Category: Post-consultation

  • Counting the crossings

    Counting the Crossings

    ALTO says it will not wall off communities, and points to France and Spain. Those countries did something else as well, and the letter leaves it out.

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Analytical Brief · Published August 2026
    ⚠ What ALTO Told Kingston Readers

    On 14 August 2026, a letter in the Kingston Whig-Standard from ALTO’s Chief Project Management Officer and Cadence’s Project Director told corridor residents the railway “will not create a wall between communities”, nor a barrier to wildlife or water. As proof it can be done, the letter offered two numbers: France has built more than 4,000 structures across roughly 2,700 km of high-speed line, and Spain more than 900 across roughly 750 km.

    The letter does not mention Kingston, the route, where stations would go, what any of it costs, or expropriation. It does say preserving access has been a key principle from the beginning. ALTO’s own Preserving Access and Movement page carries a last-modified date of 7 May 2026 — after the consultation closed on 24 April.

    The Short Version

    Take ALTO’s own figures and divide them through. France works out to about one structure every 675 metres. Spain, about one every 833 metres. Those are the rates being offered as reassurance.

    The trouble is that a count of structures built tells you nothing about how many crossings were closed. A railway can put in 900 bridges and still cut off 3,000 field entrances, farm lanes and township roads. The letter gives the top half of the fraction and leaves out the bottom.

    Kingstonians already have ALTO’s own answer to this. In February 2026, ALTO’s Vice-President of Systems Engineering told Kingston City Council that crossings would be consolidated to bring costs down, and that the company would try to limit how many overpasses get built. That was six months before the letter, to the same city, on the same subject.

    There is a larger omission. France did not solve farm severance with bridges. It has a legal procedure that lets the state reorganise the surrounding farmland so that a farm cut in two can be put back into a workable shape, paid for by the project. On one French high-speed line, 3,700 hectares of land were bought up in advance so that farmers could be compensated in land rather than only in cash. Ontario has nothing of the kind.

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    Counting the Crossings — Full Brief (PDF)
    The arithmetic behind ALTO’s France and Spain comparison, and the land instrument the letter leaves out

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    The Arithmetic

    What ALTO’s own numbers work out to

    Neither figure in the letter is disputed here. They are simply divided through. A structure count only becomes meaningful once you know how far apart the structures are, and how far apart the things they are meant to replace used to be.

    ~675 m
    average gap between structures on the French network, using ALTO’s figures
    4,000 structures over 2,700 km
    ~833 m
    average gap on the Spanish line ALTO cites
    900 structures over 750 km
    1.25–2 km
    typical spacing of public roads across eastern Ontario’s concession grid
    before counting farm lanes and driveways

    There is a third number the letter does not offer, and it cuts the other way. HS2 in Britain is the most recent comparable project of this kind: a brand-new high-speed line built through peri-urban and rural England. Its first phase runs about 225 km and will carry more than 500 bridging structures, including over 50 major viaducts — roughly one structure every 450 m. That is about half again the French rate, through country a good deal more built up than eastern Ontario. The most recent comparable project provided more, not fewer, than the average ALTO offers as reassurance.

    The spread between the three is itself worth noticing. A fifty per cent difference between two European networks tells you that these totals are governed by terrain, by how much of a route sits in tunnel or on viaduct, and by what each project counts as a structure. About nine tenths of HS2’s first phase runs in tunnel, in cutting or on structures, so a large share of those 500 exist to carry the railway over the landscape rather than to carry a community across the railway. A structure count is a construction statistic, not a standard of community access.

    Eastern Ontario was surveyed on a grid. Roads run at regular intervals, and between them sit farm lanes, private driveways and municipal drains. Whether a European average is enough for that grid is exactly the question people along the corridor are asking. Quoting the French figure does not answer it. It assumes the answer.

    There is a comparison closer to home that nobody has yet made. Highway 416 is a modern, fully grade-separated corridor built through the same survey grid, the same farmland and several of the same municipalities. How many crossings Ontario provided on that road is not something this brief has established, but it is the obvious yardstick, and it ought to be established before a French average is relied on.

    The Missing Number

    How many roads are we talking about?

    The denominator is not actually a mystery. Canada’s own transport department has published it.

    In a briefing note prepared for a Parliamentary committee in March 2023, Transport Canada set out what a full high-speed line between Québec City and Toronto would require: a fully enclosed and fenced corridor, a straighter alignment, double tracking throughout, and complete grade separation on a route that currently carries more than 1,000 public and private crossings.

    That figure described the northern route, through comparatively empty country — Canadian Shield, wetlands, big rural lots. The southern corridor now being prioritised runs through some of the most intensively farmed land in eastern Ontario, where the concession grid is tightest. On the southern option, 1,000 is more likely a floor than a ceiling.

    The Initiative’s own road severance analysis puts the proportion of crossings permanently closed rather than bridged on rural high-speed corridors at somewhere between 30 and 60 per cent. Applied to a floor of 1,000, that is 300 to 600 roads dead-ended — our estimate, not a figure ALTO or Transport Canada has published.

    1,000+
    public and private crossings on the alignment
    Transport Canada, March 2023
    300–600
    roads likely closed, on the Initiative’s estimate
    30 to 60 per cent of crossings
    $3.2–8.4B
    Initiative’s estimated cost of the crossings that would be built
    never shown as a separate line

    That last figure matters for a different reason. Grade separation is one of the most expensive parts of any high-speed corridor, and a sum of that size has never appeared as its own line in ALTO’s published capital estimate. Neither has any methodology explaining how many crossings will be built, or to what standard, or how it will be decided which roads are simply stopped up.

    The reassurance in the August letter is offered in the absence of the one document that could support it. Further detail is set out in the Initiative’s technical analysis of road severances.

    On the Record

    What ALTO told Kingston in February

    Six months before this letter appeared in Kingston’s paper, ALTO’s Vice-President of Systems Engineering and Interface sat before Kingston City Council and was asked about exactly this. The transcript is the fullest account ALTO has given in public of how it approaches road crossings, and it does not read the way the letter does.

    The reassurance

    Asked by a councillor whether there would be a standard distance between crossings, he described a working assumption that every road would get some form of duct or overpass, since the roads belong to municipalities or road authorities and cannot be cut unilaterally.

    The qualification, in the same answer

    He went on to say that in reality some crossings would be looked at for consolidation, to lower costs and improve construction, subject to discussion with the road authority.

    The objective

    Pressed by the Deputy Mayor, he set it out plainly: grade separations would vary by area, would be settled during route selection, and ALTO would “try and limit the number of overpasses that we’ll need to get created”.

    And the fencing

    He confirmed that modern high-speed rail must be completely segregated and fully fenced anywhere level access is possible, whether the line runs at 200 or 300 km/h.

    Read together: a starting assumption that is subject to cost-driven consolidation, an explicit goal of building as few overpasses as possible, and continuous fencing between whatever crossings survive.

    The councillor’s actual question — is there a standard distance between crossings — was not answered, and no standard has been published since. February’s statements and August’s letter were addressed to the same city.

    Three Problems

    Why the structure count does not settle it

    You are being shown half a fraction

    The number that answers the severance question is a ratio: structures built, divided by accesses cut off. The letter supplies only the first. Every complaint recorded by French and Spanish farmers over the last forty years is perfectly compatible with the figures quoted.

    Not every structure reconnects anything

    “Engineering structures” and “viaducts” include everything the railway needs to build itself: bridges over rivers, crossings of existing motorways and railways, tunnels through hills. A viaduct over a river gorge restores nobody’s access to their back field. How many of the 4,000 exist to reconnect a severed local road or laneway is not stated, and is certainly a much smaller number.

    A different landscape

    The French network largely runs through consolidated farming country. Eastern Ontario is a survey grid of concession roads, side roads, long farm lots and dead ends. The same rate of crossings produces a very different result depending on how much there was to cross in the first place.

    The Missing Piece

    What France also built

    The most important thing missing from the letter is not a number. It is a law.

    Two of the countries with the longest high-speed rail experience did not leave farm access to be worked out project by project. They legislated it. France did so through its rural code; Germany passed a federal land consolidation statute in 1953 that covers exactly this situation. In both, farmers sit on the body that decides, that body can compulsorily redraw the farms and the farm tracks together, the proponent pays, and there is a right of appeal to the courts.

    France has a statutory procedure called aménagement foncier agricole et forestier — land reorganisation, formerly known as remembrement. Its stated purpose includes repairing the damage that major linear projects, high-speed railways among them, do to rural land. Where a line slices a farm in half, the surrounding parcels can be legally reorganised so that holdings are handed back in a shape a farmer can actually work. Local commissions run it under departmental authority, and the project pays for it.

    Land is also bought up ahead of time. A national rural land agency, SAFER, holds first refusal on farmland coming up for sale, so that displaced farmers can be given land instead of only a cheque. Spain has its own version of the same idea.

    This matters for who gets a say. In Canada there is no seat and no statutory role. On 4 June 2026 the five organisations representing effectively the whole farm sector in Ontario and Quebec concluded that ALTO’s proposed collaboration agreement was not in their members’ interests to sign. In France they would not have had to negotiate for a place at the table. They would already have had one, in law.

    This is not a minor administrative detail. On the Le Mans to Rennes high-speed line, roughly 3,700 hectares were placed in reserve, with agricultural land bought up as it came to market within three kilometres of the future route. In Ille-et-Vilaine alone, 48.5 km of new railway took about 480 hectares of crops and pasture — and against that, 720 hectares of land reserve were assembled and parcels across some 1,200 hectares either side of the track were reorganised, affecting more than 4,400 landowners, financed by the project and delivered through intercommunal commissions.

    In France and Germany In Ontario
    A legal procedure to reorganise farmland around a new line, whose express purpose includes repairing damage done by major linear infrastructure. No equivalent. There is no statutory land reorganisation for farms severed by infrastructure.
    Farmers hold seats on the deciding body, and decisions can be appealed to the courts. No seat and no statutory role. Five farm organisations declined ALTO’s collaboration agreement in June 2026 rather than accept its terms.
    A rural land agency with first refusal on farmland coming to market, used to assemble land reserves years ahead of construction. No equivalent agency and no statutory land reserve mechanism.
    Local commissions empowered to redraw parcel boundaries, operating under departmental authority. No equivalent body. No one can redraw the neighbours’ boundaries to make a severed farm whole again.
    Compensation in land is possible: a farmer who loses acreage can be given workable acreage back. Compensation in money only, for what is physically taken. Expropriation and negotiated purchase are the available tools.

    So the comparison in the letter is accurate and, at the same time, does not carry over. The French result rests partly on a legal instrument Canada does not have. A letter that cites France’s bridge count while saying nothing about France’s land reorganisation is describing half of how the problem was solved.

    Cadence’s Project Director is quoted in French farming trade coverage of that same Le Mans to Rennes project, explaining that the land reserve had to account for the right-of-way, the land reorganisation and the environmental compensation together.

    That gap is a problem in Canadian law rather than a failing of the project sponsor. It is still a gap, and it has to be closed before European results can reasonably be promised here. Closing it is not something ALTO can do on its own.

    Not Just How Many

    A structure is not automatically an answer

    Even where a crossing is built, two questions decide whether it is any use, and ALTO has published nothing on either.

    Size

    A livestock crossing and a machinery crossing are not the same structure. A standard cattle underpass runs about 2.1 metres high. A modern combine or grain cart needs 4 metres or more. A structure built to the wrong dimension is a closure as far as the equipment is concerned. No minimum dimensions have been published, and no spacing standard.

    Upkeep

    Nobody has decided who maintains these crossings over the decades that follow. ALTO describes its approach as still being developed. France took roughly a decade of litigation and legislation to settle the same question. Municipalities along the corridor have a direct interest in the answer.

    What closure pushes onto the road

    When a farm crossing is extinguished, the equipment does not disappear. It goes onto the public road. By the Ontario Federation of Agriculture’s own figure, slow-moving farm vehicles are 3.8 to 4.8 times more likely to be involved in a fatal collision per kilometre travelled. Severance is therefore also a road-safety question, and one that has not been assessed.

    The Initiative has examined the two halves of this problem separately: road severances and wildlife crossings.

    The Wall

    One claim that cannot be tested as written

    A railway running at over 300 km/h is fully grade-separated and fenced along its entire length. That is what grade separation means. The structure is a continuous barrier by engineering necessity. The real question is where the openings are and how many there are, not whether the barrier exists.

    What ALTO could reasonably promise is that severance will be mitigated at designed crossings, to a stated standard, at a stated spacing. A flat undertaking that no wall will be created is not something anyone can test — and it is a sentence that will be read back to ALTO by every landowner and every township that later finds an access closed.

    The same applies to wildlife. Continuous fencing is a barrier to animals except where crossings are designed in, and how well those crossings get used varies a great deal by species — a question examined at length in the Initiative’s work on wildlife crossings.

    An early study along a Spanish high-speed line, monitoring fifteen underpasses and two overpasses over two years, recorded no deer or wild boar crossings at all. That was 1996, and crossing design has moved on a great deal since; it should not be read as the last word. But the more recent evidence does not settle the question the other way either. A systematic review of crossing structures across roads and railways found that animals did cross them in almost every study examined — and yet a decline in wildlife movement after construction was prevented in fewer than 40 per cent of cases, with many structures poorly built or poorly monitored.

    On Spain’s network the best-documented harm is to birds. Camera monitoring from on board trains estimated 60.5 bird collisions per kilometre per year on a stretch carrying 53 trains a day, and 26.1 on a stretch carrying 25. Later work found the surrounding bird community changing species by species, and uncapped catenary poles acting as pitfall traps for birds that nest in cavities. Anti-birdstrike screens are routinely fitted to viaducts, and how well they work is still being studied.

    None of this says the corridor cannot be crossed by wildlife. It says that whether it can depends on design decisions and monitoring commitments not yet made, and that a flat undertaking given before them is not one a reader can test. Of the three promises, the one about natural water flows is the most straightforward to deliver.

    What Can Be Asked Now

    Six questions ALTO can answer today

    The letter makes commitments specific enough to be checked. None of the following requires a finalised route.

    The ratio
    Against Transport Canada’s figure of more than 1,000 crossings, how many are assumed to get a structure, and how many will be closed?
    Composition
    Of the French and Spanish structures cited, how many exist to reconnect a severed local access, as opposed to carrying the line over a river, motorway or railway?
    Ontario benchmark
    What crossing rate is assumed for the Ontario segments, and how was it arrived at? A comparison with Highway 416 through similar country would be useful to communities along the route.
    Criteria
    What method decides whether a road is bridged or dead-ended, and what detour distance is treated as acceptable in the countryside?
    Cost
    What provision for grade separation sits inside the capital estimate, and why has it never been shown as a separate line?
    Dimensions
    What minimum height and width will agricultural crossings meet, and what spacing standard applies? Will structures be sized for machinery or only for livestock?
    Maintenance
    Who owns and maintains each crossing structure over its life, and who carries that cost — ALTO, Cadence, or the municipality?
    Detours
    Where an access will not be reinstated, how much further will people have to drive to reach the nearest crossing, and what work supports that figure?
    Emergency access
    Which paramedic services and municipal fire departments have been consulted about response routes, on what dates, and what did they find?
    Severed farms
    Is any land reorganisation or land reserve contemplated for farms cut in two, and under what legal authority would it operate?

    The letter is right that decades of international experience exist and should be drawn on. The difficulty is that it draws on one half of that experience and leaves out the other. France built more than four thousand structures. France also rebuilt the farms. The second of those depended on machinery Ontario does not have, and no number of overpasses substitutes for it. Meanwhile the company’s own engineering executive has told this city’s council that the aim is to build as few overpasses as it can.

    Download Full Brief
    Counting the Crossings (PDF)
    Full analysis for municipal councils, farm organisations, MPs and residents along the corridor — with the per-kilometre working, the French statutory provisions and the complete source list

    Download PDF

    How to read the numbers on this page

    The French and Spanish structure counts are as given in the 14 August letter and used here as stated. The Transport Canada crossing count, the HS2 figures, the Kingston council statements, the French statutory provisions, the HS2 petition figures, the emergency-response research and the wildlife findings are all quoted from the sources listed below and can be checked there.

    Everything else is our own calculation or estimate, and is marked as such where it appears: the per-kilometre and spacing rates, the 30 to 60 per cent closure proportion and the 300 to 600 closures that follow from it, the $3.2 to $8.4 billion grade-separation range, and the detour arithmetic. Where ALTO or Transport Canada has not published a figure, we say so rather than inferring one, and we make no claim about what anyone knew or intended.

    Sources

    Primary documents and statements

    1.

    Maria Luisa Dominguez and Loïc Dorbec, “Building on decades of high-speed rail experience,” letter to the editor, Kingston Whig-Standard, 14 August 2026. Structure and length figures for France and Spain are as stated in that letter and are used here as given; the per-kilometre rates are the Initiative’s arithmetic.
    2.

    Chambres d’agriculture France, on aménagement foncier agricole et forestier and its role in repairing disruption caused to rural land by the route of major linear works, high-speed railways included. chambres-agriculture.fr
    3.

    Département d’Ille-et-Vilaine, on the LGV Bretagne–Pays de la Loire land reorganisation and land reserve programme: 48.5 km of new line, 480 ha absorbed, 720 ha of reserve constituted, 1,200 ha of parcels reorganised, more than 4,400 landowners affected, financed by the project owner. cg35.fr
    4.

    WikiAgri, on the land reserves assembled through SAFER for the Le Mans–Rennes high-speed line: approximately 3,700 ha placed in reserve, with agricultural land pre-empted within three kilometres of the future alignment. Contains the quoted remarks of Cadence’s Project Director on the composition of that reserve. wikiagri.fr
    5.

