alto project proposal of 2025-26. What I will call the ‘northern Shield corridor’ lies north of Highway 7, and what I will call the ‘Frontenac/Napanee corridor’ lies south of Highway 7. Farther south another corridor already exists, along the CN right of way and Highway 401. This third, most southerly corridor is the one that Alto is reluctant to discuss.1

    To put this in another way, the imaginary contractor and the real agents of Alto are both selling their solutions with logical fallacies. The contractor tells us: you need to fix your roof, so you need my options A or B. Alto: you need to fix your broken transportation system, so you need a new transportation corridor. Neither argument follows, because in each case there is a third option.

    Section 2

    Good development vs. maldevelopment

    Some development is worthwhile, but some is quite undesirable; this is an ethical difference, based on values, and with 80 years of post-WWII experience we know a lot about what these values are. Worthwhile development not only produces more, it also enhances people’s well-being and freedom, so that they are better able to shape their own lives for the better; it also does so equitably and sustainably. These are the pillars of what has been identified as a worthwhile ‘human development’ approach by the influential economist Mahbub ul Haq in collaboration with Nobel laureate Amartya Sen.2

    Meanwhile, other development researchers have studied what these broad values require in practice in cases of development projects (like Alto) that involve land-taking.3 Some guidance can be found in national legal systems, in international human rights law, and in operational policies of international financial institutions. Yet the evidence shows that ‘even when all three approaches are applied consistently, outcomes … are generally still poor’, impacting negatively on the livelihoods and well-being of people affected.4 A recent synthesis of this research has formulated six guiding principles to fill these gaps. Three of these are most significant for the Alto proposal:

    2. Fair procedures: promote inclusive decision-making through a fair and transparent procedure from the outset and throughout the lifecycle of the project;

    3. Fair distribution: ensure a fair distribution of impacts and benefits and align with the Sustainable Development Goals;

    6. Remedy and accountability: ensure remedy and accountability through access to grievance redress mechanisms, remediation and legal recourse.5

    These values and principles help to distinguish between good development and maldevelopment in five dimensions of the Alto proposal: public interest, landowner impact, community impact, environmental impact, and Indigenous peoples’ consent.

    Section 3

    Public interest, public need

    Development ethics tells us that people should not be displaced and land should not be taken for development except for projects that are in the public interest.6 What does ‘public interest’ mean here? It means that the gains or advantages created by the project are not entirely private gains, that very significant gains accrue to us as a public. An important standard of public interest is public need. Building schools and hospitals involves land-taking, by which some residents may be displaced, and yet there is great gain to the public, in having schools and hospitals, simply because schools and hospitals are things we need, as a public. This does not entail that building a particular school in a particular place is the best way to meet this need, but it does give very strong reason for building some such school where it is most needed.

    The term ‘high-speed rail’ has been used with different meanings in recent discussions, and so I want to be clear that what I will mean is rail service with maximum speeds faster than 200km/hr. This range corresponds with the definition of HSR by the International Union of Railways.7 This range includes what Alto means by ‘high-speed’, which is faster than 300km/hr, but it also includes speeds in the 200 range. Unlike the Alto definition (>300km/hr), the broader UIC definition captures the majority of high-speed rail services currently offered in Japan and Europe.8

    There is a strong case that high-speed rail, in this sense, is a public need in Ontario and Québec. According to this argument, HSR is needed to shift people’s choices in the Ontario-Québec corridor from airplanes, cars, and buses to trains. This is needed for two main reasons. First, continued reliance on cars, buses, and airplanes, for generations to come, has an unacceptable carbon footprint, which will contribute to ever greater loss of life, property, homes, and habitats through climate change. Second, continued reliance on cars, buses, and airplanes imposes a drag on economic productivity, putting downward pressure on livelihoods and well-being throughout the economy. For these two reasons, it is argued, we have a long-term need to change the mode of inter-city transport in this corridor, and, to achieve this we have a long-term public need for high-speed rail.9

    However, this does not determine where and how HSR should be built – with one exception. Building HSR stations at locations removed from city centres defeats the purpose of HSR (for travelers) by adding commuting time to reach the stations.10 As to where and how HSR is built, public benefit is only one value that matters: we also have equity/fairness/justice and sustainability to consider. There are equity issues pertaining to landowners, communities, and Indigenous peoples, which I will consider in the next three sections; environmental values will be considered in section 7. All of these raise further issues of accountability.

