Tag: HSR economics

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

August 23, 2026

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 hear	What 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 hear	What 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 hear	What 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 hear	What 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 hear	What 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

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

August 22, 2026

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 used	Value of the stream	Relative to 3.5%	$49.5B scaled
2.5 per cent	21.34	1.43×	$71.0B
3.0 per cent	17.76	1.19×	$59.1B
3.5 per cent — ALTO’s rate	14.89	1.00×	$49.5B
UK declining schedule	15.61	1.05×	$51.9B
5 per cent	9.11	0.61×	$30.3B
7 per cent	5.09	0.34×	$16.9B
8 per cent	3.90	0.26×	$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 published	Figure
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

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.

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

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

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)

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

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

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

Transport Canada, Economic Evaluation Branch, Guide to Benefit-Cost Analysis in Transport Canada, Ottawa, 1994. Catalogued in the Transport Research International Documentation database. TRID

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

August 21, 2026

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.

Download

Two Parameters, None of the Conditions — Full Brief (PDF)

Full research brief with page references, parameter tables, and sources

Download PDF

Start Here

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 specifies	What 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.

Download Full Brief

Two Parameters, None of the Conditions (PDF)

Full research brief with page references, parameter tables, worked figures and sources

Download PDF

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

August 21, 2026

Two point two trillion

Also in this site

Two Point Two Trillion

ALTO’s headline economic claim is true of the Canada that existed in 2019. It is presented to the public as today’s.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Economics Brief · Published July 2026

⚠ Two studies, two summaries

ALTO has commissioned two economic studies and published both. Aviseo Consulting produced a computer model of the effect of high-speed rail on the whole Canadian economy. CPCS, working with HDR, produced a study of its effect on tourism. Both reports are careful. Both state their limits plainly. Both are free to download from ALTO’s website.

This brief is not about those studies. It is about the difference between what they say and what ALTO says they say. That difference is where the public numbers come from — and it is what a travel trade article repeated to a wide audience on July 20, 2026, without opening either report.

What we found, in one minute

The famous 1.1 per cent is 1.1 per cent of Canada’s 2019 economy. The Aviseo report says so on page 13, in those words. ALTO’s public pages drop the year and call the money “today’s value.” Canada’s economy is now about a third bigger than it was in 2019, so the same claim in today’s money would be about $36.5 billion, not $24.5 billion — or, if you keep the dollar figure, about 0.74 per cent, not 1.1.

Almost all of it is one assumption. Of the $24.4 billion the model produces, $21.0 billion comes from assuming businesses in and around Toronto, Montréal, Ottawa and Québec City become 3 per cent more productive. Change that one dial to 2 per cent and the answer is $13.8 billion. Change it to 5 per cent and it is $34.5 billion. ALTO publishes the middle figure and not the range.

The two studies disagree with each other about tourism. Aviseo counts international visitors only and says domestic tourism is mostly people spending money they would have spent anyway. CPCS builds its headline on domestic travel within the corridor. The two use different methods that cannot be added together. Neither of ALTO’s summaries mentions the other study.

And in the tourism study’s base case, the small towns get nothing at all. Under the scenario where no extra tourism policy is put in place, Peterborough and Trois-Rivières receive zero additional visitor spending and zero additional GDP. The blog post announcing that study is titled “How High-Speed Rail Will Boost Tourism from Big Cities to Small Towns.”

The Arithmetic

1.1 per cent of which year?

ALTO’s website puts the claim in one line: a “1.1% increase in Canada’s GDP ($24.5 billion in today’s value)”. GDP means the total size of the economy — everything the country produces in a year.

Work backwards from those two numbers and you can calculate how big the economy would have to be for both to be right at once.

$24.4B

the benefit the study actually reports

Aviseo report, Table 1

1.1%

the share of the economy that represents

Aviseo report, page 13

$2.22T

the size of economy where both are true

$24.4 billion divided by 1.1 per cent

Statistics Canada measures the economy every three months. In the first quarter of 2026 it came to $3,321,588 million — about $3.32 trillion. That is roughly $1.1 trillion more than the figure the two numbers imply. Statistics Canada

Two notes on these figures. Nobody has claimed that Canada’s economy is $2.22 trillion. That number is our own division of the two figures ALTO publishes together, and it is here because it is what those two figures imply about each other. And the benefit appears on this page as both $24.4 billion and $24.5 billion: the first is the number in Aviseo’s own table, the second the rounded form ALTO uses on its benefits page. They are the same estimate.

The study explains why, and it is not hiding anything. The Aviseo model is built on Statistics Canada’s 2019 picture of the economy, chosen because 2020 and 2021 were pandemic years and the data from them is not reliable. Page 13 then states the result carefully: the gain is about $24.4 billion, which is roughly 1.1 per cent of Canada’s 2019 GDP.

That is the whole finding. The study says 2019. ALTO’s website says “today’s value.”

If you use the 1.1 per cent

Applied to today’s economy, the benefit would be about $36.5 billion a year. ALTO’s published dollar figure understates its own claim by roughly a third.

If you use the $24.4 billion

Measured against today’s economy, that is about 0.74 per cent — not 1.1. The headline percentage is too high for the dollar figure beside it.

There is a further wrinkle worth knowing. The model is what economists call static. It does not project forward year by year. It asks a single question: what would 2019 have looked like if the railway had already been running? The report says so directly. That means there is no discounting and no present-value calculation anywhere in it — so the phrase “in today’s value” describes a piece of arithmetic the study never performed.

Where The Number Comes From

Almost all of it is a single dial

The model adds up three separate effects. The report breaks them out, so we can see exactly how much each one contributes to the $24.4 billion.

Channel	Contribution	Share of total
Productivity — businesses getting more done because cities are better connected	$21.0B	86%
Labour supply — people working more hours because commuting is quicker	$2.7B	11%
Tourism — extra spending by international visitors	$0.8B	3%
Total	$24.4B	100%

Nearly nine tenths of the headline comes from the productivity line. So it is worth knowing exactly how that number was produced.

The modellers picked a figure from the international research for how much more productive businesses become when a fast rail link arrives. The research offers a range. They chose 3 per cent for their middle case, then applied it to the economies of four metropolitan areas: Toronto, Montréal, Ottawa and Québec City.

Those four metros produce roughly a third of Canada’s economy. Three per cent of a third is about one per cent. The headline is close to being arithmetic from the assumption rather than a discovery about railways.

What happens when you move the dial

The report tests three settings. At 2 per cent, the total is about $13.8 billion. At 3 per cent, it is $24.4 billion. At 5 per cent, it is $34.5 billion. Across everything the report tests, the full range runs from $14.8 billion to $41.0 billion. ALTO’s blog post and website give one number from the middle of that range and no range at all.

And note which places are in the calculation

Toronto, Montréal, Ottawa and Québec City. Not Peterborough. Not Trois-Rivières. Not Laval. The model gives the productivity benefit — nearly nine tenths of the whole claim — to the four largest cities on the line and to nowhere else.

The research the modellers drew on says these effects concentrate within about 30 kilometres of a station. Because nobody knows yet where the stations will be, the study used each city’s whole metropolitan area as a stand-in for that 30-kilometre circle. The report is open about this. It means the 3 per cent boost is applied to every business in those metros, including the great many that will never go near the train.

Study Versus Summary

What the reports say, and what the blog posts say

Both studies are honest about their limits. Both blog posts announcing them are not. This is the pattern at the centre of this brief.

What the report says	What ALTO’s summary says
Aviseo: the gain is roughly 1.1 per cent of Canada’s 2019 GDP.	ALTO’s blog: the analysis concludes ALTO will permanently uplift Canada’s GDP by 1.1 per cent. No year. ALTO’s benefits page: $24.5 billion in today’s value.
Not carried:The base year
Aviseo: results run from $14.8B to $41.0B depending on which assumptions are used.	One figure, from the middle. The range appears in neither the blog post nor any public ALTO page.
Not carried:The range
Aviseo: the study deliberately excludes construction and operating costs, looking only at long-term effects.	Presented as the economic case for building the railway. A study that excludes costs cannot tell you whether a project is worth its price.
Not carried:The scope limit
CPCS: the scenarios are illustrative, order-of-magnitude, and “should not be interpreted as forecasts.”	ALTO’s blog: CPCS developed forecasts, and the report includes tangible projections giving real-world, objective results.
Contradicted:The report’s own caution
CPCS: three scenarios — $177M, $1.0B, $3.9B in added GDP, depending on how much tourism policy is coordinated.	The middle figure only. The low scenario, roughly six times smaller, is not mentioned.
Not carried:The low case
Both reports: commissioned and paid for by ALTO. Aviseo’s cover states the work was undertaken on ALTO’s behalf. CPCS notes the opinions are the authors’ own.	Both blog posts describe the consultants as independent — in the same passage that says ALTO engaged them.
As stated:The word “independent”

To be clear about who did what

Neither consultancy has done anything wrong here. Aviseo tested six different sets of economic assumptions and two labour-market conditions, ran close to a hundred simulations, reported ranges throughout, and stated its base year. CPCS labelled its scenarios illustrative and warned against reading them as forecasts. The reports are the careful part. The summaries are where the caution disappears.

Two Studies, One Question

The two reports disagree about tourism

Both studies estimate how much extra economic activity tourism would bring. They arrive at similar-looking numbers by opposite routes, and the two cannot simply be added together or compared.

