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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How Canada stacks up against the G7
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.
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.
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 buys | What 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.
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:
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.
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
A neutral track owner
An independent referee
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.
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.