Learning from Canada’s Biggest Transit Projects
What the Eglinton Crosstown, Ottawa’s LRT, and fifteen years of hard lessons tell us about the track ahead for ALTO.
Canada’s two largest recent transit public-private partnerships — the Eglinton Crosstown in Toronto and the Confederation Line in Ottawa — share a documented pattern: large bundled contracts, adversarial breakdowns, technical warnings recorded and set aside, and costs well above the estimates that won approval.
Some of the firms that delivered those projects are also members of the Cadence consortium awarded the ALTO co-development contract. That is a fact about who is in the room, not a prediction about what they will do. This page sets out the record and the questions it raises, before the commitments become irreversible.
Canada’s largest transit P3s, at a glance
| Project and model | Estimate, outturn, and outcome |
|---|---|
| Ottawa Confederation Line, Stage 1 P3, DBFOM, 30-year term |
Budgeted at about $2.1 billion; construction delivered close to that figure, with legal costs continuing. Opened more than 15 months late; two derailments in 2021; a public inquiry under Justice William Hourigan followed. |
| Ottawa Trillium Line, Stage 2 P3, DBFOM |
Contracted at about $1.6 billion. Delivered more than two years late, with subcontractor litigation unresolved. The Hourigan inquiry examined the evaluation process that led to the award. |
| Eglinton Crosstown LRT P3, DBFOM, 30-year term (Crosslinx) |
The 2015 contract was worth about $9.1 billion for construction and 30 years of maintenance, tunnelling having been let separately. The reported baseline was $12.2 billion in 2019 and about $13.1 billion by early 2026 — roughly $8 billion above the estimate at the start of construction. Opened February 2026, some six years later than first promised. Settlements to the consortium exceeded half a billion dollars, including $325 million in 2020 after a court found Metrolinx’s refusal to treat the pandemic as a contractual emergency unreasonable. |
| HS2 Phase 1, United Kingdom Hybrid public and contracted delivery |
The National Audit Office reported in June 2026 that the cost of the London–Birmingham programme has roughly doubled since 2020 — an increase of some £36 billion excluding inflation — with the full railway now expected three to thirteen years later than planned. The benefit-cost ratio stood at 1.2 at the 2020 decision to proceed; recomputed on the costs now known, the auditor puts it at 0.3 to 0.4. The northern leg was cancelled in 2023. |
| California High-Speed Rail Public authority delivery |
Approved by voters in 2008 against a US$33 billion estimate. The authority’s 2023 business plan put the full system in the range of US$88–128 billion. No segment is yet in revenue service. |
The two Canadian cases were urban light-rail systems measured in kilometres and costing in the low billions. ALTO is a corridor project of a different order — roughly 1,000 kilometres end to end, through terrain with no Canadian precedent, at a published capital estimate of $60–90 billion. That published figure is a Class 5 estimate carrying a ±50 per cent accuracy band; the Initiative’s reference-class analysis, anchored to sixteen comparable completed projects, puts the central figure nearer $143 billion. Whatever the eventual number, the risks associated with the delivery model scale with it.
What these projects have in common
1 · Contracts too large to attract genuine competition
Bundling design, construction, financing and decades of maintenance into a single DBFOM contract limits the pool of firms able to bid. Both Eglinton and Ottawa drew few competing proposals. Where competitive tension is weak, the discipline that is supposed to make a P3 efficient is weak with it. The Ontario Auditor General documented this effect across dozens of provincial P3s in 2014.
2 · Adversarial relationships and litigation as a cost driver
In both Canadian cases the relationship between government and contractor became adversarial, and the public paid for it. Metrolinx settlements to Crosslinx exceeded half a billion dollars. Ottawa has been in continuous legal dispute across both stages. A fixed-price structure intended to transfer risk to the private sector can instead reward treating every difficulty as a claim rather than a problem to be solved jointly — a dynamic visible in the settlement record on both projects.
3 · Technical warnings recorded, then set aside
In each case credible technical warnings existed before the problems materialised. The TTC’s 2012 expert panel anticipated several of Eglinton’s specific failure modes. Ottawa’s technical evaluators raised concerns about the Trillium Line bid before award. In each case the warnings are on the record and the decisions were taken anyway.
4 · Political pressure and the rush to open
Justice Hourigan’s inquiry found that political pressure was a significant factor in the decision to open the Confederation Line before the system was ready. The sequence — announcement, delay, revised announcement — points to a structural tension between the political incentives that attach to megaproject announcements and the technical realities of delivering them.
5 · A winning bid that cannot be verified from outside
A PSPC memorandum to the Deputy Minister of 12 December 2024, released under access to information, records that the Preferred Bidder’s total score was well above the other teams, in large part because of a very competitive commercial package. PSPC asked subject-matter experts and evaluators to confirm the low commercial bid would not put delivery at risk; the memorandum states they were told it was not a concern, and that two further series of expert reviews confirmed the same. BDO Canada LLP, engaged as independent fairness monitor from January 2022, gave an unqualified assurance in its Final Report of 20 May 2025 that the process it observed, through to the close of the Pre-Development Agreement, was carried out in a fair, open and transparent manner, and recorded no fairness concerns at any phase.
The bid contents themselves remain unreleased. We draw no conclusion about how the price was arrived at, which is not on the public record. The point is narrower: the assurance that the price was deliverable rests on reviews the public cannot see, and without the bid there is no external baseline against which cost movement during co-development can be measured.
The same firms, a new project
Several members of the Cadence consortium have delivered major Canadian transit infrastructure before, including the projects described above. The table records roles, not judgements. Participation in a project that ran over budget is not evidence about any firm’s conduct, and none is asserted here.
| Firm and role in Cadence | Previous Canadian rail and transit involvement |
|---|---|
| AtkinsRéalis Engineering member Renamed from SNC-Lavalin in 2023 |
Member of the Crosslinx consortium on the Eglinton Crosstown; partner in Rideau Transit Group on Ottawa’s Confederation Line Stage 1; contractor on the Trillium Line, Stage 2, where subcontractor litigation remains unresolved. |
| CDPQ Infra Lead investor and financial partner Infrastructure arm of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec |
Developer, owner and operator of the RÉM in Montréal under a long-term concession with availability payments. The RÉM de l’Est extension was discontinued in 2022 and returned to public planning. |
| SNCF Voyageurs Operations partner |
Operator of the French TGV network. Substantial high-speed operating experience; no prior Canadian infrastructure delivery record. |
| Keolis Operations and service design |
International transit operator with limited Canadian presence. Operating experience rather than capital delivery. |
| Air Canada Consortium member |
An airline rather than a rail infrastructure firm. Its participation has not been publicly explained. What can be stated is structural: a carrier with a significant share of Toronto–Montréal and Toronto–Ottawa air traffic is a member of the consortium developing a rail service that would compete for some of the same passengers. |
Before the commitments become irreversible
This page does not argue that ALTO should not be built. It argues that the record of large Canadian transit P3s makes the following questions worth putting on the public record while they can still be answered usefully.
Documents and reporting relied on
Where a figure above is drawn from press reporting rather than a primary document, it is stated as reported and the primary source is identified where one exists. Corrections are welcome and will be made on the page.