    Transport Canada, TRAN Committee Appearance Binder, Item 15: High Frequency Rail, 7 March 2023 — source of the figure of more than 1,000 public and private crossings on the alignment.
    6.

    City of Kingston, Council meeting of 17 February 2026, closed-captioning transcript — remarks of ALTO’s Vice-President of Systems Engineering and Interface on crossing consolidation, overpass numbers and corridor fencing.
    7.

    HS2 Phase 1 structure count: more than 500 bridging structures including over 50 major viaducts, per HS2 Ltd’s head of civils structures, reported in New Civil Engineer, 15 June 2022, and repeated on the Institution of Civil Engineers project page. Route length taken as approximately 225 km; some sources give 208 route km, which would raise the per-kilometre rate rather than lower it.
    8.

    Wildlife. Rodríguez, Crema and Delibes (1996), on underpass and overpass use along Spanish high-speed line. Rytwinski and others, systematic review and meta-analysis of crossing-structure effectiveness, for the finding on movement decline. Barrientos and Borda-de-Água, “Railways as Barriers for Wildlife: Current Knowledge,” in Railway Ecology (Springer, 2017). García de la Morena and others (2017) for the on-board camera collision estimates; Malo and others (2017) on bird response and catenary-pole mortality; and work on high-speed rail and bird-community change published in PLOS One (2024).
    9.

    Erin Durant, “Alto: Which farm roads stay open and who pays?” 16 August 2026 — source for the German Flurbereinigungsgesetz parallel, the seats-and-appeal structure of the French and German commissions, crossing dimensions for livestock versus machinery, the unresolved maintenance question, the OFA slow-moving-vehicle collision figure, and the last-modified metadata on ALTO’s agricultural pages.
    10.

    Joint statement of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, l’Union des producteurs agricoles, National Farmers Union (Ontario), Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario and Union des cultivateurs franco-ontariens, 16 June 2026, following their 4 June meeting on ALTO’s proposed collaboration agreement.
    11.

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, Road severances (technical analysis, March 2026 — source of the closure proportions and grade separation cost range) and Wildlife crossings.
    12.

    Ontario road spacing reflects the concession survey pattern across the corridor study area. Highway 416 is proposed here as a benchmark for comparison; no crossing-provision figure for that corridor has been established for this brief.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  Analytical Brief  ·  August 2026
    Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high-speed rail corridor.

  • 50000 jobs

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Plain Language Brief

    Where do 50,000 jobs come from?

    Alto says building the railway will support about 50,000 jobs. We checked that figure against two railways that publish both what they spend and who they employ.

    September 2026

    50,000

    Jobs Alto says the project will support during construction. Its report defines the figure once, in an appendix.

    ~18,000

    People actually working on the railway, on our estimate, at Alto’s own budget and schedule.

    The number is not wrong. It is a standard output of a standard economic model, and when we rebuilt it from scratch we got almost exactly the same answer. But roughly two thirds of it is not people building a railway, and Alto’s report says so in only one place.

    What Alto says

    Alto’s report Canada’s Moment: The Economic Opportunity of High-Speed Rail, published in August 2026, says the Québec City–Toronto line will support approximately 50,000 jobs while it is being built, and more than 5,000 once it is running. The figure has been repeated in federal announcements and in news coverage since. Almost everywhere it appears, it appears on its own: 50,000 jobs during construction.

    An earlier version of the number was slightly different. The federal announcement of 19 February 2025 gave over 51,000 jobs and a GDP gain of up to $35 billion a year. Transport Canada was still publishing that pairing in its 12 December 2025 release. Canada’s Moment, eight months later, gives 50,000 jobs and $24.5 billion. The report does not explain the difference between the two GDP figures, which is about 43 per cent.

    What the report actually says

    Further into the report, in section 4.3.3 and in two identical tables — Table 7 in the body and Table A4 in the appendix — the figure is described much more fully. There it is:

    • 50,000 full-time equivalent jobs. A full-time equivalent is work converted to a standard full-time measure. It is not a count of people.
    • Spread across a ten-year construction period.
    • Three kinds of work counted together. Direct work on the project; supply chain work at the firms that supply it; and induced work, meaning jobs supported when those workers spend their wages in shops, restaurants and everywhere else.
    • Produced by the 2019 Statistics Canada input-output model. This is a standard tool that estimates how spending in one part of the economy ripples through the rest of it.
    • Labelled an upper estimate.

    The appendix is careful about what this does and does not mean. It says the results describe economic activity supported by spending rather than a net gain to the country. It leaves them out of the project’s benefit-cost ratio. And it notes that the method does not allow for labour shortages or other limits on how much the economy can absorb.

    That is a fair and reasonably candid description. The difficulty is where it sits. Those two pages of an eighty-four page report carry it, and nothing else does. The summary at the front, the table comparing high-speed rail with the alternative, Alto’s website, the government announcements and the news coverage all carry the number without any of it.

    The number reaching the public is not the number the appendix defines. It is the same figure with its definition left behind.

    How we checked it

    Two railways publish both halves of the equation — how much they spend in a year, and how many people that spending puts to work.

    • HS2 in Britain publishes audited capital spending and a programme workforce figure every year.
    • The Réseau express métropolitain in Montréal, built by CDPQ Infra, published a jobs claim and periodic counts of workers on site. It is also the closest match anywhere to the way Alto has been set up.

    Both land in the same place: roughly 2,200 to 3,300 people working for every billion dollars spent in a year.

    Alto’s own published figures are $60 to $90 billion of capital over ten to fourteen years. That works out to $4.3 to $9.0 billion a year, which is around half the rate HS2 is spending at present. Applying the observed rate from those two projects to Alto’s own budget and schedule gives 13,000 to 21,000 people working on the programme in the central cases, and a ceiling near 30,000 if the project spends at the top of its range on the fastest possible build.

    We then rebuilt the whole 50,000 the way the appendix says it is built — adding supply chain and induced work on top of the people on site, using standard multiplier ratios.

    Rebuilding the 50,000 — ten-year build at the top of Alto’s capital range
    LayerWhat it meansPeople
    Owner and engineeringAlto’s own staff and the designers700 – 2,000
    Site and contractorPeople building the railway16,000 – 17,300
    Supply chainStaff at firms supplying the project14,400
    InducedJobs supported when those wages are spent18,200
    TotalAlto publishes 50,00050,600

    Initiative estimate, built from HS2 and REM published spending and workforce figures and standard supply-chain and induced multiplier ratios, applied to Alto’s own published capital range and schedule.

    What the check found

    50,600, against Alto’s published 50,000. The two agree to within one per cent, using the same three categories Alto names in its own appendix, by a route that borrows nothing from Alto’s model. On that basis the figure stands up as an output of the model that produced it.

    What the agreement also does is fix what is inside the number. On Alto’s own budget, roughly 18,000 of the 50,000 are people working on the railway. The rest — nearly two thirds — are jobs at supplier firms and jobs supported when wages are spent again. Fewer than four in ten are on the railway itself.

    A second and completely separate check gives the same answer. Direct labour usually accounts for 30 to 40 per cent of spending on heavy civil construction. Applied to $75 billion over ten to twelve years, at a fully loaded cost of $100,000 to $140,000 per worker-year, that supports somewhere between 13,400 and 30,000 people, centred near 19,000. Two methods that share no inputs bracket the same range.

    The other way of reading it

    Turn the question round and the arithmetic bites. If 50,000 really meant 50,000 people working on the railway, the project would need to spend $15.2 to $22.7 billion every year — a programme of $152 to $273 billion, against the $60 to $90 billion Alto has published. That is close to the $142 billion the Initiative’s own cost model predicts for this corridor. On the arithmetic set out here, Alto’s employment claim implies a more expensive railway than the one Alto has costed.

    The question the report leaves open

    “50,000 full-time equivalent jobs during a ten-year construction period” can be read two ways. It can mean 50,000 full-time equivalents working in each year of the decade. Or it can mean 50,000 years of work in total, spread across the decade. The two readings are ten times apart, and the report does not say which is meant.

    Only the first works arithmetically. The second would put the project at 0.67 job-years for every $1 million spent, against 2.6 at HS2 and 2.6 to 3.3 at the REM — roughly a quarter of the labour intensity of any comparable railway now being built. So this analysis treats the figure as an annual average, which is the reading that makes it defensible. A reader has no way to know without being told.

    Two more things in the tables

    Upper, not central

    Both tables head their value column “upper estimate”. One appendix earlier, the $24.5 billion GDP figure is labelled a central estimate, drawn from a stated range of sensitivity tests. So a range exists behind the 50,000 as well. What has been published is its top. The Initiative has recorded the same pattern twice before in this report: ranges that appear in the commissioned studies but not in the public summaries.

    The comparison figures have no source

    Table 2 sets high-speed rail against the alternative, “high-frequency rail”, and credits that alternative with 44,000 construction jobs at a capital cost of $45 to $75 billion. Neither figure carries a footnote, a source or a method anywhere in the document. The implied job intensity is internally consistent with the high-speed figures, so the numbers do not look wrong. The point is that a reader has no way to check them.

    This has been released before

    Employment modelling for this corridor has been published once already, and what happened to it is worth knowing. The Joint Project Office — VIA Rail and the Canada Infrastructure Bank — produced a business case for High Frequency Rail, the slower predecessor to this project, in December 2021. It gives construction employment as 71,000 to 96,000 annual equivalent jobs. That is a third unit of measure again, different from Alto’s 50,000 and from the 51,000 in the 2025 announcement, but stated plainly enough that a reader knows what is being counted.

    The Canada Infrastructure Bank released that document in full in November 2025. The same document, released under a separate access request, cuts the identical sentence: “an estimated ___ annual equivalent jobs could be created,” with the sentence left grammatical around the missing number and no exemption provision marked against it. We hold both versions.

    So the same employment figure, for the same corridor, has been treated as releasable by one federal body and withheld by another. That is worth putting on the record now, before anyone argues that the modelling behind the 50,000 is too commercially sensitive to publish.

    What we are asking Alto to publish

    Alto holds all of this already. None of it would cost anything the organisation does not have.

    1. Whether the 50,000 is an annual average, or a cumulative count of full-time-equivalent years.
    2. How it splits across the three categories Table A4 names: direct, supply chain and induced.
    3. The range the upper estimate was drawn from, and the central value within it.
    4. The year-by-year profile across the ten-year construction period.
    5. The assumption made about imports and Canadian content in the input-output run.
    6. The capital and operating spending profile that was fed into the model.
    7. The source of the 44,000 jobs and the $45 to $75 billion attributed to high-frequency rail in Table 2.

    And, more simply than any of that: carry the appendix definition alongside the number, wherever the number appears.

    How to read the numbers on this page

    Every figure attributed to Alto, HS2, CDPQ Infra, the California High-Speed Rail Authority or a Government of Canada release is quoted from the published source listed below, and can be checked there.

    Every other figure on this page is a calculation by the Initiative from those published inputs, and is described as an estimate where it appears. The reconstruction is an estimate rather than a measurement: it applies labour intensity observed on two comparator projects, together with standard supply-chain and induced multiplier ratios, to Alto’s own published capital range and schedule.

    Where Alto has not published something, this page says so rather than inferring it, and makes no claim about why any particular figure was or was not published.

    Read the full paper

    50,000 Jobs? — the research paper (PDF)

    Ten pages. Sets out the method in full, the year-by-year spending and workforce figures for HS2 and the Réseau express métropolitain, the layer-by-layer reconstruction, the job-years-per-dollar comparison against California and the US Federal Highway Administration, and the complete source list.

    Sources and notes

    1Alto, Canada’s Moment: The Economic Opportunity of High-Speed Rail, August 2026. Section 4.3.3 and Tables 7 and A4 (50,000 full-time equivalent jobs across direct, supply chain and induced effects, ten-year construction period, upper estimate; $86 billion value added; $23 billion tax revenue). Appendix A.2 methodology box (2019 Statistics Canada input-output model; static; excluded from the benefit-cost ratio; no account taken of labour shortages or capacity limits). Table A2 ($24.5 billion GDP, central estimate). Table 2 (44,000 construction jobs and $45 to $75 billion capital for high-frequency rail, unsourced). Section 4.3.3 sidebar (Canadian materials commitment).
    2Prime Minister of Canada, news release, 19 February 2025 (over 51,000 jobs during construction; GDP gain of up to $35 billion annually).
    3Transport Canada, news release, 12 December 2025, naming Ottawa–Montréal as the first segment (51,000 jobs during construction; up to $35 billion in GDP).
    4HS2 Ltd, Annual Report and Accounts 2022–23 to 2025–26 (capital expenditure and workforce), and six-monthly reports to Parliament, December 2024, July 2025 and May 2026 (jobs supported, supply chain businesses, spend to date, cost range and schedule).
    5CDPQ Infra, REM fact sheet and project pages; REM news releases of April 2018, November 2020 and June 2021 (34,000 jobs; over 30,000 direct and indirect jobs; more than 2,000 and then more than 3,000 workers on site).
    6California High-Speed Rail Authority, economic impact analyses for FY2023–24 and FY2024–25, and the March 2024 release on construction jobs and daily dispatch.
    7US Federal Highway Administration, Employment Impacts of Highway Infrastructure Investment (13,000 job-years per US$1 billion; 64/36 split between direct-and-indirect and induced).
    8Exchange rates: Bank of Canada daily rates, 1 September 2026. 1 GBP = C$1.8795; 1 USD = C$1.3896. Per-kilometre cost comparison uses the Initiative’s own ECI/CFI cost model.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative Independent, non-partisan citizen research on the proposed Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor. This page is a plain-language summary of the research paper 50,000 Jobs?, September 2026. The full paper sets out the method, the tables and the complete source list. Nothing on this page is a statement about the motives or conduct of any person or organisation. It is an analysis of published figures and of what those published figures do and do not say.

  • Procured and then

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Brief · September 2026

    Procured, and Then?

    ALTO commissioned the outside view. Whether it changed anything is the one question the record does not answer.

    Independent, non-partisan research · citizenresearch.ca
    In Plain Language

    The standard fix for over-optimistic infrastructure forecasts is to check them against what comparable projects actually cost and carried, rather than trusting the project’s own bottom-up numbers. That check is called reference-class forecasting, and ALTO commissioned one. It hired the firm founded by the researcher who developed the method.

    That is to ALTO’s credit. But commissioning a check and acting on it are different things, and only one document would show which happened: a comparison putting ALTO’s own published figures beside the ones the check produced. The Initiative asked for that record. The response was extended to 18 September 2026, with notice that a third party would be consulted — a step the Act provides for where an institution intends to release records that may contain a supplier’s commercial information.

    Meanwhile, in June 2026, ALTO published two studies putting large dollar values on the project’s benefits. Neither sets those benefits against what the line would cost. This brief looks at all three documents and asks what they show about how the project’s numbers are being assembled — and what a single unredacted release would settle.

    Download
    Procured, and Then? (PDF)
    The full brief, with sources
    Download PDF
    Related
    HPR Research Report, Chapter 1
    The forecasting framework this brief applies, set out in full
    Read Chapter 1
    01 · The Instrument

    ALTO commissioned the outside view

    Chapter 1 of the HPR Research Report sets out the method this brief relies on, so it is only summarised here. Large infrastructure forecasts miss in a consistent direction: costs come in high, benefits come in low. The established corrective is to stop treating a project as unique and instead compare it against the recorded outcomes of projects like it. The technique has a name — reference-class forecasting — and a literature behind it.

    In 2024 ALTO issued an advance contract award notice, PAS240625-002-00, for reference-class forecasting, should-cost and should-schedule modelling, and a series of Challenge Boards. An advance contract award notice is the instrument used when a department intends to award without competition, on the basis that only one supplier can do the work. The named supplier was Oxford Global Projects, the consultancy founded by Bent Flyvbjerg and Alexander Budzier.

    This is worth stating plainly, because it cuts against the easy criticism. ALTO did not ignore the outside view. It went out and procured it, from the people who developed it.

    02 · The Question

    Buying the instrument is not the same as letting it bind

    Reference-class forecasting corrects a forecast only if the number it produces is permitted to move the decision. A should-cost that is commissioned, delivered and then filed next to an unchanged inside-view estimate has not corrected anything. The method’s own literature is explicit that the failure mode is not the absence of the outside view but its subordination — the number produced, and then declined.

    So the decisive record is not the existence of the forecast. It is the comparison: does ALTO’s published capital cost reflect its own reference-class should-cost, or diverge from it? One document would answer that — the inside view and the outside view set side by side.

    A test, not an accusation

    This yields something better than a claim about anyone’s conduct: a prediction that can be checked. If the commissioned reference-class figures are more conservative than the numbers ALTO has published, the outside view was procured but not applied. If they match, the Initiative’s cost critique weakens accordingly.

    We do not know which. Nothing in this brief asserts that ALTO set the analysis aside. The point is that the question is answerable, that a single document answers it, and that the document exists.

    03 · The Clock

    The record will arrive after the decision has moved on

    The Initiative requested the reference-class records under access to information — the workbook, the should-cost and should-schedule outputs, and above all any document setting the inside view beside the outside view. Request A-2026-0004 was met in June 2026 with a ninety-day extension carrying the response to 18 September 2026, together with a notice invoking third-party consultation under section 27.

    Section 27 consultation is a routine step, and it is worth being precise about which way it points. The section applies where the head of an institution intends to disclose a record that may contain a third party’s commercial information: the notice tells that third party of the intention to release and gives it twenty days to make representations against disclosure, and invoking the section is what permits the response time to be extended. The notice on A-2026-0004 therefore records that Alto has turned its mind to releasing the reference-class records and has given Oxford Global Projects the opportunity to object. It is not a signal that the material will be withheld.