    Section 4

    Landowner impact

    When we notice unfairness or injustice, we are perceiving some kind of deprivation as being wrong. Even if a development project meets public needs and creates public benefits, our intuitive sense of justice will object if the project imposes unwarranted burdens and harms on others. It remains true for cooking that, ‘If you want make an omelet you have to break some eggs,’ – but not as a metaphor excusing harmful development. Thus it is widely accepted that development projects should not make people worse off, either by displacing them from their land, or through other community impacts.11

    Paying people market value for the land that is taken from them may still leave them worse off. One reason is the impact of land-taking on livelihoods. When his land was assessed for compensation by an oil pipeline project, a Ugandan farmer remarked, ‘I had 10 mango trees where I used to make a lot of money every season and look after 11 dependents, we got only 670,000 [shillings] … they didn’t think about the capital value required to plant new trees and how many years it would take us to start harvesting fruits again.’12 The Alto project does not threaten any mango trees in Eastern Ontario, but it does threaten to impact livelihoods by dividing farms. It may be possible to mitigate these effects, but it would be complicated: organizing and paying for land swaps so that each farm is made whole by other land on the same side of the fenced-off right of way. One challenge of land replacement strategies like these is to ensure that the replacement land is of as good quality as the land lost. If this is not possible, compensation for lost revenue/livelihood would require revenue sharing plans on the part of the project.

    The Ontario Federation of Agriculture has stated:

    It is not acceptable for any railway to divide properties and thereby “landlock” the interior of the lot. Any crossing must be at least 10 metres wide to allow large and irregularly shaped farm and forestry equipment to be conveyed safely across the railway. Over- and underpasses must be engineered to accommodate the weight, height, and width of not only today’s farm and forestry equipment but also what machines may be used in the future. Crossings must also be engineered to prevent equipment rollovers. Alto must also preserve drainage system functionality and not adversely affect natural drainage systems.

    Alto has stated that the entirety of the railway corridor will be fenced. Alto must consult on the fencing design to ensure farm animals cannot stray onto the tracks, as some farm animals have special fencing needs.

    In addition, Transport Canada and Alto must provide fair and proportionate compensation for other negative affections caused by the railway, which will permanently affect farm production and limit growth potential.13

    The issue here is equity: if these effects are not fully mitigated and/or compensated, the farmers will bear special burdens for the building of high-speed rail – as if an arbitrary high-speed rail tax were imposed upon farmers on whose land track was laid.

    Currently no accountability mechanisms have been established to ensure that such mitigations and compensations are carried out, and to which landowners can seek recourse in case mitigation and compensation are not carried out. Government has an ethical obligation to establish such mechanisms before making a final investment decision.

    Section 5

    Community impacts

    According to Alto:

    High-speed rail is one of the world’s safest modes of intercity transportation. This partly stems from the fact that its tracks are physically separate from regular road traffic. There are no crossings connecting roadways and the tracks, thereby minimizing the risk of collisions. In addition, the high-speed rail network’s right-of-way is completely fenced in. Elevated tracks and tunnels mean the trains can cross entire cities without interacting with other road vehicles or trains.14

    However, this same railway separation also has other consequences for human security. Limited overpass/underpass crossings may increase distances and times for fire and ambulance services, potentially causing fatal delays.15 These security gaps can be mitigated by careful planning of overpasses and underpasses; mitigation plans should be agreed with the municipalities responsible for delivering these services. Best practices of high-speed rail systems in other countries should be followed.