Aviseo — $0.8 billion	CPCS — $1.0 billion
Counts international visitors only. The report says domestic tourism is largely people spending money they would have spent somewhere else in Canada anyway, so it has limited effect on the national total. Uses a model of the whole economy, which subtracts activity drawn away from elsewhere.	Its middle scenario is driven mostly by travel within the corridor — exactly the domestic tourism Aviseo set aside. Uses a simpler method that adds up ripple effects through suppliers and wages without subtracting what was displaced. This produces larger figures by design.
Result:Two numbers that cannot be combined

There is a third figure in circulation. ALTO’s FAQ page advertises $800 million a year in tourism revenue. That matches Aviseo’s contribution-to-GDP figure, which is not the same thing as revenue — and it matches no revenue figure in either report.

So ALTO’s public materials carry a tourism benefit that is variously $0.8 billion of national output, $1.0 billion of national output, and $800 million of revenue, drawn from two studies using incompatible methods, one of which discounts the category the other relies on. Neither blog post mentions that the other study exists.

The Small Towns

In the base case, two station cities get zero

The CPCS tourism study models three futures. The railway is identical in all three. What differs is how much extra tourism policy governments put in place around it — last-mile transit, regional shuttles, coordinated visitor information. The low coordination scenario is the one where the railway gets built and nothing else changes.

City	Low coordination	High coordination
Toronto	$37M	up to $1,500M
Québec City	$50M	up to $500M
Montréal (incl. Laval)	$44M	up to $900M
Ottawa-Gatineau	$21M	up to $560M
Trois-Rivières	$0	up to $25M
Peterborough	$0	up to $35M

Zero. Not a small amount — nothing. The report’s GDP table records the same: Peterborough unchanged at $475 million, Trois-Rivières unchanged at $318 million.

Even under full corridor-wide coordination, Peterborough reaches up to $35 million against Toronto’s $1.5 billion — roughly 43 to 1. The blog post announcing this study is titled “How High-Speed Rail Will Boost Tourism from Big Cities to Small Towns.”

The Initiative has examined this study in full elsewhere — its scope, the conditions attached to its scenarios, the rural corridor regions left outside its frame, and the cost side it does not count. Benefits for Stations, Costs for the Corridor

The Missing Side

A study that cannot tell you if it is worth it

The Aviseo report states in its introduction that it deliberately leaves out construction and operating costs, in order to focus on long-term effects. That is a reasonable choice for the study. It has a consequence.

A benefit figure with no cost beside it cannot answer the only question that matters: is this worth building? The report never claims to answer it. ALTO’s summary presents it as though it does, and the trade coverage went further still, running the entire economic case without a single dollar of cost anywhere in it.

The cost side is not a mystery. It is simply somewhere else. ALTO’s published figure is $60 to $90 billion — a range its own chief executive has described as a working assumption rather than an estimate, with real numbers not expected until 2027 or 2028, after the route is chosen. The Initiative’s analysis of the full ledger puts ALTO’s central benefit-cost ratio at about 0.11, against the 1.0 that marks a project paying its way. Financial Analysis

The shape of the published record

The benefit is modelled in detail by two consultancies, published to two significant figures, and repeated by every outlet covering the project. The cost is a range spanning $30 billion, described by the proponent as an assumption, and resolvable only after the decision it is meant to inform has been taken. That asymmetry is the finding, not the individual numbers.

This is the pattern the Oxford researcher Bent Flyvbjerg documents across large infrastructure projects worldwide: benefits arrive early, precisely, and in dollars; costs arrive late, as ranges, after commitment.

The Chain

Six weeks, and the reports were not cited

The article that prompted this brief promised readers what others are missing about ALTO’s economics, and led on tourism. Here is what had already been published.

2019

The year of the economy the Aviseo model is built on. Everything downstream is expressed in this year’s terms.

2024

Aviseo runs the model. ALTO supplies its passenger forecasts in May and June.

June 8, 2026

ALTO publishes “How High-Speed Rail Will Boost Tourism from Big Cities to Small Towns,” with the full CPCS tourism report attached for download.

June 2026

The Aviseo report is uploaded to ALTO’s website.

July 13, 2026

ALTO publishes “How Alto Will Reshape Canada’s Economy,” with the full Aviseo report attached for download. It states the 1.1 per cent without the year, the range, or the cost exclusion.

July 20, 2026

A travel trade site publishes a long article on ALTO’s economics and tourism benefits under a headline promising what others are missing. Its two themes are the two blog posts. It cites neither report, calls the analysis independent, and contains no cost figure of any kind.

Seven days after one blog post and six weeks after the other. The tourism angle presented as the overlooked discovery had been the subject of an entire ALTO blog post and a 42-page commissioned report, both freely available, for a month and a half.

Why this matters more than one bad article

Each outlet in a chain like this can be cited by the next as confirmation. A figure that has never been independently checked ends up looking like something everybody agrees on, purely because it has been repeated. In this case the answer was not hidden. It was a click away from the two blog posts the article’s themes are drawn from.

What the article contains, and what it does not

The article cites neither report. It describes the analysis as independent. It contains no cost figure of any kind. Its two themes are the subjects of two ALTO blog posts published seven days and six weeks earlier, each with the full commissioned report attached for download on the same page.

Summary · July 2026

Where things stand

Wrong year

“$24.5 billion in today’s value.” The study says 1.1 per cent of Canada’s 2019 GDP. In today’s economy the same claim is either $36.5 billion or 0.74 per cent, not $24.5 billion and 1.1 per cent.

Wrong kind

“Today’s value” describes a calculation the study never did. The model is static and contains no discounting. Its results are annual, not a one-time total.

Not carried

The range. Aviseo reports $14.8B to $41.0B. CPCS reports $177M, $1.0B and $3.9B. ALTO publishes one figure from the middle of each.

Not carried

The scope limit. Aviseo excludes costs by design. The study is presented as the economic case for a project whose price it never considered.

Contradicted

“Should not be interpreted as forecasts.” CPCS’s words. ALTO’s summary calls the same scenarios forecasts, tangible projections and objective results.

At odds

Benefits for small towns. Under the scenario where only the railway is built, Peterborough and Trois-Rivières receive $0. The blog announcing that report is titled “from Big Cities to Small Towns.”

Unreconciled

Two tourism figures. $0.8B from one study counting international visitors, $1.0B from another counting domestic travel, by methods that cannot be combined — plus $800M of “revenue” on the FAQ that matches neither.

As stated

“Independent.” Both consultancies were engaged and paid by ALTO. Both blog posts state this in the same passage that calls the firms independent, so a reader who takes the word to mean “not commissioned by the proponent” is reading it in a sense the passage itself rules out.

Fragile

Eighty-six per cent of the claim rests on one assumption — a 3 per cent productivity gain applied to four metropolitan economies. At 2 per cent the total is $13.8B; at 5 per cent, $34.5B.

Sound

The studies themselves. Both are careful, both state their limits, both are published in full and free to download. Our argument is with the summaries, not the analysis.

What we are and are not saying

We are not saying high-speed rail cannot bring economic benefits, and we are not criticising the consultants who did this work.

We are saying that ALTO commissioned two careful studies and then published summaries that removed the base year, the ranges, the scope limits and the warnings — and that the resulting figures now circulate as settled facts. On the arithmetic, the position is narrow and easy to check: 1.1 per cent and $24.5 billion cannot both describe today’s Canada, and the study says which year they describe.

ALTO could correct this in a sentence. Adding the words “of 2019 GDP” to its benefits page would make the claim accurate.

How to read the numbers on this page

Every figure attributed to Aviseo, CPCS, ALTO or Statistics Canada is quoted from the source listed below and can be checked there. Every other figure is our own calculation from those published inputs: the $2.22 trillion implied economy, the $36.5 billion and 0.74 per cent restatements in current terms, the observation that 3 per cent of roughly a third of national output is about 1 per cent, the 43-to-1 Toronto-to-Peterborough ratio, and the benefit-cost ratio of about 0.11, which comes from our own financial analysis and not from either commissioned study.

Where a study or a summary does not state something, we say so rather than inferring it, and we make no claim about why any particular qualification was or was not reproduced.