    What remains is a question of timing rather than intent. The third party may object and the institution may then withhold some of the figures; equally it may not. What can be said is the sequence: the record capable of testing the decision will arrive after further commitment has been made. What it contains, the disclosure itself will settle.

    Why timing decides this

    An outside-view check disciplines a decision only while the decision is still open. Once enough money is committed, the arithmetic changes: the cost of stopping is subtracted from the cost of continuing, and a project can show better value for money the more has already been spent on it. Britain’s High Speed Two reached exactly that point — the National Audit Office found in June 2026 that the ratio for completing the programme had risen even as the programme grew more expensive, because the estimated cost of cancelling had more than quadrupled.

    The cheapest moment to apply the test is before that crossover, not after it.

    04 · The Benefit Case

    Two studies, no cost side

    In June 2026, two months after the consultation closed, ALTO released two commissioned studies. A computable general equilibrium assessment by Aviseo Consulting reports a national real GDP gain of about $24.4 billion a year. A corridor tourism study by CPCS with HDR adds up to $3.9 billion in GDP and 43,000 jobs.

    Neither nets a cost. The macroeconomic study excludes construction and operating expenditure by design; the tourism study has no cost side to exclude. Both are benefit totals unaccompanied by the outlay required to obtain them. Both, to their credit, describe their outputs as illustrative and order-of-magnitude rather than forecasts, and make the largest figures conditional on tourism policy the railway itself does not deliver.

    The scenario range has a floor and no ceiling on the downside

    Each study is built as a fan of scenarios, from pessimistic to optimistic. In both, the entire fan sits above zero. The macro study reports welfare increasing in every scenario; the tourism study’s weakest case is still $177 million and two thousand jobs. The modelled question is how large the gain is, never whether there is a loss.

    Adverse mechanisms are identified but do not reach the total

    The tourism study acknowledges that faster trains shorten stays and convert overnight visits into day trips, and shows length of stay falling in several cities. The aggregate rises regardless.

    The two studies disagree, and each resolves the disagreement upward

    The macro study omits domestic tourism on the ground that it is largely substitution from other household spending, with little net effect on national output. The tourism study builds most of its $33.7-billion base, and most of its headline uplift, from precisely that in-corridor domestic travel — counted through gross multipliers that assume no such displacement. The two treatments diverge, and in each case the treatment adopted is the one that yields the larger figure for that study.

    The studies import the literature’s upside but not its realisation record

    Both studies draw their benefit magnitudes from the international high-speed rail literature — the same comparison set the Initiative uses. What they import is the size of the upside. What they do not import is that literature’s record on realisation: rail benefits arriving at about two-thirds of forecast, and passenger numbers overstated by roughly a hundred per cent.

    Each of the four observations above is a description of what the documents contain. Taken together they describe a benefit case in which every point of divergence has resolved in the same direction — which is the pattern the forecasting literature says to look for, and the reason an independent outside-view comparison matters more, not less, once numbers of this size are in circulation. The same two studies are examined in detail in the Initiative’s briefs Two Point Two Trillion and At Face Value.

    05 · The Ask

    Publish the comparison

    The Initiative’s recommendation is narrow and does not require anyone to accept a word of its own analysis.

    01
    Release the comparison in full. ALTO should publish its reference-class should-cost and should-schedule outputs alongside its published capital cost and benefit-cost figures, unredacted. The outside view was commissioned to be seen, not filed.
    02
    Publish the benefit studies against a cost. A $24.4-billion annual benefit figure is not interpretable without the outlay required to obtain it. The two June 2026 studies should be accompanied by an appraisal that nets one against the other.
    03
    Apply the test before further commitment. The window in which an outside-view check can still change a decision is open now. It narrows with every disbursement.

    It requires one document to be made public. The framework behind the request is set out in full in Chapter 1 of the HPR Research Report; what ought to be built instead is the subject of the chapters that follow it.

    How to read this brief

    Every figure attributed to Alto, Aviseo, CPCS, the National Audit Office or a published paper is quoted from the source listed below and can be checked there. Nothing else here is a calculation of ours: the argument rests on what the documents contain and on the sequence of dates, not on a competing estimate.

    Where a record has not been released, this brief says so rather than inferring its contents, and makes no claim about why any extension was taken or any figure was or was not published. The prediction in section 02 is stated in both directions and will be settled by the disclosure, not by us.

    Sources

    Documents relied on

    1
    Alto (VIA HFR – VIA TGF Inc.). Advance Contract Award Notice PAS240625-002-00 — project management and control expertise; pre-identified supplier Oxford Global Projects UK Limited. 2024.
    2
    Alto (VIA HFR – VIA TGF Inc.). Notice of extension, Access to Information request A-2026-0004. June 2026. On file with the Initiative.
    3
    Aviseo Consulting. An Overview of the Structural Economic Impacts of Alto: Computable General Equilibrium Modelling Approach to Assessing High-Speed Rail in the Toronto–Québec City Corridor. Prepared for Alto. June 2026.
    4
    CPCS, in association with HDR. Tourism in the Alto Corridor: Current Conditions and Potential Impacts. Prepared for Alto. June 2026.
    5
    National Audit Office. High Speed Two reset. Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, Session 2026-27, HC 52. London: National Audit Office, June 2026.
    6
    Flyvbjerg, Bent. “Quality Control and Due Diligence in Project Management: Getting Decisions Right by Taking the Outside View.” International Journal of Project Management 31, no. 5 (2013): 760–774.
    7
    Flyvbjerg, Bent. “Top-Ten Behavioral Biases in Project Management: An Overview.” Project Management Journal 52, no. 6 (2021): 531–546.
    Coalition for Better Rail  ·  ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  Brief · September 2026
    Independent, non-partisan research on Canada’s proposed Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor.

  • 3 claims 1 fare

    Three Claims, One Fare

    ALTO makes three promises about the high-speed railway. All three depend on one number it has never published — the price of a ticket.

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Fare and Ridership Note 1 · Published August 2026
    The argument in plain terms

    ALTO promises three things at once: that 24 million people a year will ride the new railway; that they will save 9.3 billion hours of travel time, worth $49.5 billion; and that ticket sales will cover the cost of running and maintaining the line. Each promise sits in a different part of the report, backed by different evidence.

    All three depend on one number the report never gives: the price of a ticket. Cheap tickets fill trains, which is what the first two promises need. Expensive tickets bring in the revenue the third promise needs. A fare cannot be cheap and expensive at the same time, so the three promises pull against one another.

    Work out the single fare at which all three could hold, and it comes to about 19 cents per kilometre travelled — roughly $83 for a typical 428-kilometre journey. At that price the railway breaks even only if 24 million people ride it, and 24 million people ride it only if the corridor is generating about 74 million intercity trips a year, by all modes. On ALTO’s own population figures, the corridor will generate about 34 million.

    So making all three promises at once means making a fourth one that is never stated: that by 2055 the corridor would have to be generating more than twice the intercity travel that ALTO’s own population figures produce. Nobody forecasts travel on that scale, and that is exactly the difficulty.

    ⚠ How to read the fares on this page

    Fares here are given per kilometre travelled, because that is how railway revenue is calculated. A passenger-kilometre is simply one traveller going one kilometre, so a fare of $0.15 per kilometre means a passenger pays 15 cents for every kilometre of their journey. Multiply by 428 km — the average journey — for a rough ticket price: $0.15 is about $64, $0.22 about $94, $0.28 about $120, and the $0.193 break-even fare about $83.

    Modal Shift Notes and O&M Notes, referred to throughout, are earlier papers in this series and are available at citizenresearch.ca.

    2.19×
    how much more intercity travel the corridor would have to generate for all three promises to hold: 73.9 million trips a year against 33.7 million forecast
    §6.1
    $0.193
    the only fare at which all three could hold — about $83 a journey. At that price the railway carries about 11 million riders, not 24 million
    §6.1
    63%
    the most of its running costs the railway can recover from fares at any price. Fares pay about 63 cents of every dollar; the rest comes from the public
    §8
    Download
    Three Claims, One Fare — Full Brief (PDF)
    The complete arithmetic, set out step by step, with every figure sourced so that any part of it can be checked or rejected

    Download PDF

    The Three Promises

    Three claims that are only ever made separately

    Where this comes from. ALTO is the company proposing the high-speed railway. In August 2026 it published a report, Canada’s Moment: The Economic Opportunity of High-Speed Rail, making the three claims set out below. This page is a plain-language version of an independent check of those claims against published population and travel data — in effect, a fact-check of ALTO’s report. Every step of the arithmetic is shown so that any part of it can be rejected.

    Three numbers do the persuasive work in ALTO’s report Canada’s Moment. They appear in different chapters, rest on different evidence, and are never set side by side. Put side by side, they turn out to want opposite things from the price of a ticket.

    The Promise What it needs the ticket price to do
    1. Ridership. 24 million passengers a year by 2055, rising after that. Be low. The cheaper the ticket, the more people ride — and for a family of three or more, driving already costs almost nothing extra.
    2. Economic benefit. 9.3 billion hours of travel time saved, worth $49.5 billion. Be low. Every benefit counted in the appraisal — time, car costs, safety, congestion, emissions — depends on how many people actually switch to the train.
    3. Paying its own way. “The railway pays for its own operations and maintenance.” Be high. Most of the cost of running the railway stays the same whether the trains are full or empty, so covering it depends on how much each passenger pays.

    The first two promises pull the fare down. The third pulls it up. That is not a criticism of high-speed rail; every high-speed railway ever built faces the same squeeze. The criticism is that the report presents all three as true at the same time without ever showing the fare that would deliver them.

    Why These Are One Promise

    Everything runs through the ticket price

    Picture a single dial: the price of a ticket. Turning that one dial moves all three of ALTO’s claims at the same time, because all three are calculated from it. Turn the price down and more people ride, which automatically raises the total hours saved, because total hours saved is just hours per person multiplied by the number of people. But turn the price down and each ticket brings in less money, so covering the railway’s costs gets harder. The three claims are not three separate discoveries. They are three readings taken off the same dial — and ALTO’s report never shows you the setting it used.

    The fare is not a detail to be settled later, once the business case is agreed. It is the number the business case turns on. It enters the arithmetic twice, pulling in opposite directions, and everything else follows automatically.

    1 — The fare sets how many people ride

    The fare sets how expensive the train is next to driving or flying, which sets the share of trips that choose rail. Apply that share to the total number of intercity trips in the corridor and you have annual ridership.

    2 — Ridership sets both the benefits and the revenue

    Riders multiplied by the length of the average journey gives total passenger-kilometres. That single quantity drives the hours saved and the ticket revenue. There is no way to improve one without damaging the other.

    3 — So the first two promises are the same promise

    If the hours saved per passenger are held at ALTO’s own figure, the economic benefit is simply the number of riders multiplied by a fixed amount. The $49.5 billion is the 24 million riders, restated in dollars. That leaves two propositions, not three: one about demand, one about covering costs.

    Three numbers agreeing is not three checks passing

    If one team checked ridership, another checked time savings and a third checked whether fares cover costs — each using its own method — and all three agreed, that would mean something. That is not what happens here. All three start from the same unpublished ticket price, so of course they agree. They are three shadows cast by the same object. They will always line up, and their lining up is no evidence that the object is the right shape.

    4 — And two propositions have one joint answer

    Two equations with two unknowns — the fare and the number of riders — will usually have a solution. The claims are not inconsistent with one another. The question is what that solution demands of the corridor.

    The Travel Market

    How much intercity travel there is to win

    The corridor’s total travel market is its population multiplied by the number of intercity trips each resident makes on the routes the railway would serve. Modal Shift Note 3 puts the 2025 corridor population at about 14.9 million across the cities directly served, growing at 1.0 per cent a year, and puts intercity travel at about 1.68 trips per resident per year.

    20.1M
    people living in the corridor in 2055, on the central growth path
    Modal Shift Note 3
    33.7M
    intercity trips a year in 2055, by every mode — car, air, bus and rail combined
    20.1M × 1.68 trips each
    71%
    the share of that entire market ALTO’s 24 million riders would represent
    24.0M ÷ 33.7M

    Seventy-one per cent of all intercity travel — car, air, bus and rail together — is a share no high-speed railway is known to have won. It is worth being precise about this, because the famous European figures look higher and are not the same measure. Roughly 75 per cent of Madrid–Barcelona travellers choose the train over the plane, and more than 80 per cent on Madrid–Seville; those are shares of the rail-and-air market, which excludes the car. Against a car that costs its driver almost nothing extra to fill, no comparable share of the whole market has been recorded. Nor is 71 per cent a forecast that fails at some fares and works at others. As the sections below show, no fare produces it.

    What Each Ticket Price Delivers

    Three realistic fare levels, and what each one buys

    Modal Shift Note 3 sets out three combinations of fare and subsidy spanning the realistic range of policy, and reports the share of the market each one wins. The dollar figures are this note’s translation of those descriptions into a fare per kilometre; Note 3 publishes no dollar figures, so the translation is an inference. Every figure below uses the version most favourable to the project.

    The Fare Level What it delivers
    A — Heavy subsidy. $0.15 per km (about $64 a journey). Fares held at today’s VIA Rail levels, with $2.5–4.5 billion a year of public money covering construction costs. 13.5 million riders a year — 38–42% of the market. $27.8 billion of benefit against the $49.5 billion claimed. Fares cover 54% of running costs.
    All three promises:Not met
    B — Moderate subsidy. $0.22 per km (about $94 a journey). Fares matched to airfares, with $1.5–2.5 billion a year of public money covering construction costs. The arrangement the published business case appears to assume. 10.1 million riders a year — 28–32% of the market. $20.9 billion of benefit. Fares cover 64% of running costs — the best result available at any price.
    All three promises:Not met
    C — Minimal subsidy. $0.28 per km (about $120 a journey). Fares set by a private operator to maximise revenue, above airfare levels, with $0.5–1.5 billion a year of residual public support. Closest to a commercially structured P3; ALTO has published no payment mechanism. 7.3 million riders a year — 20–23% of the market. $15.0 billion of benefit. Fares cover 63% of running costs.
    All three promises:Not met
    ALTO as published. No fare stated anywhere in the report. 24.0 million riders a year — 71% of the market. $49.5 billion of benefit. Fares cover 100% of running costs.
    Fare required to produce this:Never published

    Even on the most generous treatment — the heaviest subsidy, mature ridership rather than the slower build-up of the opening years, and ALTO’s own hours saved per passenger accepted exactly as published — the economic benefit is $27.8 billion, not $49.5 billion. That is a reduction of 44 per cent arising from the ridership side alone.

    Paying the Running Costs

    Why cheap tickets cannot fix the finances

    Think of a gym. It pays rent whether 10 people turn up or 1,000 — that cost is fixed. It also buys more towels and cleaning supplies as more people come — that cost varies with use. A railway works the same way, and the split matters more than it might sound.

    Running a railway costs money in two ways. Some costs stay the same however many people ride — track, structures, signalling, stations, head office, and buying the trains. Others grow with the number of trains you run. On ALTO’s own figures, spread over the life of the assets at its own 3.5 per cent rate, the fixed block is $1,130 million a year, and 61 per cent of the total cost does not move with ridership at all.

    That is why cutting fares to fill the trains does not fix the finances. It helps a little at first — more passengers spread across the same fixed cost — and then makes matters worse, because each extra passenger is paying less. Cost recovery does not simply improve as fares rise. It improves, peaks, and then falls back.

    Chart: economic benefit delivered and share of running costs covered by fares, at each fare. Neither of ALTO's two claims is ever reached.

    Figure 2. Neither promise is ever reached. The economic benefit delivered (navy, left axis) and the share of running costs covered by fares (rust, right axis), at each fare. The two gold lines are ALTO’s two claims. Benefit falls steadily as fares rise; cost recovery rises, peaks well short of covering everything, then falls away as riders drop off. The fare that comes closest to one claim is far from the other. The chart shows cost recovery as a ratio, so its peak of 0.63 is the 63 per cent described here, and the gold line at 1.00 is fares covering costs in full.

    The ceiling is about two-thirds

    The turning point sits at a fare near $0.26 per kilometre, where fares cover about 63 per cent of running costs. The best of the three published levels reaches 64 per cent. At no price in the corridor as forecast do fares cover the cost of running the railway. Fares pay about 63 cents of every dollar; the remaining 37 cents comes from the public, every year, forever.

    And the best fare for the finances is the worst for the benefits

    The fare that comes closest to paying for the railway delivers roughly $16 billion of the claimed $49.5 billion in benefits. The fare that comes closest to one promise is nowhere near the fare that delivers the other.

    Against the cost of building it, nothing reaches a dollar

    Construction of roughly $75 billion, spread across 2027–2037 and discounted at 3.5 per cent, is worth about $57 billion in today’s dollars. Measured against that, every dollar returns 49 cents of benefit at fare level A, 36 cents at level B and 26 cents at level C. ALTO’s own published benefits return 86 cents — and that failure is ALTO’s own arithmetic, not this note’s. None of these figures counts the operating shortfall above, which the public would have to fund on top.

    The Three Promises Joined Up

    There is exactly one answer, and it is about the corridor

    The obvious next step is to check the promises one at a time and report that none of them survives. That is true, and it is set out below. But it is the weaker exercise, because it invites the reply that the whole thing is merely a disagreement with three forecasts.

    A short detour, because the next step depends on it. Suppose you are told two things about a bag of marbles: it holds 18 marbles, and there are twice as many red ones as blue. Neither fact on its own tells you how many are red. Put them together and there is exactly one answer — 12 red and 6 blue. Two facts, each loose on its own, can lock onto a single exact answer once you require both to be true at the same time.