    Once again accountability is a problem. To date no accountability mechanisms have been established to ensure agreement and planning for timely fire and emergency health services after Alto rail lines have been built and separated from roadways. Nor is there any body to which municipalities can seek recourse in case such agreement and planning do not occur, or in case agreements are not fulfilled. Government has an ethical obligation to establish such mechanisms before making a final investment decision.

    If the Frontenac/Napanee or northern shield corridors are chosen for HSR, existing VIA service will be impacted by service cuts as longer-distance travellers shift to HSR. At present Kingston is the fifth-busiest passenger train station in the country. There is a public need to maintain viable service for these passengers and others from stations along the existing VIA corridor. Moreover, community impacts from Alto would reach far beyond eastern Ontario. If 80% of VIA revenue currently comes from passengers travelling in the Windsor-Québec corridor, and much of this is diverted to Cadence as operator of HSR between Toronto and Québec, much less will be available to support other major VIA trains, such as: Montréal-Halifax (‘The Ocean’); Toronto-Vancouver (‘The Canadian’); Winnipeg-Churchill; Jasper-Prince Rupert; Sudbury-White River; Montréal-Jonquière/Senneterre. Allowing these train services to be degraded or discontinued would constitute a clear neglect of public interest. Accordingly, the Alto HSR Citizens Research Initiative has called for two immediate legislative responses:

    Statutory Service Guarantee for the Kingston SubdivisionAny federal legislation enabling ALTO must include a statutory charter guaranteeing minimum VIA Rail service levels on the Kingston Subdivision. The charter must specify minimum daily frequencies, protect morning and evening service windows, and require public consultation before schedule changes affecting intermediate communities.

    Dedicated, Legislated Funding for the National Rail NetworkParliament must establish a dedicated funding stream for VIA Rail’s non-corridor network — The Ocean, The Canadian, and remote services — entirely independent of corridor revenue that will transfer to Cadence. This fund must be protected as a condition of any ALTO implementation agreement.16

    The appropriate timing for such legislative action would be as close as possible to the final investment decision on the Alto project.

    Section 6

    Indigenous peoples’ consent

    Alto has stated, ‘We are committed to engaging in meaningful consultations with the aim of securing the Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC), of potentially impacted communities.’17 The phrasing is ambiguous. Are they committed to achieving FPIC, or only to holding ‘meaningful consultations with the aim’ of doing so? The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is unambiguous on this point.

    Article 322. States shall consult and cooperate in good faith with the indigenous peoples concerned through their own representative institutions in order to obtain their free and informed consent prior to the approval of any project affecting their lands or territories and other resources, particularly in connection with the development, utilization or exploitation of mineral, water or other resources.18

    Meaningful consultation is not the end; it is only a means to achieving ‘free and informed consent prior to the approval of any project affecting their lands or territories and other resources’.

    The earlier High Frequency Rail project which preceded Alto included consultation with ‘more than 40 potentially impacted Indigenous communities and organizations’.19 However, that consultation focused entirely on supplementing the Request for Proposals with provisions for Indigenous social benefits and participation. There was no mention of consent with regard to impact on Indigenous territory; in any case, the Request for Proposals for HFR has been superseded by the Alto HSR proposal awarded to Cadence, now in co-development phase. Site selection and alignment have not yet been specified by Alto and Cadence. At the present time it is unclear whether any discussions have been undertaken with the Mohawk of the Bay of Quinte in Ontario or the Mohawk of Kanesatake in Quebec about use of or impact on their territories. Nor is there any evidence of commitment to recourse or accountability mechanisms for benefit/land/participation commitments that will be made to them.

