Ready to Tender, Not Yet Approved
Cadence has opened the procurement for the first segment of ALTO — while its own notice says the project is not yet approved.
On June 23, 2026, Cadence — the private partner chosen to develop ALTO — published a Preliminary Notice to Market for the Ottawa–Montreal segment, the first part of the line to be built. It sets out the contracts, the delivery models, and a tendering schedule that starts this summer. Cadence PNM
The same notice states that construction has “no official launch date” and that the entire build-and-operate phase is “subject to the government of Canada’s final confirmation of the investment.” In other words: the machinery to build this is being switched on before the decision to build it — and the money to pay for it — has been confirmed.
You do not need an access-to-information request to see this one. It is a public document, unredacted, published by the developer itself — and on its own pages it does two things at once: it commits the construction industry to a two-year tendering calendar for the project’s biggest contracts, and it confirms that the project is not yet funded, not yet finally approved, and does not yet have a confirmed start date.
This is the same sequence this Initiative has documented at every earlier stage: the commitment comes first, the decision that would justify it comes later. What is new is that it is now happening in the open, in the developer’s own words, rather than in a briefing note released years after the fact.
None of this settles whether high-speed rail should be built. It is a question about order of operations — whether a project should be this far into procurement before the public analysis, the final business case, and the funding decision are in place.
A tender calendar, not a green light
A “Preliminary Notice to Market” is a signal to construction firms: here is the work that is coming, here is roughly when it will be tendered, start putting your teams together. Cadence is careful to say it is not a formal call for bids and not a commitment to buy anything. That caution is worth taking at face value — but it cuts both ways. The document is not a decision to proceed; it is the paperwork that gets the supply chain ready to proceed. And it is being issued now, ahead of the decision that determines whether there is anything to proceed to.
The notice is explicit about that gap. It says construction is “contemplated to begin in 2029–2030, although no official launch date has been confirmed,” and that the build-and-operate phase — the phase where the line actually gets built — happens only “subject to the government of Canada’s final confirmation of the investment.” Yet the tendering timetable it publishes does not wait for that confirmation. It begins in the summer of 2026.
2026
The order here is the whole story. Under any ordinary reading of how a public project should work, the sequence is: decide whether to build it, confirm the money, then tender the work. This notice runs two of those steps in parallel — the tendering starts while the decision and the money are still described, on the same pages, as outstanding.
What the notice commits to, and what it leaves open
The clearest way to read the document is to line up what it treats as fixed enough to build a procurement schedule around against what it says is still undecided. Both columns are drawn from the same notice.
| Treated as ready to tender | Still described as undecided |
|---|---|
| The contract packages. The notice sets out more than seventeen contract packages (WP1–WP17) — trains, signalling, stations, the Montreal access tunnel, two major bridges, and the track itself — each with a delivery model already assigned. | The final route. The “more precise corridor” is still promised for autumn 2026. For the Toronto–Ottawa segment, the notice leaves open the choice between a northern route through the Canadian Shield and a southern route through farmland — unresolved. |
| The timetable. A tender calendar running from summer 2026 (trains) through 2027–2028 (tunnel, bridges, civil works), package by package. | The start date. Construction has no confirmed launch date; 2029–2030 is described only as “contemplated.” |
| The delivery company. A dedicated entity, “InfraCo,” led by CDPQ Infra, is to be the contracting party for all the builders, with a second company, “OpCo,” to run operations. | The funding. The entire build-and-operate phase is “subject to the government of Canada’s final confirmation of the investment” — which the notice does not report as having been given. |
| The technical spec. Design speed of 320 km/h; full electrification; no level crossings; a twin-bore tunnel roughly 15 km long and 9 m wide under the Riviere des Prairies and Mount Royal into Montreal. | The business case. No final business case has been published. The government’s own answer to Parliament in June 2026 was that the cost-benefit, net-present-value, and 30-year subsidy figures are “not finalized.” |
Read together, the two columns describe a project detailed enough to hand contractors a two-year work plan, and unsettled enough that its route, its price, its business case, and its go-ahead are all still open. Those are not usually true of the same project at the same time.
