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.
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, look at why that outcome suited ALTO’s private-sector partner very well, and explain why none of it can be patched from the inside.
Much of this chapter draws on documents obtained through Access to Information requests — internal board and executive records, procurement files, and a Fairness Monitor report — along with the CRI’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.
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.
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.
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, plus a formal Fairness Monitor report on the procurement, 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.
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. The process included 36 structured private meetings between the government and each bidder over eight and a half months. In effect, bidders had real influence over what the project would become, not just how to build a fixed spec.
The winning bidder builds bigger things
The winning consortium, Cadence — CDPQ Infra, AtkinsRéalis, Keolis, SYSTRA Canada, SNCF Voyageurs, and Air Canada — isn’t built for a modest rehabilitation of a disused rail corridor. Its members built Montréal’s REM and operate France’s TGV network. When Cadence’s financial bid came in low enough that officials double-checked it with outside experts, the likeliest explanation is that Cadence was pricing a far more ambitious, dedicated high-speed specification — the kind of project its members actually build.
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.
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.
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
ALTO’s published business case shows a net loss of $21.1 billion in present-value terms and a benefit-cost ratio of about 0.4 — meaning every dollar spent returns about forty cents of measured value. These are the government’s own figures. Treasury Board’s minimum threshold for infrastructure investment is a ratio of 1.0. 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.
| Scenario | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Published (government figures) Cost assumed: $60–90B | Benefit-cost ratio ~0.40 |
| CRI reference-class estimate Cost assumed: ~$143B | Benefit-cost ratio ~0.03–0.11 |
| Treasury Board minimum threshold | Benefit-cost ratio of 1.0 required |
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.
| Source | 2055 ridership estimate |
|---|---|
| ALTO’s public target | 24 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) model | 18–19 million (year 30) |
| Standard bias correction applied to ALTO’s own figure | 8.4 million |
| CRI bottom-up model, central case | 9.2 million (range: 3.7–17.2 million) |
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.
The problems above are risks for the public. For ALTO’s private partner, they’re a position of strength
The procurement gave the Cadence consortium a planning-and-design mandate whose financial structure shields it from the project’s analytical weak points, while giving it a large stake in the project’s long-term revenue if it goes ahead. Here’s how that plays out in practice.
How the risk is shared
How the sequencing works in Cadence’s favour
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 of ALTO 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 in the rest of this report
This chapter has traced one argument in five 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); its private partner’s position is optimized around those same weaknesses (2.4); and none of it can be fixed by refinement (2.5). The chapters that follow set out the alternative.