    Section 7

    Environmental Impact

    For the route through the Frontenac Arch and Napanee Plain, environmental risks are significant. For the northern route largely over Canadian Shield, risks are less clear. For the southernmost corridor, environmental risks have already been incurred by the CN right of way and Highway 401; one would expect additional risks from HSR to be small by comparison. Doing nothing to shift travelers over to rail also incurs the environmental risks incurred by flying and driving, notably contributions to climate change. The difficult question is actually the normative question: which risks must be avoided? If worthwhile development is environmentally sustainable, then the answer is that we must avoid risks that are unsustainable, and this shifts the question to: what are the meaning and standards for sustainability?

    While precise answers to these normative questions are elusive, two broad ways of framing them have emerged over the past forty years to provide starting points for public deliberation about environmental risks. The 1987 Brundtland Commission proposed that development is sustainable when it meets the needs of present generations without jeopardizing the needs of future generations.20 More recently, the UNDP Human Development Report of 2020 called for steering development to ease the ‘planetary pressures’ that historical and contemporary social and economic development unleash.21 The main idea here is that development puts pressures on the planet, and the planet pushes back in ways that make present and future human flourishing more uncertain. At the extreme:

    Climate change and biodiversity integrity loss are tightly coupled core boundaries, and human activities are currently pushing both of them into a high-risk zone. If humanity breaches planetary boundaries too far or for too long, it may disrupt planetary life support systems, with substantial risks for human life as we know it.22

    The HSR corridor over part of the Frontenac Arch will also traverse an adjoining limestone plain surrounding the Napanee and Salmon Rivers. Under the limestone plain is found karst geology, featuring sinkholes, fissures, caves, and disappearing streams; above it are rare alvar ecosystems based on terrain with thin or no soil cover. These ecosystems harbour several species protected by the Species at Risk Act; it is doubtful that Alto could show that its construction can meet requirements of this Act. Construction would also affect subsurface water flows in unpredictable ways, possibly damaging freshwater access and use downstream. For other ecosystems in other places it may be possible to mitigate environmental impacts of HSR, as for example best practice standards have evolved in Europe for protecting essential pathways for migratory species. If such mitigation strategies can succeed for a CN/401 corridor, or for a northern shield corridor, they must be planned, budgeted, and carried out. However, in the Frontenac Arch and Napanee Plain these particular mitigation strategies may be of no use, due to the combination of karst geology below and alvar ecosystems above. Since biodiversity and freshwater access are two dimensions in which there are planetary boundaries, it follows that, in this corridor, an HSR line would be adding to planetary pressures rather than reducing them. Building HSR in the Frontenac/Napanee corridor, then, qualifies as environmental maldevelopment.23

    In the northern Shield corridor, biodiversity and freshwater impacts may be less pronounced and more amenable to mitigation. The HSR line and its construction are less likely to disrupt water flow in this corridor, where streams run parallel to rail alignment. The line would disrupt movement by larger mammals such as moose, elk, and bear, but these are not species at risk. More research is needed to determine what kinds of mitigation are required; international evidence suggests that there are few types of overpass that large mammals will actually use, and these are quite expensive.24 Effects on other species also requires further study and assessment. A clear standard for wildlife mitigation, with accountability mechanisms, is needed to ensure that adequate mitigation measures are chosen and implemented.

    Section 8

    Ranking the options: from morally worst to not so bad

    These two frameworks – future generations and planetary pressures – can help to orient discussion of environmental and social impacts in ethical, value-based terms. We can consider what will be the result of rolling out the various HSR options over multiple future generations. How will these decisions now affect planetary pressures exerted by humans then? Is it possible to assess or at least imagine how much closer to or in excess of planetary boundaries we get, in each scenario? In light of this, we can rank those options, as to how comparatively undesirable they are, from a development ethics perspective.

    The following rankings are only illustrative, expressing my own moral assessment, based on reasons for concern that I am aware of at the present time. This illustration, however, does have a point, namely that it is plausible and powerful to rank the options before us in terms of their enduring impact both to enhance human well-being and to reduce the dangerous pressures we are placing upon the planetary systems that sustain us. What we need, I conclude, is a public deliberation to make such a ranking.