    The same move works on the railway. “24 million riders” is one fact. “Fares alone cover the running costs” is another. Neither tells you the ticket price by itself — plenty of low prices might draw 24 million riders, plenty of high ones might cover costs. Require both at the same price, and as with the marbles there is only one price where that is possible.

    The stronger exercise is to solve the two propositions together and ask what corridor would satisfy them. Covering costs fixes a relationship between the fare and the number of riders; so does the ridership promise. Two equations, two unknowns, one answer.

    The one fare, and the one market, that satisfy all three

    Covering 100 per cent of running costs at exactly 24 million riders requires a fare of $0.1935 per kilometre. At that fare the train wins 32.5 per cent of the market. For 32.5 per cent to equal 24 million riders, the corridor must be generating 73.9 million intercity trips a year. It is forecast to generate 33.7 million. The ratio is 2.19×.

    There is only one such point, and it is worth being clear about why. Above $0.193 the railway covers its costs but carries fewer than 24 million people; below it, it carries more but cannot pay for them. Only at $0.193 do the two meet, and where they meet is fixed by the size of the market. The three promises do not contradict each other. They contradict the corridor.

    That unstated assertion has a value, and it can be put in whichever units a reader finds easiest to judge:

    Expressed as Required by the three promises, against the forecast
    Intercity trips a year, all modes 73.9 million required, against 33.7 million forecast — 2.19×
    People living in the corridor in 2055 44.0 million required, against 20.1 million forecast — more people on the Toronto–Québec City axis alone than live in Canada today
    Intercity trips per resident, per year 3.68 required, against 1.68 — corridor residents travelling more than twice as often as the evidence supports, at a time when remote and hybrid working push the other way
    Annual population growth, 2025–2055 3.7 per cent a year sustained for three decades, against a central forecast of 1.0 per cent and a high forecast of 1.6

    Anyone wishing to defend all three promises therefore has exactly one thing to defend, and it is a claim about demand rather than about engineering or financing. Cheaper construction, faster trains and a different discount rate do not reach it. Only a larger travel market does.

    The Gap That Does Not Close

    No ticket price escapes the problem

    Within the corridor as forecast, is there some fare — between the three levels above, or beyond them — that escapes the problem? There is not, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of forecasting.

    Two things happen at once as the price goes up. The number of riders the railway needs in order to break even falls gently and steadily, like walking down a slope — each rider is worth more, so fewer are needed, but that effect fades out gradually. The number of riders available falls away sharply, because once the train costs about what driving costs, people stop switching to it very quickly. A gentle slope and a cliff do not meet.

    Put more precisely: raising the fare lowers the number of riders needed to break even, because each remaining passenger contributes more. But raising the fare also lowers the number of riders available, and it does so faster. The first effect tails off gradually. The second accelerates, because once the train loses its price advantage over a car that costs almost nothing extra to fill, passengers fall away sharply. The second effect always wins.

    Chart: the market share the railway needs to cover its costs, against the share it can win, at each fare. The two curves never meet.

    Figure 1. The two curves never meet at any fare. The rust curve is the share of the market the railway would need to cover its running costs; the solid navy curve is the share it can actually win. The shaded area between them is the gap. The dashed navy curve is the same demand curve in a corridor generating 2.19 times as much travel — it touches the rust curve at exactly one point, $0.193, and that point sits on the gold line marking the 71 per cent share ALTO’s 24-million forecast implies. The chart labels this share “capture”, and the fare “fare yield, dollars per passenger-kilometre”.
    At this fare Market share needed, against market share achievable
    $0.15 per km — fare level A
    about $64 a journey    		 Needs 117.7% of the entire intercity market. Can win 40%. The railway would have to carry more trips than exist in the corridor at all, across every mode, simply to cover its running costs.
    $0.22 per km — fare level B
    about $94 a journey    		 Needs 57.3%. Can win 30%.
    $0.28 per km — fare level C
    about $120 a journey    		 Needs 39.8%. Can win 21.5%. This is as close as the gap ever comes: 1.85×, at about $0.29.
    $0.40 per km
    about $171 a journey    		 Needs 24.7%. Can win 12.1%. The gap has started widening again as the ridership base collapses.

    Read the last figures as the size of the gap: at every fare, the railway needs between roughly twice and three times the market share it can actually win. There is no fare at which it closes.

    What Would Have To Change

    Fixing one promise at a time

    These are the terms a proponent is most likely to reply in. Three of the four turn out not to reach the joint answer at all.

    A larger travel market — reaches all three

    A corridor population of 34.0 million by 2055, or 2.85 trips per resident, brings 24 million riders within reach. Covering the running costs as well takes the 44.0 million of the joint answer. This is the only repair that reaches all three promises.

    Longer journeys — does not move ridership

    An average journey of 793–1,259 km, against the 428 km assumed — meaning essentially every passenger riding Toronto to Québec City end to end, and at fare level A a journey longer than the line itself. It would help cover costs. It puts nobody extra on a train.

    Lower running costs — covers costs only

    Running costs 37–46 per cent below the O&M Note estimates, with the fixed block down from $1,130 million to about $564 million. Again, nothing on the cost side puts passengers on trains.

    A stronger switch to rail — the same claim in different units

    The whole demand curve lifted by a factor of 2.19 at every fare. This is arithmetically identical to a bigger market, and equally a claim about demand.

    This is the asymmetry the brief turns on. Repairs on the cost side rescue the cost-covering promise and leave the ridership promise exactly where it was, because nothing on the cost side puts passengers on trains. Only a larger travel market reaches all three, and both routes to one — more people, or a greater willingness to switch — are the same claim in different units.

    Where Things Stand · August 2026

    Summary ledger

    Taking the promises one at a time, in the corridor as forecast, at every fare examined:

    Not met
    24 million riders a year. The ceiling across the whole fare range is 13.5 million. At the break-even fare of $0.193 it is about 11 million.
    Not met
    $49.5 billion in economic benefits. The ceiling is $27.8 billion, and that figure accepts ALTO’s own hours saved per passenger without challenge.
    Not met
    Fares cover the cost of running and maintaining the railway. The ceiling is 63–64 per cent, at any price, in the corridor as forecast.
    Robust
    The ceiling on cost recovery is the solid half of this finding. It sits inside the range of fares the modelling actually covers, and needs no projection beyond it.
    Softer
    The ceilings on riders and benefits involve projecting beyond the tested range at fares below $0.15, and a proponent is entitled to challenge them. The joint answer at $0.193 does not depend on any such projection.
    Answerable
    A proponent who accepts a 73.9-million-trip corridor is entitled to hold all three promises at once — and should be asked to say so plainly.

    The three promises are not logically inconsistent with one another, and this brief does not claim they are. There is a genuine joint answer. The difficulty is that the answer describes a corridor that does not exist — and that the fourth promise, the one about how much travel the corridor generates, is the only one ALTO has never had to defend, because it has never been stated.

    That distinction is not a technicality. A single claim that says “this project needs more than twice the travel demand anyone forecasts” invites immediate scrutiny. Three separately sourced numbers that merely happen to agree do not. Splitting one unproven assumption across three chapters is what allowed it to travel through public debate unchallenged — and catching that before tens of billions of public dollars are committed is the whole point of a review like this one.

    Download Full Brief
    Three Claims, One Fare (PDF)
    The complete arithmetic with every step shown, for anyone who wants to check or reject any part of it

    Download PDF

    Limits

    What this brief does not claim

    The translation of the three fare levels into dollars is an inference

    Modal Shift Note 3 defines the three levels by how much subsidy they need and how they compare with airfares, not in dollars per kilometre. The $0.15, $0.22 and $0.28 figures are this brief’s reading of what those descriptions imply. Anyone who rejects the reading should supply the fares the business case actually assumes — and the conclusion holds across the whole range of fares, not only at those three points.

    The 428-kilometre average journey is an assumption

    Carried over from revised O&M Note 3. It matters a great deal: revenue and hours saved both rise and fall with it.

    The construction cost figure is not ALTO’s

    The $75 billion is the midpoint of the $60–90 billion range used elsewhere in this series. ALTO publishes no comparable figure. The returns per dollar should be read as indicative, and they measure benefits against construction cost alone.

    Nothing here depends on the 9.3-billion-hour figure being correct

    It is held at ALTO’s own value throughout. If it is correct, the findings stand as stated. If it turns out to be overstated, the benefit column falls further still and every conclusion here becomes firmer, not weaker.

    The model of the train service is coarse

    A single 450-seat train type, uniformly 65 per cent full over a 1,000-kilometre corridor, is a simplification. A real railway would vary train length and frequency by section, which would cut the ridership-related costs somewhat when ridership is low. It would not touch the fixed costs, which is where the problem lies.

    Sources

    Primary documents and companion notes

    1.

    ALTO, Canada’s Moment: The Economic Opportunity of High-Speed Rail, August 2026. The 24-million ridership forecast, the 9.3 billion hours of travel time saved and the $49.5 billion total benefit figure at a 3.5 per cent discount rate.
    2.

    ALTO, Canada’s Moment, August 2026. The claim appears three times: in the chief executive’s foreword, where revenues are expected to cover all operating and maintenance costs and to offset the ongoing public subsidies conventional passenger rail has historically required; in the executive summary, where operating revenues are expected to fully cover operating and maintenance costs, transitioning passenger rail from a publicly subsidised service to a commercially viable operation; and in the financial chapter, where the project is expected to operate on a self-sustaining basis. The same chapter distinguishes day-to-day operating costs from initial capital investment and lifecycle costs, and states that revenues do not cover all costs once those are included — the distinction examined in revised O&M Note 3, which finds the claim true for day-to-day operations alone, marginal once renewals are included, and failing once the trains themselves have to be replaced.
    3.

    Modal Shift Note 3 — corridor population, starting point and growth path; intercity trips per resident. The 1.68 figure is the 2025 baseline; the working range is 1.6–1.8. Using 1.68 is marginally conservative against this brief’s own conclusion.
    4.

    Modal Shift Note 3 — market shares of 38–42, 28–32 and 20–23 per cent for the three fare levels, which Note 3 calls Regimes A, B and C.
    5.

    Revised O&M Note 3 — infrastructure $1,016M, operations $700M and fleet $127M a year, spread over the life of the assets at 3.5 per cent real; the fixed and variable split giving $1,130M fixed and $8.91M for each train per day.
    6.

    Statistics Canada, The Daily, 17 June 2026 — Canada’s total population estimated at 41,417,056 on 1 April 2026, a decrease of 55,025 over the preceding quarter.
    7.

    Fare levels, service assumptions and the joint solution are set out in full in the PDF brief, including the two equations solved simultaneously in §6.1.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  Fare and Ridership Note 1  ·  August 2026
    Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high-speed rail corridor. All figures are reconstructions from published sources and companion notes in this series; the arithmetic is set out in full so that any step can be checked or rejected. Corrections welcome.

  • At face value

    At Face Value

    Five numbers from ALTO’s economic report are now in wide circulation. Each one is either the top of a range or the middle of one. In every case the range exists. In every case it was not printed.

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Economic Claims Brief · Published August 2026
    ⚠ The numbers you will hear

    $49.5 billion in benefits · $24.5 billion in added GDP · 1.1 per cent of Canada’s economy · 50,000 jobs · 24 million riders a year

    None of these figures is invented. Every one comes from real modelling work by real economists, and each is accurate on its own terms. But each describes something narrower, or more conditional, than it sounds — and in every case the report prints one number where the work behind it reports a range.

    Critical Finding

    $49.5 billion is labelled an upper estimate — the good end of a range whose other end is nowhere in the document. $24.5 billion is a central estimate from a range its own modeller published as $14.8 billion to $41.0 billion. 24 million riders is prefixed “up to.” 50,000 jobs sits in a table headed “upper estimate” — and ALTO’s own appendix states those figures are not net economic gains.

    Meanwhile the report declines to publish a benefit-cost ratio — the single number that would tell you whether the benefits exceed the costs.

    The point of this brief is not that ALTO’s numbers are wrong. It is that they are being used as though they were settled, when the documents behind them show they are not.

    The document under examination
    Canada’s Moment: The Economic Opportunity of High-Speed Rail
    ALTO, August 2026 — 83 pages. All figures on this page are from that report or the studies it commissioned.
    Read ALTO’s report
    Number One

    “$49.5 billion in benefits”

    What you’ll hearWhat it actually is
    ALTO delivers $49.5 billion in benefits to Canadians. The upper estimate of benefits, added up over 60 years, adjusted downward for the fact that most of them arrive decades from now. Nearly four-fifths of it is saved travel time.
    In plain language — what “discounted” means

    Economists assume a benefit arriving in 2085 is worth less to us today than the same benefit arriving next year — the same reason $100 now beats $100 in twenty years. So future benefits get shrunk before they are added up. This is standard, required, and correct.

    It also does a great deal of work here, and the Initiative’s brief Hours Are Not Dollars sets it out in full. The report says ALTO saves 9.3 billion hours of travel time, and values an hour at $22.32. Multiply those together and you get $207.6 billion. The figure that appears in the benefit table is $38.4 billion. Discounting removes about 82 per cent of the face value, because most of those hours are saved by people who have not been born yet.

    In plain language — what “upper estimate” means

    The benefit table is headed “upper estimate.” Every narrative figure is prefixed “up to” — up to 24 million riders, up to 9.3 billion hours, up to 400 lives saved. An upper estimate is one end of a range. The other end does not appear anywhere in the 83 pages.

    There is one more thing about this number worth knowing. The report opens by making traffic congestion the problem — Highway 401, Pearson airport, journeys that are too slow and too unreliable. In the benefit table, easing congestion is worth $570 million out of $49.5 billion: about 1.2 per cent. Cleaner air is worth $27 million, roughly one part in two thousand.

    The problem the report leads with and the benefit the report counts are almost entirely different things.

    Number Two

    “$24.5 billion in added GDP”

    What you’ll hearWhat it actually is
    ALTO adds $24.5 billion to the Canadian economy. The middle of a range running from $14.8 billion to $41.0 billion, produced by a different model, in a different year’s dollars, and measured as an annual figure rather than a 60-year total.
    Can it be added to the $49.5 billion? No — the report says so on page 9

    The Initiative examined this figure in detail in Two Point Two Trillion. It is the number ALTO’s website states most confidently: the analysis “concludes that Alto will permanently uplift Canada’s GDP by 1.1%.” The study behind it is more careful, and it publishes its range.

    $14.8B
    the low end of the modeller’s published range
    Aviseo, Table 1
    $24.4B
    the baseline — the only figure that reached the public
    Aviseo, Table 1
    $41.0B
    the high end — nearly three times the low end
    Aviseo, Table 1
    In plain language — where this number comes from

    It comes from a computable general equilibrium model — a simulation of the whole Canadian economy that works out what happens to wages, prices, trade and output when you change one thing. These are legitimate, widely used tools. Governments run them all the time.

    The thing being changed here is a single assumption: that firms in Toronto, Montréal, Ottawa and Québec City become three per cent more productive because the train exists. That one assumption produces $21 billion of the $24.4 billion — 86 per cent of the total.

    In plain language — how three per cent was chosen

    The modellers say so openly, and deserve credit for it. Studies in Germany and Sweden found productivity gains of two to four per cent. So, they write, “it seems reasonable to consider a baseline scenario” of three per cent.

    They also tested two per cent and five per cent. Two per cent gives the $14.8 billion; five per cent gives the $41.0 billion. There is no scenario in which the productivity gain fails to appear at all — even the pessimistic case assumes a two per cent uplift across four city economies.

    One further detail. Because nobody yet knows where the stations will go, the modellers applied that productivity boost to the entire metropolitan areas of Toronto, Montréal, Ottawa and Québec City — standing in for the 30-kilometre radius around a station that the research actually supports. Peterborough, Laval, Trois-Rivières and Kingston appear nowhere in that calculation.

    Number Three

    “1.1 per cent of Canada’s GDP”

    What you’ll hearWhat it actually is
    ALTO raises Canada’s GDP by 1.1 per cent. 1.1 per cent of the Canadian economy as it was in 2019 — the last pre-pandemic year, used because 2020 and 2021 were distorted.

    The modeller says this plainly: the gain is “roughly 1.1% of Canada’s 2019 GDP.” Canada’s Moment drops the year. The website drops the year and adds the word “will.”

    Taken across the published range rather than the midpoint, the same calculation gives roughly 0.6 per cent at the low end and 1.8 per cent at the high end. One of those three numbers is in circulation.

    Number Four

    “50,000 jobs and $86 billion”

    What you’ll hearWhat ALTO’s own appendix says
    Building ALTO creates 50,000 jobs and adds $86 billion to GDP. These figures “represent spending-supported economic activity rather than net economic gains” and are “therefore not included in the benefit-cost ratio.”
    In plain language — why jobs numbers are not benefits

    If you spend $60 billion on anything — a railway, a bridge, a very large hole — people get paid to do it, and those people spend their wages locally. Counting that as a benefit of the project would mean any spending is a benefit, which cannot be right: the money had to come from somewhere, and would have employed someone else.

    ALTO’s appendix says this outright, and adds that the model used “does not account for potential constraints in the economy, such as labour shortages or capacity limits.” Most promoters present numbers like these as benefits and say nothing. ALTO explicitly refuses to — on page 80. The 50,000 jobs appear on page 5.