Download

Two Point Two Trillion — Full Brief (PDF)

The complete analysis, with all figures, tables and sources

Download PDF

Sources

Where our figures come from

1.Aviseo Consulting, An Overview of the Structural Economic Impacts of Alto: Computable General Equilibrium Modelling Approach, June 2026. Prepared on behalf of ALTO. Source of the 2019 calibration, the $24.4 billion figure, the 1.1 per cent of 2019 GDP statement (page 13), the $14.8B–$41.0B range, the channel breakdown, and the productivity settings of 0.02, 0.03 and 0.05. altotrain.ca (PDF)

2.ALTO, “How Alto Will Reshape Canada’s Economy,” blog post, July 13, 2026. States the 1.1 per cent without the base year or range, and describes the commissioned report as independent. Links the Aviseo report. altotrain.ca

3.CPCS, in association with HDR, Tourism in the Alto Corridor: Current Conditions and Potential Impacts, June 2026. Prepared for ALTO. Source of the three coordination scenarios, the per-city spending and GDP tables, the statement that the scenarios should not be interpreted as forecasts, and the finding on business spending declines. altotrain.ca (PDF)

4.ALTO, “How High-Speed Rail Will Boost Tourism from Big Cities to Small Towns,” blog post, June 8, 2026. Reports the medium scenario only, and describes the scenarios as forecasts and tangible projections. Links the CPCS report. altotrain.ca

5.ALTO, “Discover Alto’s Many Benefits,” project benefits page. Source of the “$24.5 billion in today’s value” phrasing and the construction and operational jobs figures. altotrain.ca

6.ALTO, “Answering your questions.” Source of the $800 million annual tourism revenue claim. altotrain.ca

7.Statistics Canada, Gross domestic product, income and expenditure, first quarter 2026, released May 29, 2026. Table 1 gives gross domestic product at market prices, seasonally adjusted at annual rates, of $3,321,588 million for the first quarter of 2026. Underlying series: Table 36-10-0103-01. Table 1 · Table 36-10-0103-01

8.Rituparna Dutta Choudhury, “Canada’s Toronto–Québec City High-Speed Rail Could Unlock GDP Growth: What Others Are Missing About Alto’s Billion Dollar Economic Transformation,” Travel and Tour World, July 20, 2026. travelandtourworld.com

9.ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, ALTO Financial Analysis. Source of the benefit-cost ratio of approximately 0.11, the cost-per-kilometre model, and the achievable ridership frontier of 5 to 12 million annual trips against ALTO’s 24 million target. citizenresearch.ca

10.ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, Tourism Study brief, June 2026. Examines the scope of the CPCS study, including the exclusion of rural corridor regions. citizenresearch.ca

11.Bent Flyvbjerg, on optimism bias and reference-class forecasting in the appraisal of large infrastructure projects.

July 23, 2026

The more you look

The More You Look, the Worse It Gets — ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative

The More You Look, the Worse It Gets

Thirty studies of high-speed rail in this corridor, across fifty-six years. One simple pattern runs through all of them.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · A plain-language guide to the record · 2026 · Working synthesis

⚠ The bottom line, up front

The people building the railway say it will pay for itself. The one independent study in 2026 that actually checked the math — using the builders’ own cost estimates — found a hole of about $53 billion over fifty years.

That’s not a fluke. It’s the pattern. For fifty-six years, the case for this railway has looked best in exactly the studies with the most to gain from building it.

In one minute

We read thirty major studies of high-speed rail in this corridor, from 1970 to today, and asked every one the same set of questions — with all the dollar figures put on a level footing.

The verdict almost always matches who paid for the study. Equipment makers, the proponent and paid advocates say build it. Independent governments say wait. And every single study that actually runs the finances finds the same thing: ticket sales can’t cover the cost, so the public pays most of the bill.

The numbers that look great — low costs, huge ridership, big climate wins — come from the promoters. The numbers that survive an independent look are far more sober. The closer and more independent the analysis, the weaker the case.

Read the full report

Corridor Rail Studies, 1970–2026 — A Cross-Decade Analysis

Thirty studies, thirty-four dimensions, nine findings, with the full evidence tables

Download PDF

How we know

Thirty studies. Same questions. Fifty-six years.

We didn’t cherry-pick. We took thirty of the major studies of this railway — going right back to a 1970 federal commission — and put the same 34 questions to all of them, so the answers line up side by side across the decades.

major studies of this railway, read into one matrix

1970–2026

questions asked of every single study

so the answers compare

years of studies, all priced in today’s dollars

a level playing field

The studies come from every side: equipment makers, government task forces, a Crown corporation, universities, Transport Canada, and the builders themselves. That range is the whole point — it lets us tell a real change in the corridor apart from a change in who’s doing the asking.

What we found

Nine things every reader should know

Read across all thirty studies, nine patterns keep showing up. Here they are in plain terms.

1The answer depends on who paid for the study

Line up the verdicts and it’s impossible to miss. The build-it studies come from equipment makers, from a Crown corporation that wanted to run the trains, from the proponent, and from paid advocates. Every independent government that looked said wait. Building new is the sponsors’ answer — not what fifty-six years of evidence actually points to.

2It has never paid for itself. Not once.

Every study that runs the money lands in the same spot: fares can’t cover the cost, and taxpayers foot most of the bill. VIA’s own 1984 numbers came out negative. In 1995, three governments agreed the public would cover 70–75%. In 2026, an independent model put the public subsidy at about $53 billion over fifty years — and found the railway wouldn’t even break even until year 44. The promise that it’ll fund itself is the single most optimistic claim in the whole record.

3The closer you look, the more it costs

Whenever a promoter and an independent body price the same thing, the promoter’s number is lower — and the price climbs as the estimate gets more serious. A 2026 advocacy paper gets the cost down to $63 billion only by assuming rock-bottom construction prices, about a third of our own central estimate of roughly $143 million per kilometre. The cheaper the headline, the thinner the math underneath it.

4The ridership numbers don’t hold up

The passenger forecasts are shakier than they look — and academics, an airline, Parliament and Transport Canada have all said so. One 1994 study showed the forecast could swing fivefold just by changing a single modelling choice, on the same data. Transport Canada’s own reviewers called the assumptions “optimistic and aggressive.” And the biggest numbers always belong to the promoters.

5The freight idea is good — with one catch

Splitting passengers and freight onto the corridor’s two parallel tracks, and freeing up freight capacity as a bonus, is a genuinely sound idea — it was proposed back in 2002. The catch: at the time, the freight railways said they didn’t need the extra capacity. It’s a strong argument, as long as it’s honest about that condition.

6Going faster barely helps

Study after study finds that top speed buys almost no extra riders — one found just an 8% jump going all the way from 300 to 400 km/h, another only about 9% from 200 to 300. So the level-headed studies settle far lower: a 2002 plan judged 240 km/h fast enough, and even the independent 2026 model assumes trains averaging just 200–250 km/h. The “top speed everywhere” designs are the outliers — a moderate railway of roughly 180–240 km/h carries nearly the same riders for far less money, and that’s where the evidence actually sits.

7We’ve seen this financing risk before

Having a private partner build and run the railway while the public owns the assets isn’t new — and neither is the warning. Both Parliament (1998) and Transport Canada (2003) flagged the same danger decades ago: deals like this can hand the risk to taxpayers and the reward to investors, with a rosy headline resting on one convenient assumption.

8The climate math only counts the good half

For decades, no study counted carbon at all. Now they do — but only the savings from getting people out of cars and planes. The huge emissions from pouring hundreds of kilometres of concrete and steel and clearing land? Left out. Count both sides honestly and this design adds emissions for decades. That’s the difference between a climate win and a climate cost.

9When the numbers fail, out comes “nation-building”

There’s a move that shows up again and again: when the dollars-and-cents case comes up short, in come national unity, regional growth, and keeping up with other countries. One 2016 report recommended extending the line even at a benefit-cost ratio of 0.24 — about 24 cents of benefit for every dollar spent. These arguments can be fair. But they do the heaviest lifting exactly where the economics are weakest.

The gap, side by side

What the promoters say vs. what independent studies find

All nine findings come down to one contrast. Same railway, same engineering — but the promoters’ numbers and the independent record split apart at every point that matters, and they split the same way every time.

What the promoters say	What independent studies find
Build it new. Equipment makers, a Crown corporation that wanted the contract, the proponent, and paid advocates all say go ahead.	Wait. Every independent government that studied it held off; the reviews and the airlines said upgrade what’s there instead.
The verdict:Build vs Wait
It’ll pay for itself. The 2025 prospectus says the trains will turn a profit — the rosiest claim in fifty-six years.	Taxpayers pay most of it. From 1984 to 2026, every study that runs the money says fares can’t cover the cost. The 2026 independent model: about $53 billion in public subsidy over fifty years.
The money:Self-funding vs ~$53B public
As low as $63 billion. A 2026 paper reaches that number by assuming bargain construction prices.	More like $80–90 billion. The proponent’s own range tops out at $90 billion; independent build-ups land near $80 billion. Costs rise the closer you look.
Price tag:~$63B vs ~$80–90B
24 to 56 million riders. The 2025–2026 figures are the highest ever produced for this line.	About half that. The only recent independent, survey-based forecast lands near 10 million a year — right in line with fifty years of history.
Yearly riders:~24–56M vs ~10M
A big climate win. The proponent headlines a 39-megatonne cut — counting only the savings from fewer car and plane trips.	A climate cost, for decades. The emissions from building it — concrete, steel, cleared land — are left out entirely. Count both sides and it adds emissions.
On carbon:Half the ledger vs The whole ledger

Ridership

Same railway. Forecasts from 6 million to 56 million.

Put the passenger forecasts next to each other and they span almost tenfold — for one railway line. The high numbers always come from the promoters. The one to trust is the recent independent forecast built on an actual survey of travellers.

~10M

independent, survey-based forecast for 2050

McGill, 2026

24–43M

the proponent’s own forecast

ALTO prospectus, 2025

42–56M

the highest numbers ever produced for this line

2026 advocacy paper

Study (year)	Who produced it	Yearly riders	Basis
Air Canada / CP (1993)	Airline / railway	5.8 M	the low end of the record
Task Force (1991)	Governments	7.8 M	full corridor
Tri-government (1995)	Governments	10–12 M	full corridor
EcoTrain (2011)	Governments	10–11 M	full corridor
Lynx (1998)	Private consortium	11.1 M	Québec City–Toronto
SNCF (2010)	Equipment maker	up to 22.5 M	best-case scenario
ALTO prospectus (2025)	Proponent	24–43 M	full network
Advocacy paper (2026)	Paid advocacy	42–56 M	the highest ever
McGill (2026)	Independent	~10 M	survey-based, 2050

Study (year)

Who produced it

Yearly riders

Basis

Air Canada / CP (1993)

Airline / railway

5.8 M

the low end of the record

Task Force (1991)

Governments

7.8 M

full corridor

Tri-government (1995)

Governments

10–12 M

full corridor

EcoTrain (2011)

Governments

10–11 M

full corridor

Lynx (1998)

Private consortium

11.1 M

Québec City–Toronto

SNCF (2010)

Equipment maker

up to 22.5 M

best-case scenario

ALTO prospectus (2025)

Proponent

24–43 M

full network

Advocacy paper (2026)

Paid advocacy

42–56 M

the highest ever

McGill (2026)

Independent

~10 M

survey-based, 2050

The numbers aren’t perfectly apples-to-apples — they cover different routes and years — which is part of the point. The takeaway is simple: the independent, survey-based forecast is about half the proponent’s.