    1
    Status quo.If there is no replacement for current VIA Rail levels of service, travelers will continue to be shunted into cars, buses, and airplanes to travel between Québec, Montréal, Ottawa, and Toronto (and indeed London and Windsor). The carbon footprint for this travel will grow apace. There being no other proposals on the horizon to compensate, I conclude that continuation of the status quo on VIA Rail will mean continued contribution to the death, illness, and destruction of property and habitats that result from carbon-induced climate change.
    2
    Frontenac/Napanee corridor, without mitigation.Mitigation for landowners and community safety are feasible and morally mandatory; however, for the sake of ranking consider the possibility that it is not carried out, so we have: unnecessary and inequitable loss to livelihoods and human security. In that respect, this option ranks worse than the following one:
    3
    Frontenac/Napanee corridor, with human/community mitigation.Well-being and equity issues in the previous option are removed, but, on the environmental side, ecological mitigation seems unlikely. Over many generations, then, the effects we can anticipate from HSR include (a) expansion of human well-being; (b) reduction in the particular pressures imposed by the carbon footprint of travel between Windsor and Québec; but (c) significantly increased planetary pressures both on biodiversity and on freshwater access.
    4
    Northern Canadian Shield corridor, without mitigation.Although much of this territory is more remote, there are still roads, tracks, and migratory paths that can be cut off by HSR fencing. Human security and wildlife migration will still be impacted unless mitigation measures are adopted.
    5
    Northern Canadian Shield corridor, with mitigation.With landowner and community mitigation, inequitable losses are reduced, so that we can anticipate (a) expansion of human well-being, along with (b) reduction in the particular pressures imposed by the carbon footprint of travel between Windsor and Québec; (c) with mitigation it may be possible to avoid increasing planetary pressures on biodiversity, but this is not perfectly clear, either; (d) adverse impacts on fresh water are less likely. Rolling this forward over multiple generations, we want to ensure monitoring for unforeseen environmental problems. This could be addressed by establishing capability in each region affected by HSR for ongoing environmental monitoring, funded by revenue sharing from operation of HSR service.
    6
    Southern CN/401 corridor, without mitigation.Because this corridor already exists, one might expect fewer new adverse impacts. However, without mitigation, mandatory grade separation and fencing will adversely affect humans and other species alike, which makes this option worse than the final one.
    7
    Southern CN/401 corridor, with mitigationfor community and wildlife impacts to highest standards of European/Asian HSR, with further direction from the environmental assessment. With landowner and community mitigation, inequitable losses are reduced, so that we can anticipate (a) expansion of human well-being. In addition, the problem of depriving service to Kingston is avoided. Over future generations we can also expect (b) reduction in the particular pressures imposed by the carbon footprint of travel between Windsor and Québec. Following best European/Asian practices, modified by site-specific environmental assessment, (c) with mitigation it may be possible to avoid increasing planetary pressures on biodiversity as well as (d) impacts on fresh water. Still, rolling this forward over multiple generations, we want to ensure monitoring for unforeseen environmental problems by establishing, in each affected region, capability for ongoing environmental monitoring, funded by revenue sharing from HSR operation.

    The worst option, according to this, is the status quo. Doing nothing now about intercity travel has the worst impact on well-being and planetary pressures for future generations. The Frontenac/Napanee options are not much better. An independent public panel, I believe, would confirm these rankings and could also shed more light on the others.