    The caveat is genuine and creditable. It sits in an appendix seventy-five pages behind the figure it qualifies, and it has not travelled with the number. The Initiative examines this figure in full in Where Do 50,000 Jobs Come From?, which rebuilds it from the annual spending and workforce figures HS2 and the Réseau express métropolitain both publish, and finds that roughly 18,000 of the 50,000 are people working on the railway.

    Number Five

    “24 million riders a year”

    What you’ll hearWhat it actually is
    ALTO will carry 24 million passengers a year. “Up to” 24 million a year by 2055 — the output of scenarios and sensitivity tests whose range the report describes but does not show.

    ALTO’s own methodology appendix explains exactly what it should have published. Sensitivity testing, it says, gives decision-makers “a range of plausible outcomes rather than relying on a single forecast.” The flowchart’s stated output is “a range of plausible ridership outcomes.”

    The report then prints one number.

    That number matters more than it looks, because four of the seven benefit lines depend on it — car running costs, road safety, congestion and greenhouse gases all flow from an estimate of 90.1 billion kilometres of driving avoided. And how much driving is avoided depends on who the new passengers are. Someone who switches from a car takes kilometres off the road. Someone who switches from a plane takes none. Someone making a brand new trip takes none. That breakdown is published nowhere.

    And One Number That Is Missing

    There is no benefit-cost ratio

    The standard test of whether a public investment is worth making is simple: divide the benefits by the costs. Above one, it pays. Below one, it does not.

    Canada’s Moment does not publish that number. Page 62 explains why: the cost estimate is too early-stage for the ratio to be meaningful. The same absence runs through ALTO’s public benefits page, examined in Many Benefits, One Missing Number.

    In plain language — what the cited manual says about early-stage uncertainty

    ALTO names a Metrolinx appraisal manual as the authority for two of its key figures — the subject of It Left the Rules Behind. That manual treats early-stage uncertainty as the reason to test and publish ranges — not as a reason to withhold them. Its instruction for the earliest project stage is to conduct sensitivity testing to understand the level of uncertainty.

    The same manual also requires early-stage rail costs to be marked up by 64 per cent before being compared with benefits, because rail megaprojects are systematically undercosted. That would put ALTO’s $60–90 billion into the comparison at roughly $98–148 billion. No such uplift is applied, and the concept is not mentioned.

    So the report does not divide the benefits by the costs, while placing $49.5 billion in benefits and $60–90 billion in costs on the same spread.

    It has been done before — on this corridor, at this stage

    In December 2021 the Joint Project Office — a body formed by VIA Rail Canada and the Canada Infrastructure Bank — completed a business case for High Frequency Rail, the slower and cheaper predecessor to ALTO along the same corridor. It was at a comparable point in its development.

    That document published a benefit-cost ratio.

    Project
    High Frequency Rail — the same Toronto–Québec City corridor, at a comparable stage of design
    Capital cost
    $27.71 billion in 2020 prices
    Benefit-cost ratio
    Approximately 0.13 — rising to about 0.4 on an expanded basis that also counts agglomeration effects and a resource correction
    Net present value
    −$21.1 billion over thirty years
    Public subsidy
    $37.1 to $42.2 billion over thirty years, under the delivery models assessed
    Parameters
    Drawn from Metrolinx and Ministère des Transports du Québec guidance — the same two sources Canada’s Moment cites five years later

    It was not published at the time. It became public in November 2025, when the Canada Infrastructure Bank released it under the Access to Information Act — almost four years after it was written.

    In plain language — what a ratio of 0.13 means

    A benefit-cost ratio of 1.00 means a project returns exactly what it costs. Above 1.00 it pays for itself in economic terms; below 1.00 it does not.

    A ratio of 0.13 means that for every dollar spent, about thirteen cents of measurable benefit came back. On the wider basis, which counts effects that are harder to measure, about forty cents. The Joint Project Office published those figures anyway, alongside the subsidy the project would need.

    Read this part carefully — these are not ALTO’s numbers

    0.13 is not ALTO’s ratio, and it is not an estimate of ALTO’s ratio. High Frequency Rail was a different project: slower, at $27.71 billion rather than $60–90 billion, assessed over thirty years rather than sixty. The Joint Project Office described its own results as preliminary. None of its figures transfers to ALTO by arithmetic, and this brief does not offer them as a forecast of anything.

    What the document establishes is narrower, and harder to answer: a benefit-cost ratio can be produced for a project on this corridor at this stage of design — because one was. Immaturity did not prevent it then, on a cost estimate roughly a third the size.

    There is one further detail worth recording. The same document, released under a different access request, comes back with one section withheld in full, the capital cost and revenue sentences cut off mid-clause, and the subsection headings of its Economic Case not shown in the table of contents. No exemption provision is marked against any of these.

    What Cannot Be Checked At All

    The benefit table cannot be audited by a reader

    Each row of the main benefit table gives you a quantity and a dollar value. The natural thing to do is divide one by the other and see what price has been put on an hour, a tonne of carbon, or a life. You cannot.

    The dollar figures are discounted. The quantities are not. And the prices that would connect them are referenced by source but never stated — only the $22.32 hourly value appears anywhere.

    One row does not appear to add up at all. The report says ALTO avoids up to 400 deaths and 26,000 injuries, valued at $610 million. Working backwards, that is roughly $1.2 billion before the time adjustment — which 26,000 injuries alone would exhaust at $50,000 each, a low figure by Canadian standards, leaving nothing for the 400 lives. Either the casualty counts and the money cover different periods, or the values placed on a life and an injury are far below what Canadian governments normally use. The report does not publish enough to say which.

    The Takeaway

    The same thing has happened to every number

    Top of a range
    $49.5 billion in benefits — the table is headed “upper estimate”; the lower estimate is nowhere in the document.
    Middle of a range
    $24.5 billion in GDP — the modeller published $14.8 billion to $41.0 billion. Only the midpoint travelled.
    Top of a range
    24 million riders — prefixed “up to,” from a process whose stated purpose is to produce a range.
    Top of a range
    50,000 jobs — in a table headed “upper estimate,” for figures the appendix says are not net gains.
    Not published
    The benefit-cost ratio — the one number that would put the others in proportion. The last time one was produced for this corridor, it took an access-to-information request to see it.

    This is the finding. Not that any figure is fabricated — none is. Not that the modelling is incompetent — the underlying studies are careful, and say so about their own limits. But wherever the underlying work reported a range, the document carries a single figure from the optimistic end of it, and it is that single figure which has reached councils, newspapers and the public.

    The ranges are not secret. Most of them are in ALTO’s own commissioned studies, sitting on ALTO’s own research page. They simply did not make it into the document that everyone reads.

    None of these figures should be repeated at face value, in either direction. They are the optimistic end of work that its own authors describe as uncertain — and anyone quoting them, for or against the project, should say which end of the range they are quoting.

    In Fairness

    What this brief is not saying

    Credit where it is owed

    The modellers were transparentThe economic study behind the GDP figure publishes its full range, states its assumptions, and explains how each was chosen. This brief is only possible because that work was published.
    ALTO refuses a claim it could have madeIts appendix states that the construction jobs and spending figures are not net economic benefits — a caveat most promoters simply omit.
    Some choices are genuinely cautiousThe value of an hour is held flat for 60 years rather than rising with incomes, which lowers the benefit total substantially. Safety benefits are capped after 20 years.

    And the limits of what we show

    Some arithmetic here is oursEvery figure attributed to ALTO, Aviseo, Metrolinx, the Joint Project Office or Transport Canada is quoted from the source listed below and can be checked there. Everything else is our own calculation from those published inputs: the $207.6 billion undiscounted time total, the 82 per cent that discounting removes, the 0.6 and 1.8 per cent at the ends of the GDP range, the $98–148 billion uplifted cost, and the casualty reconciliation. The reconciliations use assumptions about timing that ALTO does not disclose. They show the numbers cannot be reproduced from what is published — not that they are wrong.
    This is about disclosure, not competenceThe underlying modelling may be entirely sound. The objection is that a reader cannot tell, because the working is not shown.
    We do not say whyWhere a range or a caveat does not appear in the report, this page says so rather than inferring it. It makes no claim about why any particular figure was or was not published.
    A range is not a refutationThat the GDP figure could be $14.8 billion does not mean it will be. It equally could be $41.0 billion. The point is that one number is being presented as though the others do not exist.
    What To Ask

    Five questions for anyone quoting these figures

    1. Is that the top of the range, or the middle?

    For four of the five headline numbers, it is one or the other.

    2. What is the lower estimate?

    The benefit table is explicitly labelled an upper bound. Every range has another end.

    3. What is the benefit-cost ratio?

    Not published. It is the number that puts every other number in proportion — and one was produced for this corridor in 2021, so “too early” is a choice rather than a constraint.

    4. What price was put on a life, or a tonne of carbon?

    Referenced by source, never stated. Without them, no line of the benefit table can be checked.

    5. Where do the new passengers come from?

    Cars, planes, existing trains, or trips that would never have happened? A fifth of the benefits depend on the answer.

    Sources

    Primary documents

    1.
    ALTO, Canada’s Moment: The Economic Opportunity of High-Speed Rail, August 2026, 83 pp. Benefit table and value of time at p. 72; cost-benefit methodology at p. 73; GDP table and its “central estimate” note at p. 75; the roughly 100 simulations at p. 78; input-output caveat at p. 80; construction figures at Table A4, p. 81; ridership methodology at pp. 81–83; benefit-cost ratio at p. 62; non-additivity of the models at p. 9. altotrain.ca (PDF)
    2.
    Aviseo Conseil, An Overview of the Structural Economic Impacts of Alto: Computable General Equilibrium Modelling Approach, June 2026, 25 pp. Prepared on behalf of Alto. Published range at Table 1; productivity scenarios at Shock 1; labour-supply scenarios at Shock 2; geography assumption at p. 10. Available on ALTO’s research page.
    3.
    Metrolinx, Business Case Manual Volume 2: Guidance, August 2021, 222 pp. Cited by ALTO as the source of its discount rate and value of time. Sensitivity requirements at pp. 87–89; optimism-bias uplift at pp. 90–94; economic parameters at Table 5.8, p. 98.
    4.
    Joint Project Office (VIA Rail Canada and the Canada Infrastructure Bank), High Frequency Rail Project: Business Case Update, V.002, 10 December 2021, 150 pp. Released by the Canada Infrastructure Bank under the Access to Information Act, November 2025. Capital cost at p. 7; benefit-cost ratio, net present value and subsidy comparison at p. 8; appraisal parameters sourced to Metrolinx and MTQ guidance at p. 40; impact results and both ratios at Table 14, p. 43. The same document released as Annexe A to access request 22-2207 withholds section 9.7 in full, truncates the capital cost and revenue sentences mid-clause, and withholds the subsection headings of the Economic Case within its table of contents, with no exemption provisions marked.
    5.
    Transport Canada, Statistics on the social costs of collisions in Canada, and the underlying Ontario social cost model — used here as the comparison for standard Canadian casualty valuations. ALTO does not cite these and may have used others.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  Economic Claims Brief  ·  August 2026
    Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high-speed rail corridor.

  • Nina’s commute

    Nina’s Commute

    ALTO’s economic report introduces a semi-retired nurse from Peterborough to show what high-speed rail changes. The corridor’s own ridership and fare data says otherwise.

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Corridor Communities Brief · Published August 2026
    ⚠ The scenario under examination

    On page 17 of Canada’s Moment, under the heading “What changes for Canadians,” ALTO introduces Nina — a semi-retired nurse living in Peterborough, invited to help train nursing students in Toronto. The report describes it as “an opportunity she would have declined in the past” because of the burden and unpredictability of commuting. With ALTO, it says, “that constraint is reduced” — letting her travel into the city twice a week without significant disruption to her routine, supplement her income, and pass on her expertise.

    It is a well-drawn illustration and the kind of person it describes certainly exists. This brief tests whether the journey it describes actually works, using the only published numbers available for that journey.

    Critical Finding

    On the only published assumption about ALTO’s service span — departures from 6 am — the first train of the day leaves Peterborough roughly 35 minutes too late to get Nina to a clinical placement. Nursing students take handover on the ward at 06:45. To be there, she needs to leave Peterborough around 05:25. She drives, exactly as she does today, which is the constraint the vignette says ALTO removes.

    On cost, the corridor’s own survey data puts willingness to pay for a Peterborough–Toronto trip at C$31 — the lowest value of any city pair on the entire route. Applying the published fare rule, two return trips a week comes to roughly $149–$178 weekly, or somewhere between a quarter and a half of what a part-time clinical teaching post pays after tax. ALTO itself discloses no fare anywhere in its 83 pages.

    And Nina is already inside the forecast she is meant to justify. The same research programme projects 269 daily boardings from Peterborough in every direction combined — about one fifth of a single 1,300-seat departure.

    The document under examination
    Canada’s Moment: The Economic Opportunity of High-Speed Rail
    ALTO, August 2026 — 83 pages. The Nina vignette appears at page 17.
    Read ALTO’s report
    The Market

    How many people make Nina’s trip?

    The most-cited independent study of corridor demand — High-Speed Rail in Canada, from Transportation Research at McGill — publishes a station-by-station table of projected daily boardings. It is the only public breakdown of its kind.

    The Peterborough row reads: 181 people a day to Toronto, 36 to Ottawa, 27 to Montréal, 9 to Trois-Rivières, 16 to Québec City. Total: 269 daily boardings — every direction, every trip purpose, everyone.

    269
    projected daily boardings at Peterborough, all destinations combined
    McGill, Prospective Daily Boarding table
    C$31
    willingness to pay, Peterborough to Toronto — the lowest of any pair on the corridor
    McGill, Willingness to Pay table
    35 min
    how much too late the first train is for a 7 am clinical start
    Initiative calculation, see below

    For scale: an ALTO departure of two coupled eight-car trainsets seats 1,300 people. Peterborough’s entire daily outbound demand is about one fifth of a single departure.

    Peterborough council was told the corridor would carry up to 72 trains a day. That is a corridor figure, not a Peterborough figure — and McGill’s own service design runs an express Toronto–Montréal train that does not stop at Peterborough at all. But even if a third of those 72 trains stopped, 269 boardings spread across 24 stopping trains works out to about eleven people per train.

    Three things should be said about this number before it is used. It is survey-derived stated preference, not observed demand — people saying what they think they would do. It is McGill’s projection, not ALTO’s: ALTO forecasts roughly 2.7 times McGill’s corridor total, and scaling Peterborough proportionally would give around 480 a day to Toronto rather than 181. And the source table contains a visible oddity — 886 people arriving in Peterborough from Toronto against 181 leaving for it, a fivefold asymmetry that is almost certainly a survey artefact rather than a real pattern. None of that changes the order of magnitude, and none of it is what breaks the scenario.

    The Timetable

    Clinical teaching starts at seven in the morning

    This is the part of the scenario that cannot be rescued, and it has nothing to do with money.

    Nursing students on a day-shift clinical placement take handover on the ward at 07:00. They are expected there at about 06:45. An instructor supervising them arrives before that. This is not a detail of one hospital’s policy — it is how bedside clinical education works, because it follows the shift.

    ALTO has published no timetable at all. The only public assumption about its service span is in the McGill financial analysis, which models departures between 6 am and 9 pm. Work backwards from a 06:45 ward start on that assumption:

    What the job requiresWhat the service offers
    06:45 — on the ward for handover
    06:15 — leave Union Station by transit
    06:10 — train arrives Toronto
    05:25 — train must leave Peterborough     		06:00 — earliest assumed departure

    On a 6 am train she reaches Union around 06:50 and a downtown hospital around 07:15 — a quarter of an hour after her students have taken handover without her.
    The first train of the day Leaves 35 minutes too late

    To teach a morning clinical placement, Nina drives — leaving Peterborough around five, exactly as she would today. The constraint the vignette says ALTO removes is the one thing ALTO doesn’t touch.

    One honest qualification. If Nina were teaching classroom or simulation-lab sessions rather than bedside clinical supervision, later start times are possible and this objection weakens considerably. The report describes a nurse with decades of experience in clinical practice, invited to help train the next generation — which in nursing education means supervision on a unit, at shift change.

    The Fare

    What the trip costs, and what the job pays

    ALTO discloses no fare, no average ticket price, and no revenue per passenger anywhere in Canada’s Moment. The only published basis for estimating one is McGill’s: a willingness-to-pay survey, with the financial analysis setting the standard fare at 1.2 times willingness to pay.

    For Peterborough–Toronto, willingness to pay is C$31 — the lowest single value in the entire matrix, lower than every other city pair on the corridor. Applying the published rule:

    Nina’s faresNina’s pay
    Round trip: $74–$89
    Two return trips a week: $149–$178
    A 26-week teaching year: $3,870–$4,620

    Before parking at the station, driving to it, or two TTC fares a day.     		An eight-hour clinical day at Ontario rates: $280–$440 gross
    Two days a week: $560–$880 gross

    Pay figures are from salary aggregators and are indicative only.
    Fare as a share of take-home pay Roughly one quarter to one half

    The vignette describes someone taking a part-time post to supplement her income. On the corridor’s own published fare basis, getting to the job would consume between a quarter and a half of what the job pays. For the person described, that is the difference between an offer worth accepting and one that isn’t.

    And it isn’t cheaper than driving

    Driving
    Fuel alone, 280 km round trip: about $36. Fuel plus wear at roughly 25¢/km: about $70. Hospital-district parking: $15–$25. All in: $50–$95.
    ALTO
    Fare $74–$89, plus station parking and two TTC fares. All in: $85–$110.

    The train costs more than the car for this journey, arrives too late for the shift, and still requires the car to reach the station.

    The Journey

    Door to door, the saving is ten to thirty minutes

    The corridor headline — journey times cut in half — is calculated on long city pairs, where the train’s cruising speed dominates the trip. Peterborough to Toronto is about 140 kilometres. On a leg that short, getting to and from the stations dominates instead.