What it means

Five takeaways

The current project sits right at the meeting point of every pattern above. The prospectus is the most upbeat sales pitch in the whole record. The most careful independent 2026 work finds a multi-billion-dollar hole. And the one favourable outside verdict is reached only by pairing the cheapest possible construction cost with the highest ridership ever forecast for the line. Here’s what that adds up to.

What the record points to

Building new from scratch is the sponsors’ pick, not the safe reading of history. Fifty-six years of evidence leans toward upgrading what exists — or waiting for a full, honest costing.

Expect the public to pay most of it. Three governments said 70–75% back in 1995, and every financial study since has landed in the same place.

A moderate-speed, lower-cost railway fits the evidence better. Extra speed barely adds riders, and costs balloon the closer you look. Both have been true for decades.

What to insist on

Get the ridership numbers independently checked before trusting them. A single forecast from the people who want to build it isn’t enough — the best studies in the record always used more than one independent forecaster.

Make the freight case — but be upfront about the catch. The idea is sound; its real value depends on the freight railways actually wanting the freed-up capacity. Say so plainly.

The evidence

All thirty studies, at a glance

Here’s the whole set, oldest to newest. Read the two right-hand columns together — who did the study, and what they concluded — and Finding 1 jumps out: the “build it” verdicts belong to the sellers and the promoters; the governments that were truly independent said wait.

Year	Study — who did it	Independent of the builder?	Verdict
1970	Intercity Passenger Transport Study — CTC	Federal	Upgrade
1984	High-Speed Passenger Rail in Canada — VIA	Crown corp	Mixed
1990	Review of Previous Studies — TRANSURB	Consultant	Wait
1990	A Pragmatic Approach (SPRINTOR) — ABB	Equipment maker	Upgrade
1990	The Canadian TGV Project — Bombardier / GEC Alsthom	Equipment maker	Build new
1991	Rapid Train Task Force — Ontario / Québec	Governments	Wait
1991	Competition in Rail Carriage — Berkowitz	Academic	Build new
1992	FAST TRACKS — VIA (advocacy)	Crown corp	Build new
1993	HST Market Assessment — Air Canada / CP	Airline / railway	Upgrade
1994	Demand-model re-estimate — Gaudry & Le Leyzour	Academic	No verdict
1995	Industrial Strategy (Vol II) — Simpson-Guerin	Consultant	No verdict
1995	Routing & Costing Study — SNC-Lavalin / Delcan	Consultant	No verdict
1995	Québec–Ontario HSR, Final Report — tri-gov	Governments	Wait
1998	The Lynx Proposal — Lynx consortium	Private consortium	Build new
2002	VIAFast — VIA Rail	Crown corp	Upgrade
2003	VIAFast validation — IBI for Transport Canada	Gov’t reviewer	No verdict
2009	Infrastructure and the Economy — Martin Prosperity Inst.	Academic	Build new
2010	Socio-Economic Study of HSR — SNCF	Equipment maker	Build new
2011	Updated Feasibility (EcoTrain) — tri-government	Governments	Wait
2014	Toronto–Kitchener–London HSR — Schabas	Consultant	Build new
2015	Future of Passenger Rail — Library of Parliament	Parliament / indep.	Upgrade
2016	Preliminary Business Case — SDG (Steer)	Consultant	Build new
2016	High Speed Rail in Ontario — Special Advisor	Provincial	Build new
2021	Toronto–Montreal Analysis — Munk School	Academic	Build new
2022	Speed and Frequency — Alstom	Equipment maker	Build new
2025	All Aboard — C.D. Howe Institute	Advocacy	Build new
2025	Fast Forward — ALTO (the proponent)	Proponent	Build new
2026	Conceptual Design & Business Case — Schabas	Advocacy	Build new
2026	Corridorwide Survey & Financial Analysis — McGill	Academic	No verdict
2026	Eastern Ontario Route (Hwy 401) — Schabas & Antinucci	Advocacy	Build new

Year

Study — who did it

Independent of the builder?

Verdict

1970

Intercity Passenger Transport Study — CTC

Federal

Upgrade

1984

High-Speed Passenger Rail in Canada — VIA

Crown corp

Mixed

1990

Review of Previous Studies — TRANSURB

Consultant

Wait

1990

A Pragmatic Approach (SPRINTOR) — ABB

Equipment maker

Upgrade

1990

The Canadian TGV Project — Bombardier / GEC Alsthom

Equipment maker

Build new

1991

Rapid Train Task Force — Ontario / Québec

Governments

Wait

1991

Competition in Rail Carriage — Berkowitz

Academic

Build new

1992

FAST TRACKS — VIA (advocacy)

Crown corp

Build new

1993

HST Market Assessment — Air Canada / CP

Airline / railway

Upgrade

1994

Demand-model re-estimate — Gaudry & Le Leyzour

Academic

No verdict

1995

Industrial Strategy (Vol II) — Simpson-Guerin

Consultant

No verdict

1995

Routing & Costing Study — SNC-Lavalin / Delcan

Consultant

No verdict

1995

Québec–Ontario HSR, Final Report — tri-gov

Governments

Wait

1998

The Lynx Proposal — Lynx consortium

Private consortium

Build new

2002

VIAFast — VIA Rail

Crown corp

Upgrade

2003

VIAFast validation — IBI for Transport Canada

Gov’t reviewer

No verdict

2009

Infrastructure and the Economy — Martin Prosperity Inst.

Academic

Build new

2010

Socio-Economic Study of HSR — SNCF

Equipment maker

Build new

2011

Updated Feasibility (EcoTrain) — tri-government

Governments

Wait

2014

Toronto–Kitchener–London HSR — Schabas

Consultant

Build new

2015

Future of Passenger Rail — Library of Parliament

Parliament / indep.

Upgrade

2016

Preliminary Business Case — SDG (Steer)

Consultant

Build new

2016

High Speed Rail in Ontario — Special Advisor

Provincial

Build new

2021

Toronto–Montreal Analysis — Munk School

Academic

Build new

2022

Speed and Frequency — Alstom

Equipment maker

Build new

2025

All Aboard — C.D. Howe Institute

Advocacy

Build new

2025

Fast Forward — ALTO (the proponent)

Proponent

Build new

2026

Conceptual Design & Business Case — Schabas

Advocacy

Build new

2026

Corridorwide Survey & Financial Analysis — McGill

Academic

No verdict

2026

Eastern Ontario Route (Hwy 401) — Schabas & Antinucci

Advocacy

Build new

“Advocacy” means a document written to argue a case — a sales prospectus, a think-tank brief, or paid expert advocacy. “No verdict” means the study analysed the question but didn’t take a build/don’t-build position.

The independent studies to trust

Where the sober numbers come from

The full list is above. If you read just a few, read the independent ones — the counterweight to the sales pitch.

Québec–Ontario High Speed Rail Project, Final Report — three governments together, 1995. Concluded the public would cover 70–75% of the cost, and a private-only version couldn’t be financed.

VIAFast validation — IBI Group for Transport Canada, 2003. The government’s own reviewers, who flagged “optimistic and aggressive” ridership assumptions.

Updated Feasibility Study (EcoTrain) — three governments, 2011. The most recent independent-government study; it said wait.

Future of Passenger Rail in Canada — Library of Parliament, 2015. Recommended upgrading service rather than building new.

Corridorwide Survey & Financial Analysis — Transportation Research at McGill, 2026. The independent study behind the $53-billion subsidy figure and the ~10-million ridership forecast.

July 6, 2026

A straighter line

A Straighter Line

Three ways to connect the same cities — and what the government’s own yardstick says about each.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Research Brief · June 2026

⚠ Companion to “Sixth in North America”

The 2020 ministerial briefing released under A-2022-005 contains two yardsticks the federal government chose for itself: slide 2.5, a checklist of where high-speed rail works best, and slide 2.6, a benchmark table of selected HSR systems. This brief runs ALTO’s eight proposed stations through both — then tests two other ways of connecting the same anchor cities. Read the companion brief →

The finding in brief

On the government’s own benchmark, ALTO as planned is the longest corridor and the least demand-dense of any system in the briefing — about 14,600 people per kilometre of new track, below every benchmarked line that reports a population.

Straightening the Toronto–Montreal spine helps only a little. The real lever is dropping the two stations that sit on no existing line, and reaching Ottawa and Quebec City on upgraded track rather than new build. Do that and the new build falls to a 540 km High Performance Passenger Rail (HPPR) spine — about 40 per cent less new track than ALTO — while demand density on new build climbs by roughly two-thirds, to mid-pack above Spain, without losing a single anchor city.