    Section 9

    Recommendations to the Government of Canada

    1
    Make corridor proposals public, including the CN/401 corridor. Immediately require Alto to develop and make public feasible alignment plans for (a) the CN/401 corridor, along with any alignment plans under active consideration for (b) the northern Canadian Shield corridor; and (c) the Frontenac/Napanee corridor. Require each of these plans to include cost estimates for wildlife and road crossings at high international standards, for land replacement to maintain farm viability, and for revenue sharing to fund ongoing monitoring of environmental impacts.
    2
    Make corridor choice a public choice. Prior to Final Investment Decision, appoint an independent public panel to recommend choice between corridor proposals (including the status quo), (a) on grounds of public interest, community impact, and environmental impacts/pressures; (b) considering these impacts for several generations (c) with powers to modify any proposals submitted, and (d) with a mandate to recommend mechanisms of recourse and accountability.
    3
    Obtain Indigenous peoples’ consent. Prior to Final Investment Decision, ensure that free and informed consent to impacts on their lands has been given by affected Indigenous peoples, along with mechanisms of recourse and accountability for community and environmental impacts on those lands as well as for commitments to Indigenous participation and community benefits.
    4
    Establish accountability mechanisms and environmental monitoring. Withhold Final Investment Decision until mechanisms of recourse and accountability have been established to support commitments for (a) landowners, (b) communities, (c) wildlife impacts, and (d) Indigenous communities. Do not invest in an HSR proposal that does not allocate revenue in the operational phase for ongoing regionally-controlled environmental monitoring.
    5
    Protect VIA Rail with legislation and funding. Establish service levels and funding streams for regional service along the Windsor-Montreal corridor and for VIA Rail’s non-corridor network – The Ocean, The Canadian, and remote services.
    Section 10

    Recommendations to Alto

    A1
    Corridor proposals. From the perspective of development ethics, corridor choice is not yours to make; this is properly a public choice. Accordingly, you are obligated to prepare development options for all of the feasible HSR corridors, to facilitate public choice among them.
    A2
    Request and obtain Indigenous people’s consent. Ensure that free and informed consent to impacts on their lands has been given by affected Indigenous peoples.
    A3
    Negotiate livelihood replacement. In negotiating with landowners, ensure that compensation covers livelihood replacement (including, for farmers, drainage and access to fields), including revenue sharing if necessary.
    A4
    Negotiate revenue sharing for ongoing regionally-controlled environmental monitoring during the operational phase.
    A5
    Negotiate mechanisms of recourse and accountability to support commitments made for (a) landowners, (b) communities, (c) wildlife impacts and environmental monitoring, and (d) Indigenous communities.
    References