    Driving todayWith ALTO
    Peterborough to a downtown Toronto hospital, door to door:

    1 hour 45 minutes to 2 hours 30, depending on the 401.     		Drive to station 15–25 min · park, walk, wait 15–20 min · train 40–50 min · Union to hospital 20–30 min

    1 hour 30 minutes to 2 hours 05
    Door-to-door saving About 10 to 30 minutes each way

    Real, but not a transformation — and it disappears entirely if she has to drive anyway to make a seven o’clock start.

    Station siting makes it worse rather than better. ALTO’s own materials point to a site outside Peterborough’s built-up area, and the McGill survey found that Peterborough respondents themselves prefer a car-accessible station away from downtown, near a highway or park-and-ride. Wherever it lands, Nina keeps the car. (Siting is unresolved; a downtown station would improve these timings.)

    The Pricing

    Revenue management points straight at her

    ALTO’s published FAQ states that the project plans to use revenue management — as most airlines and high-speed operators do — to match fares with demand and available seats, with the objective of maximising seat occupancy.

    Yield management prices Nina highest

    Airline-style pricing charges the most for peak, predictable, inflexible travel. Nina travels at peak, on fixed days, to a timetable set by a teaching term she cannot move. She is not the traveller who gets the cheap seat — she is the traveller the cheap seat is withheld from.

    Her city pair is the least valuable on the corridor

    An operator facing a $31 willingness to pay on a short leg and $110 on Toronto–Québec City has an obvious commercial answer, and it is not more Peterborough stops. The scenario depends on a pricing decision that runs against the operator’s stated pricing strategy.

    The Circle

    Nina is already inside the forecast she is meant to justify

    The vignette is offered as an illustration of what high-speed rail makes possible — a benefit the project would create. But the 181 figure comes from asking Peterborough residents how often they would use high-speed rail if it existed.

    The model has already counted the Ninas. There are 181 of them a day, in every trip purpose combined: commuters, visitors, shoppers, students, patients, people going to appointments, people going to the airport, tourists. The illustration does not add to the forecast. It is a description of one person inside it.

    That matters for how the vignette should be read. It is not evidence of demand. It is a portrait of a member of a demand estimate that the same body of research puts at a fifth of one trainload.

    In Fairness

    What this brief is not saying

    The vignette isn’t dishonest

    People like Nina existA faster, more reliable connection would genuinely help some of them. The objection is to the weight a single illustration is asked to carry in an economic case.
    A Peterborough station may be justified on other groundsRegional equity, development around the station, network structure. This brief addresses only whether this scenario demonstrates what it is offered to demonstrate.
    The report is candid elsewhereIts ridership figures are labelled “up to,” and its own tables are headed “upper estimate.” The vignette is where those qualifiers stop applying.

    And the limits of what we can show

    The fares are McGill’s, not ALTO’sALTO has published no fare. If its eventual fare is lower, the affordability arithmetic changes — and nobody can check, because the number does not exist.
    The 6 am service span is an assumptionIt is McGill’s modelling assumption, not an ALTO commitment. ALTO has published no timetable, so the clock test uses the only published assumption available.
    The pay range is indicativeOntario clinical instructor rates here come from salary aggregators and should be replaced with a collective-agreement figure.
    What Would Settle It

    Four questions

    1. What time does the first train leave Peterborough?

    Any service beginning at 6 am cannot deliver anyone to a seven o’clock shift change anywhere in Toronto. Hospitals, factories and construction sites all start before the corridor does.

    2. How many of the 72 daily trains stop at Peterborough?

    The figure given to Peterborough council was a corridor total. The station’s actual frequency has never been published.

    3. What is the fare?

    The scenario’s plausibility rests entirely on a number that appears nowhere in the 83 pages that contain the scenario.

    4. Was this scenario tested against the ridership model, or written independently of it?

    The corridor’s own survey data puts Nina’s entire market — Peterborough to Toronto, all purposes — at 181 people a day.

    Sources

    Primary documents

    1.
    ALTO, Canada’s Moment: The Economic Opportunity of High-Speed Rail, August 2026, 83 pp. The Nina vignette appears at p. 17 under “What changes for Canadians.” Ridership and route described in the executive summary; benefit tables at pp. 60 and 72. altotrain.ca (PDF)
    2.
    Zhang, B., Negm, H., & El-Geneidy, A. (2026). High-Speed Rail in Canada: Insights from a corridorwide survey and a financial analysis. Transportation Research at McGill, McGill University. Daily boardings at section I.3; willingness to pay at section I.4; fare rule, service span and fleet assumptions at section II. tram.mcgill.ca (PDF)
    3.
    ALTO, “Frequently Asked Questions,” altotrain.ca — statement of intent to use revenue management to match fares with demand and available seats. altotrain.ca
    4.
    Deny Sullivan, “High Speed Rail: Ridership forecasting,” 30 April 2026 — secondary commentary that first drew attention to the Peterborough rows and the directional asymmetry in the McGill boarding table. Substack
    5.
    Peterborough City Council resolution coverage, kawarthaNOW, 24 March 2026 — source of the “up to 72 trains per day” figure presented to council. kawarthanow.com
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  Corridor Communities Brief  ·  August 2026
    Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high-speed rail corridor.

  • Hours are not dollars

    Hours Are Not Dollars

    Almost none of ALTO’s $49.5 billion is money. It is time — and a saved hour cannot service a loan. Here is what that figure actually is, how it was built, and why it says nothing about who pays for the railway.

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Economics Explainer · August 2026 · Companion to the audit It Left the Rules Behind
    ⚠ Where the Number Sits

    In August 2026 ALTO published Canada’s Moment: The Economic Opportunity of High-Speed Rail, reporting $49.5 billion in benefits against a construction cost of $60 to $90 billion. Those benefits are not money in a bank account. They are mostly hours — time that travellers would have spent on the road or at an airport — stretched over sixty years and converted into today’s dollars.1

    The tool that does the converting is called a discount rate. ALTO uses 3.5 per cent a year. Change that one number and the headline changes by tens of billions, without a single train or passenger changing.

    In One Paragraph

    The $49.5 billion is a measure of worth, not of funds. The tool that produces it, a discount rate, answers the question is this worth doing? It does not answer the question who pays, and how? Those are separate ledgers, and ALTO’s report is detailed on the first and thin on the second. This explainer sets out what the rate does, shows the arithmetic openly, and then follows the money to the place the appraisal never goes: the difference between what it costs the government to borrow and what a private partner needs to earn.

    One finding runs against the grain and is stated here first. Two of the adjustments ALTO leaves out would have made its benefit figure larger, not smaller. The problem is not that the number is tilted. The problem is that a reader is given one number, no range, and no way to know that any of these choices were made.

    Start Here

    What a discount rate is, in ordinary words

    Ask yourself a simple question. Would you rather have $100 today, or $100 in forty years? Almost everyone takes it today. The money is useful now, the future is uncertain, and by 2066 we will probably all be somewhat better off anyway, so $100 will matter a little less to us then than it does now.

    Economists turn that instinct into a percentage. A discount rate shrinks future amounts back to what they are worth to us today, by a fixed amount each year. At 3.5 per cent, a benefit arriving sixty years from now counts for about 13 cents on the dollar. At 8 per cent, the same benefit counts for about one cent.

    That is the whole mechanism. It sounds technical and it is arithmetically simple. But it matters enormously for a railway, because of when the money and the benefits arrive.

    13¢
    what a dollar of benefit in year 60 is worth today at ALTO’s 3.5 per cent
    23¢
    the same dollar at 2.5 per cent, the rate ALTO’s own cited manual requires be tested
    1¢
    the same dollar at 8 per cent, the rate identified in 2007 Treasury Board guidance

    The timing is what makes this decisive. Construction money is spent early — from 2029 through the early 2040s — so it is barely shrunk at all. The benefits arrive later and keep arriving for sixty years, so they are shrunk heavily. Anything that changes the rate therefore hits the benefit side hard and the cost side hardly at all. A project’s whole case can move from comfortable to marginal without anything physical changing.

    The Arithmetic, Shown Openly

    How much the answer moves

    The table below is the Initiative’s own arithmetic, not a re-run of ALTO’s model. It takes a steady stream of benefits running for sixty years, beginning fifteen years from now, and asks what that stream is worth in today’s dollars at different rates. The last column simply scales ALTO’s published $49.5 billion by the same proportion, to show the size of the swing.

    Discount rate usedValue of the streamRelative to 3.5%$49.5B scaled
    2.5 per cent21.341.43×$71.0B
    3.0 per cent17.761.19×$59.1B
    3.5 per cent — ALTO’s rate14.891.00×$49.5B
    UK declining schedule15.611.05×$51.9B
    5 per cent9.110.61×$30.3B
    7 per cent5.090.34×$16.9B
    8 per cent3.900.26×$13.0B

    Assumptions, stated so the arithmetic can be checked: a level benefit stream of one dollar per year, sixty years of operation beginning in year 16, discounted back to a year-zero base. ALTO’s real benefit stream ramps up rather than running level, so the exact figures would differ; the proportions are what matter here. The scaled column is illustrative and is not ALTO’s number at those rates.

    Read the middle rows first. At 8 per cent, the same railway carrying the same passengers saving the same hours produces a benefit figure roughly a quarter the size. At 2.5 per cent it produces one roughly forty per cent larger. Nothing about the trains changed. Only the parameter changed.

    This is why appraisal manuals require the calculation to be repeated at more than one rate and the results published as a range. It is not a bureaucratic formality. It is the only way a reader can tell whether a case is robust or whether it depends on a parameter choice.

    Where 3.5 Per Cent Comes From

    A number with a family tree

    ALTO’s report attributes its rate to one source: the Business Case Manual Volume 2: Guidance, published by Metrolinx, the Government of Ontario’s transit agency for the Toronto and Hamilton region.2 That manual sets a social discount rate of 3.5 per cent, alongside an evaluation period of five to sixty years.

    The 3.5 per cent figure is not original to Metrolinx. It is the rate used by HM Treasury in the United Kingdom, and the Treasury publishes exactly how it was assembled. Three judgements are added together:

    0.5 per cent for simple impatience. People prefer good things sooner. Half a percentage point is the allowance for that.

    1.0 per cent for the risk that the future does not arrive as expected. Wars, pandemics, collapses. A benefit promised in 2080 might never materialise, so it is discounted a little further.

    2.0 per cent because people in the future will be richer. If incomes rise about 2 per cent a year, our grandchildren will be considerably better off than we are, and an extra dollar will matter less to them than it does to us. This is the largest of the three, and the most contestable.

    Those three add to 3.5.3

    Notice what the rate is not. It is not a market price, an interest rate, or anything anyone can look up. It is a set of judgements about how much weight to give people who are not yet born — and every one of the three is disputed by serious people. That is not a criticism of the figure. It is the reason a serious appraisal shows what happens when the figure moves.

    The detail that cuts in ALTO’s favour

    HM Treasury does not apply 3.5 per cent forever. The rate steps down to 3.0 per cent for years 31 to 75, and 2.5 per cent thereafter,3 and the Treasury’s supplementary guidance instructs practitioners in the same terms: the standard 3.5 per cent for years 1 to 30, and 3.0 per cent for years 31 to 75.4 The reason is uncertainty: the further out you look, the less confident anyone can be in the parameters, and the lower the rate should be.

    ALTO discounts a sixty-year stream at a flat 3.5 per cent throughout. Applying the stepped-down schedule instead would have made ALTO’s benefit total about five per cent larger, as the fourth row of the table above shows. This is a conservatism in ALTO’s favour, and it should be credited as one. It is recorded here because a reader assessing where a federal appraisal input came from deserves the whole picture, including the parts that do not fit a critical narrative.

    The Canadian Comparison

    What the federal government uses, and the gap where a manual should be

    Canada has approached the same question from the opposite end, and it is worth understanding the difference, because it produces a far higher number.

    The British method asks a question about values: how much should we care about the future? The Canadian method asks a question about alternatives: what else could this money have done? If public money invested elsewhere in the economy would have earned, say, 8 per cent, then a project has to clear that bar to be worth funding — otherwise the country was better off doing the other thing. That is what economists mean by the opportunity cost of capital.

    Neither question is wrong. They are simply different questions, and the second one produces a much tougher test than the first.

    The Treasury Board’s 2007 guidance identified 8 per cent as the appropriate rate, with sensitivity tests at 3 and 10 per cent, on that opportunity-cost basis.5 The current federal Policy on Cost-Benefit Analysis still directs departments to use the opportunity cost of capital as the discount rate, permitting a social rate only in defined cases — including where impacts run fifty years or more — and requiring that even when a social rate is used, results using the opportunity cost of capital must also be reported.6

    Two honest qualifications belong here, and neither is small. First, that federal policy governs regulations, not capital projects, so it does not bind ALTO. Second, the current edition of the Treasury Board guide is no longer published on canada.ca and is available only through an internal government wiki page,7 so the Initiative has not been able to verify the figure it now specifies.

    And the federal manual for transport projects specifically? Transport Canada’s guide to benefit-cost analysis dates from 1994.8 Thirty-two years later, there is no current, public federal appraisal manual for a project of this kind. That absence is very likely why a national railway is being appraised using a provincial transit agency’s parameters — and it is a finding about the machinery of government rather than about ALTO.

    Even the academic case for 3.5 per cent has conditions

    The most cited Canadian argument for a 3.5 per cent rate comes from the economists Boardman, Moore and Vining, who reject the 8 per cent approach. So there is a respectable Canadian case for ALTO’s rate. But it is a conditional case, and the conditions are specific.

    Condition one: the project runs under fifty years. Beyond that, they recommend a rate that steps down over time, for the same reason the UK Treasury does — nobody can see that far ahead with confidence.

    Condition two: the project must not pull money away from private investment. The money for a public project comes from taxes or borrowing, and it would otherwise have been used by someone else. Some of it would have been spent, and some would have been invested — a business expansion, new equipment, a factory. Those two are not equivalent. A dollar diverted from someone’s spending costs the economy that one dollar. A dollar diverted from investment costs more, because that investment would have gone on producing returns for years afterwards.

    And if the project does pull money from investment, there is a fix. Rather than argue about the rate all over again, you take the portion of the cost that displaced private investment and mark it up by 26 per cent before putting it in the calculation — because that is roughly what the lost investment was worth to the economy over time. Economists call the 1.26 multiplier a shadow price of capital. It is simply a way of using a generous discount rate honestly, instead of using it to pretend the money was free.5

    ALTO’s appraisal period is sixty years, which fails the first condition outright. Whether a $60 to $90 billion draw on Canadian capital displaces private investment is a real question, not a technicality — and the mark-up would apply only to the share that does, not to the whole sum. Neither condition is mentioned in the report.

    The pattern is the one the companion audit It Left the Rules Behind describes: a number travels, and the conditions attached to it stay behind.

    The Precedent

    The last time anyone published these numbers for this corridor

    ALTO’s stated reason for publishing no benefit-cost ratio is that the cost estimate is not yet mature enough to support one. It is worth knowing that a predecessor project on the same corridor did publish one, at a comparable stage, and published the funding ledger alongside it.

    In December 2021 the Joint Project Office — a body formed by VIA Rail and the Canada Infrastructure Bank — completed a Business Case Update for High Frequency Rail, the slower, cheaper predecessor to ALTO between Toronto and Québec City. It was released through access to information by the Canada Infrastructure Bank in November 2025.16

    What the 2021 business case publishedFigure
    Capital cost, with electrification (2020 prices)$27.71B
    Projected revenue over 30 years (2019 prices)$33.7B
    Operations, maintenance and rehabilitation, 30 years$32.5B
    Net present value over 30 years−$21.1B
    Benefit-cost ratio~0.13
    Expanded benefit-cost ratio~0.4
    Public subsidy over 30 years, by delivery model$37.1B to $42.2B

    Source: Joint Project Office, High Frequency Rail Business Case Update V.002, 10 December 2021. Ratios at Table 14, page 43; capital, revenue, lifecycle and net present value figures in the executive summary, pages 7 and 8; subsidy comparison at Table 4, page 8.

    A benefit-cost ratio of 0.13 means about thirteen cents of measured benefit for every dollar of cost. The wider figure of 0.4 is what the same table calls an expanded ratio, and the difference between the two is worth understanding, because it is the larger of the two numbers.

    The expansion adds two items. One is agglomeration — the economic gain from businesses being better connected — worth $0.3 to $0.9 billion. The other, worth $5.6 to $7.6 billion, is a resource correction: the fares new passengers would pay, counted as a benefit because they arrive as revenue for the operator. That single item is larger than the journey time savings and all the external benefits put together. The business case itself notes that both are relatively new to Canadian economic appraisal, which is why it reports the ratio with and without them.

    The same two sources, five years apart

    The 2021 economic case states where its parameters came from: the social discount rate, the value of time and the value of external impacts were taken from a combination of Metrolinx and Ministère des Transports du Québec guidance. Those are the same two sources ALTO cites in 2026.

    So the identical parameter lineage, applied to a $27.71 billion version of this corridor, produced a published ratio of 0.13. Five years later, on a project costing two to three times as much, the same two sources are cited and no ratio is published at all.

    And it kept the two ledgers apart

    The 2021 document also shows how the distinction this page has been drawing is meant to work in practice. Its net present value calculation used a discount rate of 2.5 per cent, sourced explicitly to the ten-year average of the 30-year Government of Canada benchmark bond — a financing rate, taken from what the government actually pays to borrow. Its economic case used the social parameters from Metrolinx and MTQ. Two questions, two rates, both disclosed, in a single document.