The Yardsticks

Two tests, chosen by the government

Slide 2.5 lists what makes high-speed rail work: large metropolitan populations, strong local transit, an optimal corridor length between economic centres, and dense city pairs.

Ministerial briefing slide 2.5, Success Factors: Where HSR Works Best, listing strong transit connections, optimal corridor length, and city-pair criteria including metropolitan population, GDP, density and collaborating economic sectors

Slide 2.5, “Success Factors: Where HSR Works Best.” Page 154 of the Canada Infrastructure Bank release, A-2022-005 (disclosed in part; marked DRAFT) — the federal checklist of where high-speed rail succeeds.

Slide 2.6 then benchmarks selected systems on capital cost, length, and the combined population they serve. Together the two let us score any route on the government’s own criteria — not ours.

Ministerial briefing slide 2.6, Selected HSR Systems: Key Metrics, a table of capital cost, cost per track-kilometre, population served, GDP and total length for seven HSR systems including France, Spain, the UK, Japan, Taiwan, California and Texas

Slide 2.6, “Selected HSR Systems: Key Metrics,” from the same release (A-2022-005, disclosed in part; marked DRAFT) — the benchmark systems against which the corridor is measured below.

Run ALTO’s eight stations through slide 2.5 and they sort cleanly into three tiers:

Anchors — pass outright

Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Quebec City: large metros with real or near-real rapid transit, at HSR-friendly distances. These are the cities the corridor exists to connect.

Good intermediate — earns its place

Kingston: small, but it sits on the direct Toronto–Montreal path, so it adds riders without adding distance. The methodology rewards exactly this.

Weak — cost without a base

Peterborough and Trois-Rivières are small and sit on no existing passenger line; reaching either means building all-new track. Laval is redundant — it is inside the Montréal CMA.

The Ladder

Three ways to connect the same anchors

Hold the four anchor cities constant and change only how they are linked. Option ① is ALTO as planned. Options ② and ③ are the High Performance Rail (HPR) alternative: a new-build HPPR spine — the High Performance Passenger Rail line — on the direct Toronto–Montreal lakeshore, plus upgraded existing track for the secondary connections. ② keeps all eight stations, reaching Ottawa on the existing line and the small cities by new spur; ③ keeps Kingston on the spine, reaches Ottawa and Quebec City on upgraded existing lines, and drops the two off-corridor cities.

Metric	① ALTO as planned	② Direct HPPR spine + spurs (keep all 8)	③ Direct HPPR spine + Ottawa link (drop 2)
Stations	8	8	6
Toronto–Montreal routing	~650 km (detour via Peterborough/Ottawa)	~540 km direct lakeshore (HPPR spine)	~540 km direct lakeshore (HPPR spine)
Ottawa connection	on the new mainline	upgraded existing (Smiths Falls–Brockville)	upgraded existing (Smiths Falls–Brockville)
Montreal–Quebec City leg	new build (north shore, via Trois-Rivières)	new build (north shore, via Trois-Rivières)	upgraded existing (south-shore VIA line)
New-build track	~910 km	~850 km	~540 km
Upgraded existing track	—	~80 km	~350 km
People served	~13.3 M	~13.3 M	~13.0 M
Demand density, new-build track	~14,600 / km	~15,600 / km	~24,100 / km
Position on the slide 2.6 benchmark	last	below Spain	mid-pack (above Spain)
Off-corridor cities needing new track	Peterborough, Trois-Rivières	Peterborough, Trois-Rivières	none

The Montreal–Quebec City leg is the pivot between ② and ③: ② builds it as new north-shore track to keep Trois-Rivières on the line, while ③ drops Trois-Rivières and serves Quebec City on the existing south-shore line, upgraded — about 260 km of the gap in new build between the two. In both ② and ③ the Ottawa connection is upgraded existing track (VIA’s Smiths Falls–Brockville line), not new build. Distances are approximate planning-level estimates; full workings with live formulas are in the reference-class workbook.

What the Numbers Say

Reading the ladder

① ALTO is the longest, least-dense option

At roughly 14,600 people per kilometre of new track, ALTO sits below every system on slide 2.6 that reports a population — the most track for the least demand per kilometre.

② Straightening the spine helps only a little

Keep all eight cities but run Toronto–Montreal direct on the HPPR spine and reach Ottawa on the existing line: new build falls to ~850 km (from ALTO’s ~910) and density edges up to ~15,600 per kilometre. Better — but still near the bottom of the benchmark, because it keeps building new track for Peterborough and the north-shore line to Trois-Rivières. The off-corridor cities, not the spine, are what hold it down.

③ Dropping the two off-corridor cities is the lever

Removing Peterborough and Trois-Rivières — and reaching Ottawa and Quebec City on upgraded existing track — cuts new build to just the 540 km HPPR spine, about 40 per cent less than ALTO, while losing fewer than 0.3 million people. Most of the saving is the Quebec leg: with Trois-Rivières gone, Montreal–Quebec reverts from ~260 km of new north-shore track to the existing south-shore line, upgraded. Demand density on new build climbs from ~14,600 to ~24,100 per kilometre — from worst on the benchmark to mid-pack, above Spain. The route gets stronger by building less, because the dropped legs were costing more length than they were adding demand.

The Kingston Test

Same city, opposite effect

Kingston is the cleanest illustration, because every option serves it. On the direct line it sits on the shortest Toronto–Montreal path, so it adds riders at almost no added distance — density goes up. On ALTO, reaching the same city means a southern dogleg off the northern route — the same population bought with extra kilometres, so density goes down. One stop, two outcomes, set entirely by the alignment rather than the city. Keeping Kingston while dropping Peterborough is precisely the discrimination the federal criteria imply: reward the intermediate that sits on the path, decline the one that pulls the line off it.

In plain language

The problem was never which cities to serve. It is the line drawn to reach them. Run the strong Toronto–Montreal market on the direct lakeshore route, branch to Ottawa, serve Quebec City on the line that already exists, and keep Kingston where it naturally sits — and the corridor moves from worst on the government’s own benchmark to the middle of the pack, on far less new track.

The two stations that drag it down, Peterborough and Trois-Rivières, are the two that sit on no existing line and would each need new track built to reach them. Serving them may be a worthy regional goal — but it should be argued and costed as that, openly, not folded into a national corridor whose headline case rests on Toronto–Montreal.

Method

How this was scored

“People served” is the combined metropolitan population of the named cities — a scale proxy, not modelled ridership, and the same crude basis slide 2.6 uses. Demand density is people per kilometre of new-build track. The alternative configurations are High Performance Rail (HPR): a new-build HPPR spine on the direct Toronto–Montreal lakeshore, plus upgraded existing lines for the Ottawa connection (VIA’s Smiths Falls–Brockville route) and, in ③, the Montreal–Quebec leg. ALTO and both alternatives are high-performance (≤200 km/h), not the 300 km/h HSR of the slide 2.6 benchmark systems, so the density comparison is conservative. Distances are approximate planning-level estimates and should be checked against ALTO’s published alignment before any figure is cited. Populations are 2021 StatCan census-metropolitan-area figures; slide 2.6 is on a 2016 basis. Trois-Rivières has had no passenger rail since 1990 and is not on VIA’s south-shore Montréal–Québec line, so serving it requires all-new track. Full workings, with live formulas, are in the reference-class workbook.

June 26, 2026

Sixth in NA

Sixth in North America

What the ranking actually measures — and the route it does not describe.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Research Brief · Published June 2026

⚠ Source: Disclosed under the Access to Information Act

The slide below is page 206 of a 294-page record released by the Canada Infrastructure Bank under access request A-2022-005 — a request for all studies, analyses, and reports related to the federal government’s high-frequency and high-speed rail file, disclosed in part. The briefing deck it belongs to is stamped “Privileged and Confidential — Do Not Share and/or Copy,” and its own footer marks it “DRAFT.” Adjacent pages were withheld under the Act’s economic-interest and advice exemptions (s. 18 and s. 21). The deck, as disclosed, is posted in full here: Ministerial Briefing — HFR and HSR (PDF).

The marking is part of the point: this is a draft analysis the department preferred not be seen, and it is the evidence being used to vouch for the corridor.

Briefing slide: Success Factors, Where HSR Works Best, ranking North American city pairs by high-speed rail demand

Section 4.2, “Success Factors: Where HSR Works Best.” Page 206 of the Canada Infrastructure Bank release, A-2022-005 (disclosed in part; marked DRAFT). The three highlighted bars are Toronto–Montreal, Toronto–Ottawa, and Montreal–Quebec City.

The finding in brief

The slide ranks Toronto–Montreal sixth among North American city pairs for high-speed rail demand. The ranking is real. What it measures is the market between two endpoint metros — not the route now being built.

The number describes the direct Toronto–Montreal corridor. The alignment taking shape runs Toronto–Peterborough–Kingston–Ottawa–Montreal — a longer, meandering route. On the very methodology the slide cites, every one of those detours lowers the score rather than raising it. And the segment actually proceeding first, Ottawa–Montreal, does not appear on the chart at all.

The Methodology

What the ranking measures

The “sixth in North America” figure comes from America 2050’s screen of tens of thousands of city pairs, a methodology published in full by the Regional Plan Association. It scores the market between two endpoint metros: downtown employment, population density, transit reach, and the existing air and road travel between them. On those inputs Toronto–Montreal scores well. The endpoints are large, dense, and already heavily travelled.

Two features of that method decide everything that follows, and both are explicit in the source.