    Notes

    1
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, How History Led Us Here, March 2026, citizenresearch.ca/how-history-led-us-here, and Where We Stand on the Route, altohsrcitizenresearch.ca, accessed April 9, 2026.
    2
    Mahbub ul Haq, Reflections on Human Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
    3
    Peter Penz, Jay Drydyk, and Pablo Bose, Displacement by Development: Ethics, Rights, and Responsibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
    4
    Smyth, Eddie, Susanna Price, and Frank Vanclay, ‘Fair and Equitable Land Access (FELA) by Development Projects: Enhancing Governance for Sustainable Development Outcomes When Projects Displace People,’ (Sustainable Development 2025, p. 3.
    5
    Ibid.
    6
    Penz, Drydyk, and Bose 2011, p. 211.
    7
    Union Internationale des Chemins de fer (UIC), ‘The Definition of High Speed Rail’ (UIC Communications: 2018). Accessed April 13, 2026. uic.org.
    8
    Wikipedia, ‘High-Speed Rail in Europe’ (March 31, 2026) en.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia, ‘Shinkansen’ (March 14, 2026) en.wikipedia.org.
    9
    While I find that this argument is sound, it is only fair to note that others disagree. The core argument I have outlined is supplemented with other lines of argument in Alto’s ‘Fast Forward’ document (Alto (VIA HFR – VIA TGF Inc.), ‘Fast Forward: Shaping Canada’s Future with a High-Speed Rail Network’ (March 2025) altotrain.ca) For opposing arguments see Tasnim Fariha, and David Jones, ‘High-Speed Potential, High-Stakes Decisions: The Policy Case for Alto’ (C.D. Howe Institute, December 11, 2025) cdhowe.org, Jerome Gessaroli, ‘Canada’s next Budget Bomb Is the Alto High-Speed Rail Project’ (Macdonald-Laurier Institute, January 14, 2026.) macdonaldlaurier.ca. The Citizens Research Initiative argues for upgrading the status quo to a ‘High Performance Rail’ system with top speeds not exceeding 200km/hr. (Where we Stand on the Route, op. cit.) For arguments that raise complications rather than expressing outright opposition, see also: Johnny Renton, ‘The Good, Bad and Awful of the Alto High Speed Rail Project, and How to Fix the Flaws and Concerns Surrounding It.’ (Substack: Next Stop, Downtown Canada, February 4, 2026) johnnyrenton.substack.com; Kathryn Smith Exon and Egon Terplan. ‘Keeping High-Speed Rail on Track: Learning from Other North American Projects’ (Toronto: School of Cities, June 6, 2025) schoolofcities.utoronto.ca; and Michael Schabas, ‘Alto Conceptual Design and Business Case” (January 12, 2026) available on Google Docs, Google Docs.
    10
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, The Station Location Problem (2026) citizenresearch.ca/station-location.
    11
    Penz, Drydyk, and Bose, Chapter 7.
    12
    Nassir Mwanje, ‘Community Perceptions of Fair Compensation in Land Expropriation: Insights from Uganda through a Capability Approach’ (Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, forthcoming).
    13
    Ontario Federation of Agriculture, ‘High-Speed Rail’ (2026) ofa.on.ca/issues/high-speed-rail.
    14
    Alto (VIA HFR – VIA TGF Inc.), Advanced Engineering Driving High-Speed Rail (February 19, 2026) altotrain.ca.
    15
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, Fire Services – Citizen Research (March 2026) citizenresearch.ca/fire-services, and Healthcare Access – Citizen Research (March 2026) citizenresearch.ca/healthcare-access.
    16
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, ‘VIA Rail on the Kingston Subdivision: Service Erosion, Funding Collapse, and the National Rail Risk from ALTO HSR’ (April 2026) citizenresearch.ca/via-future.
    17
    Alto (VIA HFR – VIA TGF Inc.), ‘Building Together: Indigenous Partnerships in Alto’s Vision’ altotrain.ca.
    18
    United Nations, Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (General Assembly, 2007) un.org
    19
    Alto (VIA HFR – VIA TGF Inc.). What We Heard & What We’re Doing Report. 2023. altotrain.ca.
    20
    World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
    21
    The ‘planetary pressures’ framework is based on several decades of ‘planetary boundaries’ research. To simplify: the core idea is that there are nine specific dimensions of planetary change that range from low risk to growing risk to high risk for human flourishing. Among these, ozone depletion, climate change, biodiversity, ocean acidification, land use change, and freshwater use are most familiar in the public sphere. A good entry point into the literature is Human Development Report 2020: The Next Frontier; Human Development and the Anthropocene, Chapter 2, ‘Unprecedented – The Scope, Scale and Speed of Human Pressures on the Planet’ (New York: UNDP, 2020), pp. 45-68.
    22
    UNDP op. cit., p. 51.
    23
    See Andrew Hyett, How Hydrology Shapes the Design – and Cost – of High-Speed Rail (March 2026) citizenresearch.ca, and the following publications by ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative (2026): Potential Effects of High-Speed Rail on the Napanee River citizenresearch.ca/napanee-river-2; A River in the Path of Two Rail Corridors citizenresearch.ca/salmon-river;
    24
    See Hyett op. cit. and two other publications of ALTO HSR Citizen Research Imitative (2026): The Wildlife Crossing Problem citizenresearch.ca/wildlife-crossings; Wildlife Connectivity, Hunting Heritage, and Game Species Habitat: Impacts of the Proposed ALTO High-Speed Rail Corridors citizenresearch.ca.
    Guest submission by Jay Drydyk, Professor Emeritus, Carleton University · Published by the ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · citizenresearch.ca
    Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high-speed rail corridor.