    Three cautions, stated plainly. High Frequency Rail is not ALTO: different technology, different speed, a $27.71 billion cost rather than $60 to $90 billion, and a thirty-year evaluation rather than sixty. The JPO described its own results as preliminary. And none of these figures transfer to ALTO by arithmetic. What the document establishes is narrower and harder to set aside: a benefit-cost ratio can be produced for a project on this corridor at this stage of development, because one was.

    One further point belongs on the record. The identical document was also released under a separate access request, and in that version the whole net present value section, the capital cost figure, the revenue figure and both ratios were blacked out — along with the subsection titles of the Economic Case within the table of contents, and the construction employment figure in the executive summary. No exemption provision is marked against any of it.17 Same document, same date, two releases, opposite outcomes.

    Following the Money

    Three different rates, and only one of them is in the report

    Here is the heart of it. People use the phrase “the discount rate” for three quite different things, and conflating them is how an appraisal result gets mistaken for a financing plan.

    1. The appraisal rate — 3.5 per cent

    Used to decide whether a project is worth doing. No money moves because of it. It turns hours saved and collisions avoided into a single present-day figure so they can be compared with the cost. Nobody charges it, nobody pays it, and no bank uses it.

    2. What it costs the government to borrow

    Real money, actually paid. When the federal government borrows for thirty years it has been paying in the region of 3.7 to 3.9 per cent during 2026. Take off inflation, which the Bank of Canada aims to hold at 2 per cent, and the true cost of the money is roughly two per cent a year.9 If the state simply builds the railway and holds it, this is what the borrowing actually costs, and it is lower than the appraisal rate.

    3. What a private partner needs to earn

    Considerably more. If a pension fund or infrastructure investor builds the railway, it is putting its own money at risk — the risk that construction costs more than planned, or that too few people ride. It requires a return for carrying that risk, and that return is paid out every year for decades. This is the rate that decides what the public actually hands over, and it appears nowhere in ALTO’s economic report.

    The gap between the second and the third is the entire public-private question. If the government borrows at 2 per cent and builds the railway itself, that is what the money costs. If a private partner builds it instead and needs 8 per cent, someone has to make up the difference — every year, for as long as the arrangement lasts. That someone is the public.

    So a project can pass the 3.5 per cent test comfortably and still require very large annual public payments to get built. The appraisal will go on saying “worth doing.” It will never say who writes the cheque, for how long, or at what return.

    Why the $49.5 billion cannot pay for anything

    This is the point most easily missed, and it is not a technicality. Nearly all of ALTO’s benefit figure is not cash. It is hours of travel time, collisions that did not happen, tonnes of emissions avoided. These are real and they matter. But a saved hour cannot service a loan, meet a payroll, or renew a worn rail.

    The money that actually funds a railway comes from two places only: fares, and government payments. ALTO’s report handles that second ledger in a few pages, supported chiefly by the operating margins of three foreign railways, and it publishes no fare, no revenue figure and no farebox recovery ratio. So the document is expansive about whether the project is worth doing and close to silent about how it would be paid for.

    A Canadian Example, Fully Documented

    How the Montréal REM is actually funded

    The Réseau express métropolitain is a 67-kilometre automated light metro in Greater Montréal, built, owned and operated by CDPQ Infra, a subsidiary of the Québec pension fund manager. It is the clearest Canadian illustration of what the third rate looks like once it becomes money, and its terms are public.10

    Who put up the capital
    CDPQ Infra $2.95B; the Government of Québec $1.283B; the Government of Canada $1.283B; Hydro-Québec $295M; the regional transit authority $512M. The construction estimate rose from $6.3 billion in 2018 to $7.95 billion by 2023, an increase CDPQ Infra absorbed under its agreement.11
    How the money returns
    Not through fares. The regional transit authority pays CDPQ Infra 72 cents for every kilometre every passenger travels, indexed annually to the Consumer Price Index. That single rate covers construction, operation and long-term maintenance.12
    If ridership beats forecast
    The rate steps down. CDPQ Infra has described trips beyond 15 per cent above forecast being paid at roughly 57 cents, and trips beyond 40 per cent above forecast at the user fare itself.13
    The two return targets
    8 to 9 per cent for CDPQ Infra. 3.7 per cent for the governments. Both were set at the outset and publicly reaffirmed during construction.14

    That pair of numbers is the whole point of this section, made concrete. The same railway, the same track, the same passengers — and two participants requiring returns that differ by more than double. The difference is not a rounding error in an appraisal. It is paid out, in cash, on every passenger-kilometre, for as long as the agreement runs.

    Why this case and not another. The REM is not an analogy picked at random. CDPQ Infra leads Cadence, the consortium selected in February 2025 as ALTO’s private development partner. AtkinsRéalis — formerly SNC-Lavalin, a member of the group that built the REM and, with Alstom, of the group that supplies and operates its trains — is also a Cadence member. The other Cadence members are SYSTRA Canada, Keolis Canada, SNCF Voyageurs and Air Canada.18 The REM is the lead sponsor’s own model, which CDPQ Infra presents publicly as an innovative approach to delivering public infrastructure. That is what makes it the most informative available guide to how a private partner’s return might be priced here.

    An important caution. ALTO is nonetheless not the REM, and this is not a prediction. Canada is to retain permanent ownership of the ALTO network, which was never the REM arrangement; the project is in a co-development phase running to 2029; and no payment mechanism has been disclosed. Cadence is a different group with different members and a different contract. The REM is offered as the one Canadian case where the arithmetic of a private partner’s return has been made public — which is exactly what has not yet happened for a project several times its size.

    Notice what a payment mechanism does with risk. Because CDPQ Infra is paid per passenger-kilometre, a shortfall in riders is a shortfall in its own revenue — the investor carries the demand risk. Under a different structure, where the public pays for the railway simply being available, a shortfall in riders changes nothing the partner receives and everything the public pays.

    Same railway, same disappointing ridership, opposite consequences. Which of those applies to ALTO has not been published.

    Limits of This Explainer

    What this does not claim

    On the rate

    3.5 per cent is not wrongIt is a mainstream, well-supported choice for long-lived public investment. This explainer does not argue that ALTO’s rate is too low.
    Two omissions favour ALTOBoth the stepped-down schedule and the sensitivity test its cited manual requires would have produced a larger benefit figure. The omissions do not all run one way.
    The arithmetic is illustrativeThe table uses a level benefit stream and a stated start year. It shows the shape of the sensitivity, not a recalculation of ALTO’s result.
    The 2021 ratios are not ALTO’sHigh Frequency Rail was a different and cheaper project assessed over thirty years, and its authors called the results preliminary. Those figures are cited as evidence that a ratio can be produced at this stage, not as an estimate of ALTO’s.

    On the comparisons

    Nothing here binds ALTOMetrolinx guidance, UK Treasury practice and federal regulatory policy carry no legal force over this project. They are offered as points of comparison, one of which ALTO chose to cite itself.
    The federal figure is unverifiedThe 8 per cent rate is documented from 2007 guidance through peer-reviewed sources. The current edition of that guide is not publicly posted, and the Initiative does not assert what it now specifies.
    We do not say whyWhere the report does not state something — a fare, a payment mechanism, a sensitivity test, a range — this page says so rather than inferring it, and makes no claim about why any figure was or was not published, or about the intentions of anyone who prepared it.
    This is a public report, not a business caseA submission to Cabinet in 2029 may contain material this document does not. What is examined here is what has been placed in public.
    What Would Settle It

    Two questions, answerable without releasing a model

    1. Who absorbs it if the passengers do not come?

    Not a forecasting question but a contract question. If a partner is paid per passenger, a shortfall reduces its return. If it is paid for availability, a shortfall costs the partner nothing and the public a great deal. Identical ridership, opposite outcomes — and ALTO has published neither the mechanism nor the cost of capital behind it.

    2. What fare, and what revenue?

    No fare level, average yield or farebox recovery ratio appears in eighty-three pages. Without one, the funding question cannot be examined by anyone outside the project.

    Neither requires access to ALTO’s models, cooperation from its staff, or agreement about what the correct discount rate for a national railway ought to be. Both are answerable from work already done.

    A third question — whether the calculation was ever run at any rate other than 3.5 per cent — belongs to the companion audit It Left the Rules Behind, which sets out the full list of tests the cited manual requires at this project’s scale and which of them appear in the report.

    Sources

    Primary documents

    1.
    ALTO, Canada’s Moment: The Economic Opportunity of High-Speed Rail, August 2026, 83 pp. Discount rate, sixty-year appraisal period and price base in the Appendix A methodology box, sourced at footnote 65 to the Metrolinx manual; capital cost and AACE Class 5 estimate at pp. 5 and 65; direct-benefit tables headed “upper estimate”. Analysed in full in the Initiative’s companion brief Two Parameters, None of the Conditions, summarised at It Left the Rules Behind.
    2.
    Metrolinx, Business Case Manual Volume 2: Guidance, August 2021, 222 pp. Economic parameters at Table 5.8: social discount rate 3.5 per cent, evaluation period five to sixty years, single blended value of time. Verified as the current edition, 21 August 2026. metrolinx.com
    3.
    HM Treasury, Review of discounting in the Green Book: Terms of Reference, 16 December 2025. Sets out the derivation of the 3.5 per cent Social Time Preference Rate. The Treasury specifies four parameters — pure time preference, catastrophe risk, the elasticity of marginal utility and the growth rate — the last two of which multiply to the 2.0 per cent component described above as a single judgement. and the declining schedule of 3.0 per cent for years 31 to 75 and 2.5 per cent thereafter. gov.uk
    4.
    HM Treasury, Green Book supplementary guidance: discounting, updated 5 February 2026. Instructs practitioners to use 3.5 per cent for years 1 to 30 and 3.0 per cent for years 31 to 75. gov.uk (PDF)
    5.
    A. E. Boardman and M. A. Moore, “The Social Discount Rate for Canada Based on Future Growth in Consumption,” Canadian Public Policy, vol. 36 no. 3 (2010), pp. 325 onward. Records the Treasury Board Secretariat’s 2007 interim recommendation of an 8 per cent social discount rate with sensitivity rates of 3 and 10 per cent on a weighted social opportunity cost of capital basis; argues instead for 3.5 per cent, conditional on a horizon under fifty years and no crowding out of private investment, with a shadow price of capital of 1.26 applied to investment flows, and a declining schedule beyond fifty years. Canadian Public Policy
    6.
    Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, Policy on Cost-Benefit Analysis, in force since 1 September 2018. Requires departments to use the opportunity cost of capital specified in the TBS guide, with a social discount rate permitted in defined cases including impacts of fifty years or more, and requires opportunity-cost results to be reported in any event. canada.ca
    7.
    Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, “Requirements for developing, managing and reviewing regulations,” canada.ca, page updated 26 November 2025, accessed 21 August 2026. States that the most current version of Canada’s Cost-Benefit Analysis Guide for Regulatory Proposals is available exclusively on the Cabinet Directive on Regulation GCwiki page. The 2022 edition remains catalogued in Government of Canada Publications as an archived document. canada.ca
    8.
    Transport Canada, Economic Evaluation Branch, Guide to Benefit-Cost Analysis in Transport Canada, Ottawa, 1994. Catalogued in the Transport Research International Documentation database. TRID
    9.
    Bank of Canada, selected benchmark bond yields, accessed August 2026; Bank of Canada policy interest rate held at 2.25 per cent through mid-2026 against a 2 per cent inflation target. Long-bond yields move daily and should be checked against the source rather than quoted from this page. bankofcanada.ca
    10.
    Réseau express métropolitain, “Information about the agreement with the ARTM and its rate mechanisms.” Sets out the 72-cent per passenger-kilometre invoice to the regional transit authority, the reduction once ridership projections are exceeded, and the turnkey scope covering construction, operation and long-term maintenance. rem.info
    11.
    Capital structure as reported on award of the construction contracts: CDPQ Infra $2.95B, Government of Québec $1.283B, Government of Canada $1.283B, Hydro-Québec $295M, ARTM $512M, against a construction cost of $6.3B. The estimate was revised to $7.95B in September 2023, with CDPQ Infra absorbing the increase under its agreement with the Québec government. International Railway Journal
    12.
    Gouvernement du Québec, ARTM and CDPQ Infra, “Release of the management and implementation agreement and of the integration agreement for the Réseau express métropolitain,” 23 April 2018. Confirms the $0.72 per passenger-km base cost and annual indexation to Canada’s Consumer Price Index, and the cap limiting additional municipal costs to roughly $45 to $60 million a year in then-current dollars. quebec.ca
    13.
    CDPQ Infra, “7 myths about the REM de l’Est,” February 2022. Describes the ridership relief mechanism: the rate falls by about 20 per cent, to roughly $0.57, for trips above 15 per cent over forecast, and equals the user fare for trips above 40 per cent over forecast. Published in the context of a later project; the mechanism described is the REM’s. cdpqinfra.com
    14.
    Réseau express métropolitain, semi-annual project update, 3 June 2021. Reaffirms the 72-cent rate set in the 2018 agreement and states the performance targets: 8 to 9 per cent for CDPQ Infra and 3.7 per cent for the government partners. rem.info
    15.
    Discounting arithmetic in this explainer computed by the Initiative on the stated assumptions: a level annual benefit stream, sixty years of operation beginning in year 16, discounted to a year-zero base; the declining-schedule row applies 3.5 per cent to years 1 to 30, 3.0 per cent to years 31 to 75, per source 3.
    16.
    Joint Project Office (VIA Rail Canada and the Canada Infrastructure Bank), High Frequency Rail Project: Business Case Update, V.002, 10 December 2021, 150 pp., released by the Canada Infrastructure Bank under the Access to Information Act, November 2025. Capital cost breakdown and 30-year revenue at p. 7; benefit-cost ratio, net present value and the Table 4 subsidy comparison at p. 8; economic appraisal parameters sourced to Metrolinx and MTQ guidance at p. 40; incremental capex and opex at Table 9; other impacts at Table 12; impact results and both ratios at Table 14, p. 43; net present value assumptions, including the 2.5 per cent discount rate sourced to the ten-year average 30-year Government of Canada benchmark bond, at Figure 38, p. 85.
    17.
    The same document released as Annexe A to access request 22-2207 (148 pp., stamped Demande d’accès à l’information #22-2207 AI(D)). In that version, section 9.7 Net Present Value Analysis survives as a heading at p. 84 with pp. 84–86 otherwise blank; section 9.8 Financial Structuring at p. 87 is withheld in full; the capital cost and 30-year revenue sentences are truncated mid-clause at p. 21, leaving the grammar intact around the removed figures; and the subsection headings of section 7 Economic Case are withheld within the table of contents, together with the title of section 8 and all of its subsections, which appear as bare dot leaders against pp. 40–43 and 44–63. The construction employment sentence at p. 21 is severed in the same way: “an estimated ___ annual equivalent jobs could be created.” That figure — 71,000 to 96,000 annual equivalent — is disclosed in full in the Canada Infrastructure Bank release at note 16. No exemption provisions are marked against any of the severed passages. Both versions held by the Initiative.
    18.
    Cadence consortium membership and CDPQ Infra’s leadership role: Cadence, “About us,” and CDPQ Infra, “Alto high-speed rail,” both accessed August 2026; consortium announced as preferred private development partner 19 February 2025, co-development agreement signed March 2025. AtkinsRéalis (formerly SNC-Lavalin) was a member of NouvLR, which held the REM engineering, procurement and construction contract, and of the group now operating as Pulsar with Alstom under the rolling stock, systems, operations and maintenance contract. cadence.info
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  Economics Explainer  ·  August 2026
    Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor.

  • It left the rules behind

    ALTO Used the Rulebook’s Numbers. It Left the Rules Behind.

    ALTO’s new economic report takes two key figures from an Ontario appraisal manual and names that manual as its source. The manual attaches conditions to those figures. The report uses the figures and leaves the conditions out.

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Economics Brief · Published August 2026 · Plain-language version of the research brief Two Parameters, None of the Conditions · Companion explainer: Hours Are Not Dollars
    ⚠ The Document Under Examination

    In August 2026 ALTO published Canada’s Moment: The Economic Opportunity of High-Speed Rail, an 83-page report setting out the economic case for the Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor. Its central figure is $49.5 billion in benefits to travellers and society, set against a construction cost of $60 to $90 billion.

    To turn sixty years of future benefits into one number in today’s dollars, the report needs two things: a rate at which to shrink future benefits back to present value, and a price for an hour of a traveller’s time. For both, it names one source — a public appraisal manual published by Metrolinx, the Government of Ontario’s transit agency for the Toronto and Hamilton region.

    Critical Finding

    The Metrolinx manual does not simply publish those two numbers. It publishes them as part of a package. For any project over $500 million, the same manual requires that the numbers be re-tested at different values, that results be reported as a range rather than a single figure, that early-stage construction costs be topped up to correct for known optimism, and that the project’s benefit-to-cost ratio be published. ALTO’s project is roughly a hundred times larger than that threshold.

    None of those requirements appears in ALTO’s report. There is no test of the discount rate, no range around the $49.5 billion, no optimism adjustment to the cost, and no benefit-cost ratio. The two numbers were carried across. The conditions attached to them were not.

    This brief does not argue that ALTO used the wrong discount rate. The rate it used is a mainstream, defensible choice. The finding is narrower and, we think, harder to answer: the report presents a set of choices as though they were simply facts, and a reader has no way of knowing that anything was chosen at all.