It is calculated per mile. Adding distance without adding a major generator pulls a corridor’s score down, not up. The screen normalizes precisely so that longer routes cannot coast on length.

Intermediate stations only help when they are themselves large. The report is clear that longer corridors out-rank shorter ones only when the cities in between are medium or large generators. Otherwise the additional miles are a penalty. The top-ranked corridor on the chart, New York–Washington, scores as it does because the dense intermediate cities of Philadelphia and Baltimore sit directly on the shortest path between the endpoints.

The Route

The corridor on the chart is not the corridor being built

The favourable score belongs to the direct Toronto–Montreal market — the existing lakeshore line, the shortest path, with a dense string of intermediate communities along it. The alignment now taking shape is the opposite of that. From Toronto it runs north to Peterborough; then — assuming the Kingston stop and southern routing the federal government added to its consideration in June 2026 come to pass — it doubles back south to Kingston, climbs north again to Ottawa, and drops south once more to Montreal. The result is a corridor that zigzags between its cities rather than running directly between its endpoints.

Map of the projected Toronto to Quebec City corridor showing the route meandering north and south between cities rather than following a direct line

The projected Toronto–Quebec City corridor. Rather than following the direct lakeshore line, the alignment meanders — north to Peterborough, south to Kingston, north to Ottawa, south to Montreal, and on toward Quebec City.

The direct corridor (what the bar scores)	The alignment being built
Toronto–Montreal, direct. The existing Lake Ontario lakeshore line, on the order of 540 km — the shortest path between the two endpoints.	Toronto–Peterborough–Kingston–Ottawa–Montreal. Roughly 610 km via Ottawa — about 13 per cent longer for the identical endpoints, and longer still with a Kingston dogleg. (This path assumes the Kingston stop and southern routing added to federal consideration in June 2026 proceed.)
Dense intermediate string. Oshawa, Cobourg, Belleville, Kingston — population and employment added steadily along the path.	Sparse flanks, weak axis. Peterborough is small and the stretches on either side of it are thinly populated; reaching Ottawa means importing the Toronto–Ottawa axis the same chart ranks near the bottom.
Highest possible per-mile score for these two endpoints.	A lower per-mile score: more kilometres, less density per kilometre, and a low-scoring leg folded in.

There is a particular irony in Kingston. It is the natural intermediate city on the direct corridor — precisely the stop that would have helped the Toronto–Montreal score. The chosen alignment runs north to bypass it. Now it is being considered for re-inclusion, bolted back onto a route designed to avoid it.

On the Method’s Own Terms

What each detour does to the score

Re-run the published methodology on the alignment actually on the table, and the per-mile score falls below the sixth-place bar. Each of the route’s defining choices works against it:

Length is a straight penalty

Per-mile normalization spreads the same Toronto and Montreal endpoint demand over more kilometres. A longer, more circuitous route scores lower for the identical endpoints — that is what the normalization is designed to do.

Peterborough adds miles faster than density

Intermediate stops only lift the score if they add population and employment per kilometre faster than the corridor’s average. Peterborough is too small, and the stretches on either side are sparse, so it adds length faster than it adds riders — a net penalty.

A Kingston dogleg is more of the same

Re-adding the one city the alignment was routed to avoid means a southern detour off the northern line: a modest generator bought with extra kilometres — again, length outpacing density.

Reaching Ottawa imports a weak leg

Ottawa is the one genuine generator among the added stops. But reaching it is the Toronto–Ottawa axis the same chart already ranks near the bottom of its field. The detour swaps the strong direct Toronto–Montreal axis for a leg the deck itself scores as weak.

Sequencing

What is actually being built first

There is a further mismatch between the headline number and the build. The first segment to proceed is not Toronto–Montreal at all — it is Ottawa–Montreal, confirmed in December 2025 as the opening phase, with construction targeted for 2029. Ottawa–Montreal does not appear anywhere on the chart.

And by the government’s own account, it was chosen first not for demand but for buildability: a relatively short and straight portion of the overall route, since high-speed trains do not handle curves well — the same logic that led California to build its first section across the flat Central Valley, avoiding tunnelling and urban construction. A constructability rationale, not a ridership one.

The corridor that scores sixth, Toronto–Montreal, is only realized once the full line is complete — including the Toronto–Ottawa leg that sits near the bottom of this very chart — work not expected to finish until the 2040s. So the headline ranking and the actual build diverge twice over: the number describes a market the first segment does not deliver, assembled from legs the chart scores unevenly, with the strongest part of the case deferred to last.

In plain language

Strip away the methodology and the point is simple. The federal government’s own briefing says high-speed rail makes the most sense between Toronto and Montreal — two large cities with heavy travel between them. It says nothing in favour of the winding route now being built.

That route keeps collecting stops the demand evidence does not support: north to Peterborough, a proposed southern dogleg to Kingston, and Trois-Rivières on the Quebec leg. Each one adds distance and cost while the case for the line still rests on the direct Toronto–Montreal market. When stations are added that do not earn their place on the numbers, the usual explanation is political — spreading the visible benefits of a marquee project across as many communities as possible to assemble support for it.

This is one of the central problems with the project, and it is a familiar one. Bent Flyvbjerg’s research on megaprojects — the body of work behind this Initiative’s reference-class approach — finds that large infrastructure projects routinely run over budget and under-deliver because their scope and routing are shaped by political bargaining and the need to sell the project, rather than by the demand evidence. A corridor designed around who gets a station rather than where the riders are is precisely the pattern that research warns about.

In Summary

What the slide does and does not say

The “sixth in North America” finding endorses a Toronto–Montreal market. It says nothing in favour of the Peterborough-routed, Kingston-doglegged, Ottawa-and-Montreal-served alignment. On the methodology’s own terms, those inclusions are exactly the choices it would mark down.

A strong endpoint market is a real asset. It is not the same thing as a strong route — and a briefing that uses the first to vouch for the second is measuring the wrong thing. That the slide is marked “DRAFT,” and that adjacent pages were withheld under the Act’s economic-interest and advice exemptions, only sharpens the question: this is the analysis on the record, and on its own terms it does not say what it is being used to say.

A note on method. The deck describes its result as a “sample calculation.” The disclosed page does not show how the path was drawn or scored. The standard America 2050 methodology and the headline result both point to the direct corridor as the basis for the sixth-place figure; if the underlying calculation is obtained, the path it used is the detail to confirm.

Anticipated Objection

“Doesn’t the line serve all those city pairs — Toronto–Ottawa, Ottawa–Montreal, Montreal–Quebec — not just Toronto–Montreal? Combine them and the project makes sense.”

It is true that a corridor serves a whole matrix of city pairs, not only its endpoints. But that observation concedes the point rather than answering it. The “sixth in North America” figure is the score for the direct Toronto–Montreal pair. The moment the case leans on Toronto–Ottawa, Ottawa–Quebec, and Toronto–Quebec, it is no longer resting on that figure — and those are precisely the legs the same chart rates weakest: Toronto–Ottawa sits second from the bottom, Montreal–Quebec City is last, and Ottawa–Quebec, Toronto–Quebec, and Ottawa–Montreal do not appear on it at all.

Two things make “combine the figures” fail on the slide’s own terms. The bars are demand-strength rankings — built from population, GDP, density, and corridor length — not passenger counts that can be summed; a sixth-place pair plus a near-last pair does not add up to a stronger corridor. And because the screen normalizes per mile, stringing the one strong pair onto a longer, detouring alignment spreads the same demand across more track-kilometres, which lowers the score rather than raising it.

The logic in fact argues for the line this brief describes. If the goal is to capture Toronto–Montreal and the markets in between, the alignment that does it best is the direct lakeshore corridor — it serves the sixth-place pair at full strength and threads a dense string of real intermediate cities (Oshawa, Cobourg, Belleville, Kingston) on the way. Adding up the pairs does not rescue the meandering route; it makes the case for the direct one.

Sources

Primary documents and statements

Canada Infrastructure Bank, completed access-to-information release A-2022-005 (disclosed in part), “Success Factors: Where HSR Works Best,” draft briefing slide, page 206. Released under the Access to Information Act; deck marked “Privileged and Confidential — Do Not Share and/or Copy” and “DRAFT.” View the disclosed deck (PDF)

America 2050 / Regional Plan Association, High-Speed Rail in America, January 2011 — the published methodology scoring rail corridors by ridership demand on a per-mile basis.

America 2050, Where High-Speed Rail Works Best — the precursor study of city pairs that the briefing slide reproduces.

Transport Canada / Alto, “Full speed ahead: Ottawa–Montreal chosen as starting point for Alto High-Speed Rail,” December 12, 2025. canada.ca · altotrain.ca

“First segment of Canadian high-speed rail to be built between Montreal, Ottawa,” Trains, December 12, 2025 — carries the Minister of Transport’s rationale for selecting the segment as a short, straight portion of the route. trains.com

“Ottawa-Montreal chosen as 1st segment of promised high-speed rail line,” CBC News, December 12, 2025 — remaining segments (Quebec City–Montreal and Ottawa–Toronto) to begin at a later, unspecified date. CBC News

Federal government statement, June 22, 2026, indicating an additional stop at Kingston would be considered for the corridor.