What is actually being tendered
The notice divides the first segment into more than seventeen work packages. Most people following this issue do not need the package numbers — but the shape of the list matters, because it shows how much of the hardest and most expensive work is being brought to market before its design is finished.
The trains and the systems come first
The first tender out the door, in summer 2026, is for the rolling stock — roughly 60 trainsets. The signalling and control systems follow in the autumn. These are network-wide contracts: they are written for the first segment but carry options to extend to the rest of the line later.
The tunnel and bridges are tendered before they are fully designed
The single most demanding piece — the Montreal access tunnel, a twin-bore ~15 km bore under a river and a mountain into the downtown — is brought to market on an early-involvement basis because its design and ground conditions are not yet settled. Two major bridges (the Riviere des Mille-Iles and the Ottawa River) are in the same position. The riskiest, priciest work is being tendered at the point where the least is known about it.
The benefit numbers arrive without a source
The notice repeats headline figures — $24.5 billion a year in GDP, more than 50,000 construction jobs, 5,000 operating jobs — with no study, method, or citation attached to any of them. They are stated as facts in a document whose own government has told Parliament the underlying cost-benefit analysis is not finished.
Who is in the room
The notice confirms the structure of the group that would build and run the line. This is a matter of public record from the document itself; it is set out here as fact, not as accusation.
Cadence is a consortium. The notice names CDPQ Infra (the infrastructure arm of Quebec’s public pension fund) as the lead infrastructure and equity member, with Air Canada as an equity member; SYSTRA and AtkinsRealis as the design leads; and Keolis and SNCF Voyageurs as the operations leads. The new delivery company, “InfraCo,” would be led by CDPQ Infra and would sit above and contract with all the individual builders.
Two features are worth noting plainly, both straight from the document. First, the same consortium that is designing the strategy also sits atop the company that will award and manage the contracts — while the notice’s own rules bar consortium members from bidding on the major contracts and require engineering firms to take part “as subcontractors.” Second, Air Canada — the airline whose routes this train is meant to compete with — is an equity holder in the developer, a position the notice describes by reference to the airline’s experience linking its flights with rail in Europe. Readers can weigh what those arrangements mean; the point here is only that the developer’s own notice puts them on the record.
Three things easy to miss
The contracts would be in English only
The notice contemplates publishing the major contracts in English only, with French “courtesy versions” available on request — a notable choice for a federal project running through Quebec and Ontario. It justifies this by pointing to the English-language agreement Cadence signed with Alto.
You may not talk to the people who run it — except through Cadence
Firms taking part in the procurement are told they “must refrain from any direct communication” with “Project Stakeholders” — a category the notice defines to include landowners and communities — except as Cadence permits, on pain of disqualification.
A federal law puts the project largely beyond local jurisdiction
The notice cites the High-Speed Rail Act, which declares the railway a “work for the general advantage of Canada.” That designation places the project under federal jurisdiction and applies provincial and municipal law only “to the extent that such laws may validly apply” — the mechanism that narrows what municipalities and provinces can require.
None of these is hidden. They are in the notice, in plain sentences. They are collected here because, together, they describe a procurement that is moving quickly, keeping tight control of who may speak to whom, and operating under a statute that limits local say — all before the funding decision the same document says is still to come.
Summary ledger
Reading the notice against the question a citizen would reasonably ask — is this project actually decided? — here is where the document leaves things.
The top of that list is moving. The bottom of it is not. A procurement this advanced usually means a project this decided — and by the developer’s own account, this one is not. The notice asks the construction market to get ready to build something the government has not yet committed to build, at a price no one has finalized, on a route not yet chosen. The reasonable question for anyone following this is not whether the train is a good idea. It is why the building has started before the deciding.
Primary documents
This brief summarizes a single public document in plain language. It does not argue that high-speed rail should or should not be built; it examines the order in which this procurement is proceeding relative to the decisions that would authorize it. A fuller treatment of the notice appears in the Initiative’s Accountability Record.