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    Why this matters

    Imagine a builder quotes you a price for an extension. Asked where the figures come from, they name the standard industry pricing guide. That guide does set those rates. It also says that on a job this size the quote must show a high and a low figure rather than a single number, must add a fixed percentage on top because early quotes are almost always too low, and must set the total against the value of what you are getting.

    The builder uses the guide’s rates and does none of the rest. The quote may well be sound. You have no way of telling — and nothing on the page tells you that anything was left out.

    That is the situation this brief describes. ALTO’s economic report takes two figures from a public appraisal manual and names that manual as its source. The same manual attaches a set of mandatory checks to those figures for projects of this size. The figures were used. The checks are absent, and their absence is not disclosed.

    It matters because of what rests on the result. The $49.5 billion benefit figure is the number now appearing in news coverage and public statements as the reason to build a railway costing $60 to $90 billion of public money, ahead of a federal decision in 2029. Presented as a single figure with no range, it reads as something measured. The report’s own tables call it an upper estimate.

    What the report gives you

    One benefit figure, $49.5 billion, built on a rate and an hourly value of time presented without explanation of where they came from or what else was possible. No range. No benefit-to-cost ratio.

    What its own cited source requires

    The same figures re-tested at different values, results published as a range with a confidence level, a 64 per cent top-up on early-stage construction costs, and the benefit-to-cost ratio reported.

    What that leaves a reader with

    No way to judge how firm the headline number is — and no indication in the document that this is a question worth asking.

    One thing this brief does not do: argue that the numbers ALTO chose are wrong, or that high-speed rail is a bad idea. The rate it used is a mainstream choice, and the one test the manual requires would, if anything, make the benefits look larger. The ask is simply that the tests be run and published, as the cited manual says they must be.

    The Two Numbers

    What the report borrowed, and from where

    3.5%
    the discount rate ALTO uses, taken from the Metrolinx manual
    Appendix A, footnote 65
    $22.32
    the value of one hour of a traveller’s time, the same figure for every trip
    justified as following Metrolinx method
    64%
    the top-up the same manual requires on construction costs at this stage of design
    not applied in the report

    The discount rate. A benefit that arrives in 2085 is not worth as much to us today as the same benefit next year. Economists handle this by shrinking future amounts back to a present-day value at a fixed annual percentage — the discount rate. ALTO uses 3.5 per cent a year, applied over a sixty-year period. The rate matters enormously: over sixty years, small changes to it move the headline benefit figure by billions.

    The value of time. Most of the $49.5 billion is not cash. It is hours — time that travellers would otherwise have spent on the road or waiting at an airport. To put a dollar figure on those hours, you have to decide what an hour is worth. ALTO uses $22.32, and applies the same figure to every trip: business or holiday, commuter or tourist. The report tells us its own ridership model did separate business from non-business travel, and that this distinction was set aside in favour of one blended figure.

    Where both come from. The footnote attached to the discount rate cites one document and one only: the Business Case Manual Volume 2: Guidance, published by Metrolinx in August 2021. The single blended value of time is defended on the grounds that it follows Metrolinx method. So a manual written for regional transit projects in the Toronto and Hamilton area is the published authority for how a national intercity railway has been appraised.

    Metrolinx guidance is not binding on a federal Crown corporation, and nothing here suggests otherwise. But a citation carries the terms of the thing cited. If you name a manual as your authority, it is fair to look at what else that manual says on the same page.

    The Manual’s Own Terms

    The numbers come as a set, not a menu

    The 3.5 per cent rate appears in a table of standard parameters. The text introducing that table is direct about their status: any departure from them has to be explicitly agreed during the work, with a clear justification recorded. It is a list of defaults you may leave, provided you say so. Below is how each of those defaults is treated in ALTO’s report.

    What the Metrolinx manual specifiesWhat ALTO’s report does
    Discount rate: 3.5 per cent. The rate at which future benefits are shrunk to present value.3.5 per cent. Adopted exactly as specified, and correctly footnoted to the manual.
    Status:Carried across
    Value of time: one blended figure. A single hourly value across all modes and all trip purposes, rather than separate values for business and leisure travel.One blended figure, $22.32. Adopted, and expressly justified by reference to the manual — in preference to the business and non-business split that ALTO’s own ridership model had already produced.
    Status:Carried across
    Growth cap: stop escalating benefits 30 years out. The manual caps growth in the inputs thirty years after the base year, expressly to reflect the fact that nobody can see that far ahead. User benefits are named as covered by the cap.Applied to two small lines, not the big one. Accident rates are capped after twenty years, and vehicle emission factors run to 2050. No cap is stated on travel-time benefits — which are 78 per cent of the total.
    Status:Applied selectively
    One price year throughout. All values discounted and escalated to a single common year, fixed at the start of the study, so that every figure in the document is in the same money.Two price years in one report. The appraisal and the capital cost are in 2024 dollars; the economy-wide GDP result is in 2019 dollars.
    Status:Not consistent
    Test the value of time at 0.75 per cent real growth. The manual’s base case assumes the value of an hour does not rise in real terms — but pairs that assumption with a required test of what happens if it does.Zero growth assumed; no test run. The assumption was carried across. The test that the manual attaches to the assumption was not.
    Status:Left behind

    One footnote on the money. Adjusting the manual’s 2021 value of time for inflation to 2024 gives roughly $21.40 — within a few per cent of ALTO’s $22.32. We are not claiming ALTO derived its figure that way, and ALTO does not say how it did. The point is simply that the figure sits where you would expect a Metrolinx-derived figure to sit, which makes the omission of the accompanying test harder to explain as an oversight.

    The Missing Tests

    What a project this size is supposed to publish

    The Metrolinx manual scales its requirements to the size of the project. Anything above $500 million is treated as large scale, and a specific list of tests and disclosures becomes mandatory. ALTO’s cost estimate is $60 to $90 billion — roughly a hundred times that threshold. Here is that list, and where each item stands in ALTO’s report.

    Re-run the numbers at a different discount rate

    The manual requires the calculation be repeated at 2.5 per cent so the reader can see how sensitive the answer is to the rate. Not done, and not mentioned. Note the direction here: the required test is at a lower rate, which would make the benefits look larger. Nothing in the manual supports an argument that ALTO’s rate is too generous. What it supports is the narrower point that the manual’s author expects the rate to be tested and the test to be shown.

    Re-run the numbers with a rising value of time

    Required at 0.75 per cent real growth per year. Not done.

    Run the costs and assumptions through a range analysis

    The manual requires costs and modelling assumptions be run thousands of times with the inputs varied, and the result reported as a range with a stated confidence level. Not done.

    Report the odds that the project is worth doing

    The manual asks specifically for the probability that benefits exceed costs. Not reported — the report publishes no benefit-cost ratio at all.

    Publish the standard indicators

    Net present value, benefit-cost ratio, capital utilisation, return on investment, internal rate of return. None published.

    Model low, medium and high growth scenarios

    Required, with the ridership growth rate stated for each. A ridership range is shown; the underlying growth scenarios are not stated.

    This is not a theoretical requirement

    The manual works the method through on a real example: an extension of the Yonge subway line in Toronto, at an early stage of design. A single cost estimate of $5.65 billion becomes a range of $6.16 to $6.84 billion, with the confidence level attached. The reader is shown a central figure, a spread, and how sure anyone is about it.

    That project is roughly one per cent the size of ALTO. On uncertainty, the manual ALTO cites tells its reader more about a subway extension than ALTO’s report tells its reader about a national railway.

    The Missing Lower Number

    The report concedes a range it never publishes

    The two tables carrying the entire $49.5 billion case are both headed with the words upper estimate. Every figure in the narrative is prefixed the same way: up to 24 million riders, up to 9.3 billion hours saved, up to 400 fatalities avoided, up to 39.1 million tonnes of emissions.

    An upper estimate is one end of a range. The other end does not appear anywhere in the document.

    The claim built on top of those figures goes further still. The report states that the benefits hold across a wide range of scenarios, and repeats the point in its conclusion. But demonstrating that a result holds across a range of scenarios is exactly what the missing sensitivity analysis does, and exactly what the cited manual requires be reported at this scale. The scenarios may well have been run. Their results are not shown.

    And the report clearly knows how to show them. Elsewhere in the same document, the ridership forecast comes with multiple scenarios and a published band around it. The economy-wide GDP figure rests on nearly a hundred separate model runs with the assumptions varied. Between a tested input and a tested output sits the largest single number in the report, presented as a single column of point estimates.

    The Optimism Adjustment

    A top-up the manual requires, and the report does not mention

    Early cost estimates for big infrastructure projects are, as a matter of record, too low. Not occasionally — routinely. The Metrolinx manual is explicit about the evidence behind this: in an international sample of 258 rail projects, ninety per cent were undercosted, by an average of forty-five per cent.

    The manual’s response is a mandatory top-up applied to the construction cost when it is compared with benefits, over and above whatever contingency is already in the estimate. The size of the top-up depends on how far the design has progressed. At the earliest stage — nought to ten per cent designed — it is 64 per cent.

    ALTO’s cost estimate is described in its own report as an AACE Class 5 estimate, which is the earliest and least developed class there is. Applied as the manual directs, a cost of $60 to $90 billion would enter the comparison at roughly $98 to $148 billion, before any comparison with benefits is attempted. That range is our own arithmetic on ALTO’s published estimate at the manual’s stated uplift; ALTO publishes no uplifted figure.

    The report applies no such adjustment and does not mention the concept. It is worth noting where this reasoning comes from: the manual grounds the adjustment in the research on transport megaproject cost overruns that this Initiative has drawn on since its first publication. That reasoning is already embedded in the appraisal manual ALTO chose to cite.

    The Central Inversion

    Too early to divide, but not too early to multiply

    The report declines to publish a benefit-cost ratio — benefits divided by costs, the single number a reader would most want. Its stated reason is that the cost estimate is too immature to support one.

    Under the framework ALTO cites, that reasoning runs backwards. The manual sets out what is required at each stage of a project’s life. At the earliest stage, the very stage ALTO is at, the requirement is a single line: conduct sensitivity testing to understand the key drivers and the level of uncertainty in each option.

    Early-stage uncertainty is not an exemption from testing. It is the reason testing is required. The report treats it the other way round: immaturity on the cost side is given as grounds for publishing nothing, while single-point figures are published on the benefit side of the same ledger. The same uncertainty is treated as decisive for one number and immaterial for the other.

    And a business case for this corridor has already done it. In December 2021 the Joint Project Office — VIA Rail and the Canada Infrastructure Bank — published a benefit-cost ratio for High Frequency Rail, the cheaper predecessor to ALTO, at a comparable stage of development: about 0.13, or roughly 0.4 on an expanded basis counting fare revenue and agglomeration as benefits. It published a net present value of minus $21.1 billion and a thirty-year public subsidy of $37.1 to $42.2 billion alongside it. Its economic parameters were drawn from Metrolinx and Ministère des Transports du Québec guidance — the same two sources ALTO cites. Immaturity did not prevent a ratio then. The companion explainer Hours Are Not Dollars sets out those figures in full, including why 0.13 rather than 0.4 is the anchor.

    A related point arises elsewhere in the report. In explaining why one set of results is excluded from the welfare account, it refers to those results as therefore not being included in the benefit-cost ratio — speaking of it as a thing with a settled boundary about what enters it. One page says a meaningful ratio cannot yet be produced. Another treats the ratio as already drawn up. The two are difficult to read together, and the report does not reconcile them.

    Limits of This Analysis

    What this brief does not say

    Stated here rather than left for others to find.

    On the analysis

    The rate is not wrong3.5 per cent is a defensible choice, used by the United Kingdom Treasury and by Metrolinx, and well supported for long-horizon public investment. This brief does not argue that ALTO’s rate is too low or too high.
    Metrolinx does not bind ALTOA provincial agency’s manual has no legal force over a federal Crown corporation. The argument is about the coherence of a citation, not about jurisdiction.
    One choice runs in ALTO’s favourThe 3.5 per cent rate is applied flat across sixty years. The UK Treasury, whose Social Time Preference Rate this figure matches, steps its rate down to 3.0 per cent after year 30. Applying that schedule would have made ALTO’s benefit total larger, not smaller.
    One cited source was not reviewedGuidance from the Ministère des Transports du Québec is cited separately for the value of time. The Initiative has not reviewed it and takes no position on what it requires.

    On the report and its source

    The report does apply conservatism in placesAccident reductions are capped after twenty years, and car emission factors are assumed to improve to 2050, which the report notes limits the emissions benefit. These are the two smallest monetised lines. No equivalent constraint is disclosed for travel time, which is 78 per cent of the total.
    The manual itself is datedMetrolinx said in 2021 that a revised version with updated values would follow in 2022. Five years on, it has not. That is a limitation of the source document, not a fault of ALTO’s — but a reader assessing where a federal appraisal input came from is entitled to know it.
    Which figures are whoseEvery figure attributed to ALTO, Metrolinx, the Joint Project Office, HM Treasury or Statistics Canada is quoted from the sources listed below and can be checked there. Three figures are our own arithmetic and are marked as such where they appear: the $98 to $148 billion uplifted capital range, the $21.40 inflation-escalated value of time, and the five per cent effect of the declining Green Book schedule. Where the report does not state something, we say so rather than inferring it, and we make no claim about why any requirement was or was not carried across.
    This is a public report, not a formal submissionA business case submitted to Cabinet in 2029 may well contain material this document does not. The claims examined here are the claims ALTO has chosen to put in public.
    What Would Settle It

    Two questions ALTO can answer without releasing a model

    Both are answerable from work ALTO has already done. Neither requires disclosure of a model, cooperation from staff, or agreement about what the correct discount rate for a national railway ought to be.

    1. Was the calculation ever run at a rate other than 3.5 per cent?

    And if so, what were the results? A negative answer is itself informative — it would mean the required test was never performed. An affirmative answer is the sensitivity table the report does not contain.

    2. Which parts of the cited guidance were applied, and which were departed from?

    The Metrolinx document requires that any variation from its parameters be agreed and clearly justified. The report records no variations at all — while, on the evidence above, departing from several.

    Where Things Stand · August 2026

    Summary ledger

    Measured against the requirements of the manual ALTO names as its authority:

    Carried across
    The 3.5 per cent discount rate, correctly cited to the manual.
    Carried across
    The single blended value of time, expressly justified by reference to the manual.
    Partial
    The thirty-year cap on benefit growth: applied to accident and emissions lines, not stated for travel time, which is 78 per cent of the benefits.
    Partial
    A single price year throughout: the appraisal is in 2024 dollars, the GDP result in 2019 dollars.
    Left behind
    Discount rate sensitivity test at 2.5 per cent.
    Left behind
    Value of time sensitivity test at 0.75 per cent real growth.
    Left behind
    Range analysis of costs and assumptions, reported with a confidence level.
    Left behind
    The probability that benefits exceed costs, and the benefit-cost ratio itself.
    Left behind
    The standard set of performance indicators: net present value, benefit-cost ratio, capital utilisation, return on investment, internal rate of return.
    Left behind
    The optimism-bias top-up on construction costs, 64 per cent at this level of design — not applied and not mentioned.
    Left behind
    The lower end of the range, on figures the report itself labels an upper estimate.

    ALTO names an appraisal manual twice — once for its discount rate, once to justify a single blended value of time — and leaves behind the testing, the ranges, the optimism adjustment and the benefit-cost reporting that the same manual attaches to those figures at this project’s scale. What remains is a column of numbers labelled an upper estimate whose lower estimate is never shown, resting on parameters presented as facts rather than as selections, in a report that declines to divide that column by the cost while describing the benefits as holding across a wide range of scenarios.

    Every document relied on here is public. Nothing in this analysis requires access to ALTO’s models, cooperation from its staff, or a view on what the correct discount rate for a national railway ought to be.

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    If the terms in this brief are unfamiliar — what a discount rate actually does, why a benefit figure is not money, and who ends up paying — the companion explainer Hours Are Not Dollars covers the same ground in plain language, and sets out the 2021 business case figures in full.

    Sources

    Primary documents

    1.
    ALTO, Canada’s Moment: The Economic Opportunity of High-Speed Rail, August 2026, 83 pp. Discount rate, appraisal period and price base in the Appendix A methodology box, sourced at footnote 65 to the Metrolinx Business Case Manual Volume 2; value of time and the single-parameter justification in the same appendix, with Ministère des Transports du Québec guidance at footnote 66. Direct-effects tables headed “upper estimate, $2024 CAD”; benefit-cost ratio discussion at p. 62 and reference to the benefit-cost ratio at p. 80; capital cost and AACE Class 5 at pp. 5 and 65; scenario-robustness claims at pp. 3 and 69.
    2.
    Metrolinx, Business Case Manual Volume 2: Guidance, August 2021, 222 pp. Economic parameters at Table 5.8; sensitivity requirements at Tables 5.1 to 5.3; optimism bias at Tables 5.4 to 5.6; worked range example at Table 5.7; Economic Case lifecycle requirements and key performance indicators; business case principles at pp. 11 and 13; guidance revision cycle at p. 4. metrolinx.com
    3.
    Metrolinx, “Business Cases — Resources,” accessed 21 August 2026. The Business Case Guidance link resolves to the Volume 2 file under an asset version token corresponding to 15 September 2022; no Volume 2 revision has been issued.
    4.
    B. Flyvbjerg, Procedures for Dealing with Optimism Bias in Transport Planning (UK Department for Transport, 2004), cited in the Metrolinx Guidance as the basis for the optimism-bias uplift.
    5.
    Statistics Canada, Table 18-10-0004-01, consumer price index, used for the 2021 to 2024 escalation of the Metrolinx value of time. The comparison is arithmetic and is not an attribution of method.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  Economics Brief  ·  August 2026
    Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor.

  • 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.

    Download
    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