Bent Flyvbjerg, Nils Bruzelius & Werner Rothengatter, Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition (Cambridge University Press, 2003); Flyvbjerg, “Survival of the Unfittest: Why the Worst Infrastructure Gets Built — and What We Can Do About It,” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 25, no. 3 (2009): 344–367; and Flyvbjerg, “Design by Deception: The Politics of Megaproject Approval,” Harvard Design Magazine no. 22 (2005) — on strategic misrepresentation, perverse incentives, and the political shaping of megaproject scope and routing.

June 26, 2026

By their own standard

Research Brief · Methodology

By Their Own Standard

Build Canada’s case for high-speed rail, measured against the megaproject method the memo itself invokes.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Methodology Brief · Published June 2026 · ALTO consultation closed April 24, 2026

⚠ The Document Under Review

Build Canada’s February 24, 2025 memo, Let’s Show the World How Canada Builds, was published one week after the federal high-speed rail announcement. It endorses high-speed rail in the Toronto–Quebec City corridor and names ALTO directly, while contesting only how the project is delivered — not whether the demand exists or whether the benefit–cost case closes. This brief takes the memo’s argument on its own terms, and holds it to the analytical standard the memo itself sets. Build Canada · original memo

Critical Finding

The memo reaches for exactly the right tools. It quotes Bent Flyvbjerg, the leading scholar of megaproject cost overruns; it calls for reference-class benchmarking against comparable lines; it demands contingency discipline; and it warns that without these, ALTO becomes another HS2 or California High-Speed Rail. On the diagnosis, the Initiative agrees.

The memo then abandons each principle at the moment it matters. It caps contingency at the level that, on its own logic, guarantees overrun. It imports foreign unit costs from a reference class that is not comparable. And it promises true high-speed rail at a unit cost that, in Canadian conditions, only high-performance rail can plausibly reach. Applied honestly, the memo’s own method points away from its conclusion.

The evidence produced since the announcement confirms the diagnosis the memo made and refutes the targets it set. The corridor is still being fundamentally re-routed in the project’s second year; the friction the memo proposed to legislate away has surfaced exactly where the method predicts. The case for caution on ALTO does not require rejecting Build Canada’s framework. It requires applying it.

The Argument’s Shape

What the memo contests, and what it does not

The memo’s argument has a particular structure. It accepts ALTO’s entire benefit case without examination — 40 per cent of the economy, 18 million people connected, up to $35 billion a year in added GDP, travel times halved — and contests only whether the project can be built cheaply and quickly. Every one of those headline figures is the proponent’s own number, repeated approvingly. The memo never asks whether the ridership exists to fill the trains, or whether the benefits exceed the costs.

It asks one question: can Canada build it the way France, Spain, and Japan did? To answer, it reaches for the right instruments — Flyvbjerg’s work on megaproject overruns, reference-class benchmarking, contingency discipline, and the cautionary record of HS2 and California. That choice of tools is what makes the memo worth engaging seriously, and what makes its conclusion fail. The same tools, applied with honest inputs, do not support the case the memo builds on them.

Common Ground

Where the memo is right

Credit first, because the diagnosis is sound. The memo correctly identifies the planning-maturity gap that drives Canadian overruns: our transit projects enter procurement with as little as 1–10 per cent of design complete, where peer countries reach 30–70 per cent. It is right that a strong, technically competent public authority — not a consortium of consultants — must own delivery. It is right that reference-class benchmarking is the antidote to optimism bias. And it is right that HS2 and California are the cautionary tales Canada should study.

None of this is in dispute. What follows is not an argument against the memo’s framework. It is the memo measured against that framework — the standard it asks to be judged by.

Held To Its Own Standard

Three flaws, by the memo’s own method

On three load-bearing claims, the memo prescribes the opposite of what the method it cites requires. The left column states the memo’s own prescription; the right column applies the memo’s own standard to it.

What the memo prescribes	Held to its own standard
1. Cap contingency, including inflation, at 10 per cent. Presented as following global best practice, alongside meticulous benchmarking against French and Japanese lines.	Reference-class forecasting — the very method the memo invokes — requires a larger uplift the less design is complete, because the unknowns are still unpriced. The memo itself concedes Canadian projects sit at 1–10 per cent design maturity. At that maturity, the honest uplift is routinely 40 per cent or more; a 10 per cent cap is defensible only near design completion. The prescription specifies the precise conditions under which budgets break, and calls it discipline.
Verdict:Self-contradictory
2. $25–40M per km; a corridor for under $50B; payback within two years. Drawn from the cost record of France, Spain, and Japan.	A reference class works only if the cases are comparable, and these are not. The cited figures come from older lines, on flatter and cheaper terrain, in earlier cost eras, with no adjustment for what this corridor crosses: the granite of the Canadian Shield, the Frontenac Arch, the wetland and karst of eastern Ontario, and dense urban approaches at both ends. Importing an unadjusted foreign unit cost is exactly the non-analogous-reference-class error Flyvbjerg’s method exists to catch — committed in the section that cites him. The Initiative’s complexity-adjusted estimate runs several times higher, with a central benefit–cost ratio far below the break-even the memo treats as obvious.
Verdict:Wrong reference class
3. True high-speed rail at that same unit cost. Dedicated track, full electrification, grade separation, 300 km/h — delivered for $25–40M per km.	In Canadian conditions, $25–40M per km is not a high-speed-rail figure at all. It is roughly the cost of a high-performance rail upgrade — incremental improvement of existing alignments, the option the memo dismisses in a single line. The memo promises high-speed performance at high-performance-rail prices. The headline product and the headline number belong to two different projects; you cannot buy the performance of one at the price of the other.
Verdict:HSR promise, HPR price

$25–40M

per km — the memo’s claimed unit cost, from France / Spain / Japan

Build Canada memo

≈ $143B

reference-class capital for the corridor delivered as high-speed rail

CRI reference-class analysis

≈ 0.06

central benefit–cost ratio — against the memo’s implied two-year payback

CRI NPV / BCR matrix

“Payback in two years” implies a project that returns many times its capital. The reference-class evidence points to one that returns a small fraction of it. The gap between the memo’s number and the comparable record is not a rounding difference; it is the entire argument.

What Has Happened Since

The diagnosis confirmed, the targets refuted

More than a year on, events have tested the memo’s promises against reality. They vindicate its diagnosis of Canadian megaproject failure and dismantle the targets it set against that diagnosis.

A corridor still being re-routed in year two

The memo set a target of a high-value section carrying passengers within five years, on standardized, locked-in designs, at 10 per cent contingency. Yet the corridor is still being fundamentally re-aligned — a southern-corridor study, a conditional new station at Kingston, an alignment still unchosen between north and south. That is direct evidence of the planning immaturity the memo flagged on its first page — and it makes the memo’s own targets incoherent. You cannot run trains in five years on frozen designs while you are still deciding where the line goes.

Friction exactly where the method predicts

The memo’s prescriptions — sever environmental review from planning, legislate automatic approvals, reduce municipalities to suggesting where infrastructure is placed rather than whether — were aimed at the precise constraints this corridor turns out to be full of: two UNESCO designations, species at risk, organized community opposition, and rural-character concerns that public consultation surfaced in volume. The Initiative’s Community Friction Index has risen from 43 to 54 since consultation began and is projected to climb further. The memo’s answer to friction is not to resolve it but to override it — and on this corridor, that is neither lawful nor likely.

The memo’s own number makes the HPR case

The memo dismisses improving existing rail as insufficient, insisting dedicated high-speed track is the only way. But its own affordability figure, $25–40M per km, is a high-performance-rail number — and the consultation recorded clear public appetite for improving VIA service first and preserving existing Kingston and eastern-Ontario connections. Strip the rhetoric and the memo makes the affordability case for the alternative it rejects.

Conclusion

The antidote that recreates the disease

The memo casts ALTO as Canada’s escape from the HS2 and California failures. Trace its logic, though, and the resemblance runs the other way. “We will build it cheaply and quickly like France and Japan — just cap the contingency and clear the obstacles” is not the cure for optimism bias. It is the textbook expression of it, almost word for word how California began.

The memo’s real service is that it concedes the entire framework. Flyvbjerg, reference classes, contingency discipline, planning maturity: take those tools, feed them honest inputs, and the conclusion does not survive. The case for caution on ALTO does not require rejecting Build Canada’s method — it requires applying it. Done honestly, it points not toward a sprint to high-speed rail at imported prices, but toward a high-performance upgrade of the corridor Canadians actually use, at a cost the country can defend.

Where The Method Lands

Summary ledger

The memo measured against the standard it sets for itself:

Sound

Diagnosis — planning-maturity gap. Correctly identifies that Canadian projects enter procurement at 1–10% design versus 30–70% abroad.

Sound

Delivery authority. Rightly prefers a strong, technically competent public authority over dependence on a consultant consortium.

Sound

Reference-class benchmarking. Rightly names it as the antidote to optimism bias.

Violated

10% contingency cap prescribed at 1–10% design maturity — manufactures the overrun the memo warns against.

Violated

$25–40M/km imported from non-comparable lines without adjustment for terrain, era, or urban approaches.

Violated

HSR promised at HPR price. The headline product and the headline cost belong to two different projects.

Violated

Override of environmental review and municipal consent — aimed squarely at the corridor’s real, documented constraints.

Refuted by events

Five-year passenger target on frozen designs — incompatible with a corridor still being re-routed in the project’s second year.

The memo is at its strongest where it agrees with the Initiative — on method. It is at its weakest where it abandons that method to reach a predetermined answer. Applied honestly, Build Canada’s own framework makes the case for high-performance-rail realism, not for a high-speed sprint at imported prices.

