Context 5 pages
Documents 7 pages Community
Resources 10 pages Environment 13 pages Community
Impacts 9 pages
How History Led Us Here
The privatization of CN Rail in 1995 set in motion a thirty-year chain of consequences that ultimately left a mega-project like Alto as one of the few remaining options. This is that chain.
The argument in brief
If you live along the proposed Alto southern corridor, you may be asking a reasonable question: why does improving train travel between Toronto and Quebec City require carving an entirely new railway through our farmland, our protected ecosystems, and our communities? Why can’t the government simply fix the rail service we already have?
The answer lies in a decision made three decades ago that most Canadians have forgotten about — but whose consequences shape Alto today. This page is where history led us here. The four pages in this section explain the layers. This one connects them.
From CN Privatization to Alto HSR
Canadian National Railway incorporated as a Crown corporation. For decades it serves a dual purpose: freight carrier and vehicle for national policy, connecting communities and enabling economic development across Canada.
VIA Rail spun off as a separate Crown corporation to handle intercity passenger service — but continues to operate on CN’s tracks. This is the structural flaw that will define the next forty years.
The Government of Canada privatizes CN Rail, selling the entire rail infrastructure — tracks, rights-of-way, signalling systems — while keeping VIA Rail as the passenger operator. VIA becomes a tenant in someone else’s house. Today, VIA owns just 3% of the tracks it operates on.
CN repositions itself as a continental freight carrier, prioritizing its own trains. Canada never passes a passenger rail priority law (unlike the U.S., which gives Amtrak priority over freight). VIA’s on-time performance collapses: from 84% in 2011 to 56% in 2022 to 30% in Q1 2025 — when CN imposed speed restrictions on VIA’s new Siemens Venture trains and withheld data from engineers trying to fix the problem.
The government funds VIA Rail to study High Frequency Rail: dedicated passenger tracks at 177 km/h alongside existing corridors. Cost: under C$5 billion. Expected construction time: four years. Read the full HFR story →
VIA Rail Business Case confirms HFR as viable. Construction was intended to take about four years. Passengers would have been boarding by now.
The government issues a Request for Expressions of Interest inviting the private sector to propose speeds above 200 km/h under a 50-year DBFOM concession. No public explanation. No side-by-side comparison of HFR vs. HSR ever published. The simpler, cheaper, faster option disappears from the public record.
Government confirms Alto: C$80–120 billion, 300 km/h+, private concession to 2085, passengers in the 2040s. The Cadence consortium — including AtkinsRéalis (formerly SNC-Lavalin) and CDPQ Infra — wins the co-development contract. C$3.9 billion in public funds committed to the co-development phase alone.
On its own tracks, VIA runs on time — historically close to 90% on-time performance between Ottawa and Montréal, where it owns the track. On CN’s tracks, it barely functions. The issue is not operational. It is structural. And it is a direct consequence of the 1995 privatization.
The Deep Irony
There is a deep irony in this trajectory. The privatization of CN in 1995 stripped the government of control over rail infrastructure. Decades of freight-first priorities then degraded passenger service to the point where it became politically unacceptable. The government’s response is now — rather than reclaiming public control over the infrastructure — to hand a second layer of privatization to a consortium of private companies.
Via Rail, Canada’s only organization with decades of experience operating daily passenger rail, has been conspicuously sidelined. Over 90% of VIA’s passengers travel the Québec City–Windsor corridor — the very corridor that Alto will serve. If the profitable ridership migrates to the privately operated Alto line, critics warn that VIA will be “left with the crumbs” — stripped of the revenue it needs to subsidize service to western Canada, the Maritimes, and rural communities.
The options that were foreclosed along the way:
Legislated passenger priority (like the U.S. Amtrak statute) — every attempt failed. Incremental track upgrades requiring CN’s cooperation — CN had no incentive to cooperate. Buying back the infrastructure — technically possible, practically unthinkable. Dedicated passenger tracks alongside existing corridors — this was the HFR plan, quietly abandoned in 2022.
Each was blocked, abandoned, or deemed insufficient. And so, Canada arrived at Alto.
The Costs of Policy Failures Downloaded to Communities
For the communities along Alto’s proposed southern route in Eastern Ontario, this history matters enormously. The reason two new lines of steel are being proposed through your farmland, through the Frontenac Arch Biosphere, through the landscapes that define your communities, is not because this was the only way to achieve better passenger rail. It is because a series of political decisions — beginning with the privatization of CN — foreclosed the simpler alternatives.
Had the government retained ownership of the rail corridor, or legislated meaningful passenger priority, or invested consistently in incremental improvements over the past thirty years, we might today have a reliable, publicly operated, moderately faster rail service on upgraded existing tracks — without the need to expropriate agricultural land, disrupt sensitive ecosystems, fragment communities, or spend $80–120 billion.
Instead, the costs of federal policy failures are being downloaded to the communities in the path of a new corridor. And all of this is presented as inevitable — as the necessary price of progress — when in truth it is the consequence of choices that were made far away, decades ago.
Read the Complete Analysis
Each page in this series addresses one layer of this history. The government documents section documents what officials knew and said internally. The community resources section connects you to the organizations and people working on this right now.
A note on accountability: This page is a synthesis, not a repeat of the Government Documents section on citizenresearch.ca. The documents pages cover what officials said and knew internally. This History & Context section covers the longer arc: the structural decisions over thirty years that made Alto feel inevitable — and the questions that follow from understanding that arc.