Sources

Primary documents and references

Build Canada, “Let’s Show the World How Canada Builds” (memo), February 24, 2025 — the document under review. buildcanada.com/memos/how-canada-builds

Alto, Public Consultation Report, June 22, 2026 — corridor framing, southern-corridor and Kingston-station feedback, community and environmental concerns.

Bent Flyvbjerg, “What You Should Know About Megaprojects and Why: An Overview,” Project Management Journal (2014) — the megaproject-overrun research the memo cites.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative — reference-class forecasting, Engineering Complexity Index regression, and de-biased cost analysis for the Toronto–Quebec City corridor.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative — NPV / benefit–cost matrix and Community Friction Index (post-consultation update).

June 25, 2026

High cost, low benefit claim

High Cost, Low Benefit — For Whom?

An ALTO Vice-President says the rail alternative would cost about as much as high-speed rail without the benefits. The government’s own record — and ALTO’s own document — say otherwise.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Analysis · June 2026

In short

In a recent public video, an ALTO Vice-President argues that high-frequency rail would still need dedicated track, would therefore cost about as much as high-speed rail, and would deliver less — a “high cost, low benefit” option. The claim runs against the public record. The government’s own reports costed a dedicated-track high-frequency railway far below high-speed rail, and judged it buildable in a fraction of the time. What shifted that cost to “similar” has never been made public.

On the benefit side, ALTO’s case rests on ridership the international reference class does not support. Tested against ALTO’s own document and the Initiative’s financial analysis, the high-cost option turns out to be the one being built.

Download

High Cost, Low Benefit — For Whom?

The full research brief, with sources (PDF)

Download PDF

The Argument

What the video claims

The argument is a single chain. High-frequency rail, the video says, is often presented as the cheaper alternative — but it would still require new dedicated track, so its cost would rise to roughly that of high-speed rail, while delivering lower travel-time, ridership, and economic benefits. The conclusion offered to viewers is that high-frequency rail is a “high cost, low benefit” option, while high-speed rail delivers both speed and frequency.

It is a clean story. Two problems sit beneath it before any single figure is examined.

It claims a cost convergence the record contradicts

The video is right that high-frequency rail needs dedicated track — it does not claim trains would share track with freight. Its claim is that building that dedicated track pushes the cost up to roughly high-speed rail’s. The government’s own reports say otherwise, on both cost and time. A dedicated-track, electrified high-frequency railway was costed at $27.7 billion in the December 2021 Business Case — and roughly $4–6 billion in its original 2016 form — and judged buildable in about four years. High-speed rail is now costed at $60–90 billion, on a build horizon stretching into the 2040s. What evidence moved high-frequency rail’s cost and schedule up to “similar” has never been explained, and no side-by-side comparison has been made public.

It never engages the alternative the Initiative proposes

The video treats high-frequency rail as the only alternative to high-speed rail. The Initiative’s proposal is different again: High Performance Rail (HPR) builds dedicated passenger track along existing transportation corridors — such as the CN right-of-way and the Highway 401 — and frees the Kingston Subdivision for freight. It is neither the government’s old high-frequency plan nor ALTO’s high-speed one, and ALTO has never assessed it.

Tested Against the Record

Three claims, three answers

$27.7B

what a dedicated-track high-frequency railway was costed at — against $60–90B for high-speed rail

2021 JPO Business Case

5×

the cost-per-kilometre gap between ALTO and High Performance Rail in the Initiative’s model

$142M vs $28M per km

0.11

ALTO’s central benefit-cost ratio — well below the 1.0 that marks a project that pays its way

Initiative methodology paper

The video makes three factual claims — on cost, on speed, and on benefit. Each can be checked against ALTO’s own published document and the Initiative’s analysis.

The claim in the video	What the record shows
“It would cost on a similar scale to high-speed rail.”	Contradicted by the public record. The government’s own 2021 Business Case put a dedicated-track high-frequency railway at $27.7 billion, against ALTO’s $60–90 billion. Even ALTO’s own Annex B places its “conventional rail” comparator 20–30% below high-speed rail. The Initiative’s reference-class model — a regression across more than forty international projects — puts ALTO at $142M/km and HPR at $28M/km, a five-fold gap. “Similar scale” holds on none of these.
“Without significantly faster travel times.”	Conventional speed already captures most of the benefit. A 177 km/h dedicated-track service was set to cut Toronto–Ottawa from over four hours to about two hours fifty. By ALTO’s own travel-time table, going to 300 km/h saves only a further 17 minutes on Toronto–Ottawa, 19 on Ottawa–Montréal, and 25 on Montréal–Québec. Most of the time saving comes from leaving freight-priority track — not from the extra speed.
“Lower ridership and reduced economic benefits.”	The benefit case rests on ridership the reference class does not support. ALTO’s 24-million-trip target sits outside the achievable modal-shift frontier of 5–12 million annual riders. No operating posture is subsidy-free; each requires roughly $1–3.5 billion per year. The central benefit-cost ratio is about 0.11. The “high benefit” half of the slogan is the half that does not survive checking.

A Note on the Travel Times

Estimated, not simulated

There is a further problem with the speed claim, separate from how small the gain is. The faster journey times were never modelled for this corridor at all. A government record released under the Access to Information Act (file A-2025-00333) shows that the project office produced a detailed RailSys simulation only for the 177 km/h base case. Every faster journey time was a spreadsheet estimate, benchmarked to average speeds on intercity railways in other countries — described in the project’s own memorandum as “for information and comparison purposes” and left to be refined later.

In other words, the under-three-hour trips that make high-speed rail attractive have no corridor-specific engineering behind them in the released record. The one number anyone actually drove through a model of the real line is the slow one.

Read the full record

The Initiative examines this in detail — the two methods, the journey-time tables, and how the speed ceiling was set as a policy target — in a companion research note, Estimated, Not Simulated, based on the same Access to Information release.

The Carbon Case

A carbon debt, not a carbon saving

The video folds environmental benefit into ALTO’s column, on the assumption that faster, higher-ridership rail is the greener choice. The Initiative’s 50-year lifecycle analysis finds the opposite once construction and a decarbonising vehicle fleet are counted. ALTO’s build is a large one-time carbon debt before a single passenger boards — about 14.7 Mt CO₂e in the central construction estimate — and with fifty years of operations the lifecycle total lands at roughly 24 to 27 Mt CO₂e on Ontario’s current grid, and as much as 34 Mt if the grid leans more on gas.

That debt only counts as a saving if the trips it captures would otherwise have been higher-carbon — and the payback math is unforgiving. At the ridership the corridor is most likely to see in its early years, around 4 million passengers a year, no scenario repays the construction debt within a credible horizon. Even at mature ridership, payback runs from a few decades to more than five hundred years, depending on how clean the grid is.

The comparison only worsens with time. By the 2040s, when ALTO might open, much of the car fleet will be electric — and an electric car carrying 1.2 people already emits about 10 g CO₂e per passenger-kilometre, below ALTO’s all-in emissions at every ridership level on today’s grid. Diverting existing VIA Rail passengers, at roughly 25 g/pkm, saves nothing at all. ALTO’s carbon case rests on displacing gasoline cars and short-haul flights — not the fleet that will actually be on the road when it opens.

Most of that debt is greenfield construction. An approach that runs on existing corridors — as High Performance Rail does — avoids the bulk of it, and the single largest carbon lever, shifting freight off congested track, is available whatever the trains’ speed or traction.

Why the Gap Is Real

The cost difference is structural, not arithmetic

The five-fold difference in the Initiative’s model is not an accounting artefact. A 300 km/h design forces a new dedicated greenfield alignment — grade separation, gentle curves, continuous fencing, and large-scale land acquisition — through terrain that scores high on both engineering complexity and community friction. Both the government’s high-frequency plan and the Initiative’s HPR instead run on or alongside existing corridors, which is why each comes in well below the high-speed option. In the Initiative’s model, the gap between high-speed rail and HPR splits roughly evenly between physical engineering and community friction — the cost of the land, the disruption, and the opposition that a new high-speed right-of-way creates.

The Bottom Line

High cost, low benefit — for whom?

The video’s thesis — that high-frequency rail is high cost and low benefit while high-speed rail delivers both — is contradicted by the government’s own record. High-frequency rail was a fully studied, dedicated-track plan, priced at $27.7 billion in 2021 and a fraction of that in its original form, and due to be carrying passengers now. The decision to replace it with a 300 km/h, $60–90-billion project was taken without a published comparison; the video supplies the missing conclusion after the fact.

On the evidence available, the high-cost option is the one that was chosen. The lower-cost alternatives — the government’s own, and the Initiative’s — were set aside without being weighed in public. That is the question the slogan invites, turned back on itself: high cost, low benefit, for whom?

Sources

Primary documents

ALTO, Fast Forward: Shaping Canada’s Future with a High-Speed Rail Network (March 2025) — cost ranges, travel times, and ridership targets, main text and Annex B. altotrain.ca

Joint Project Office High Frequency Rail Project, Business Case Update, V.002 (December 10, 2021) — dedicated-track design, $27.7 billion costing, and four-year construction estimate.

The Globe and Mail, “Transport Canada reviewing studies on Via Rail expansion” (July 2017) — the original 2016 high-frequency concept at roughly $4–6 billion. theglobeandmail.com

“VIA HFR-TGF Journey Times” memorandum and accompanying email chain (August–September 2023), released under the Access to Information Act as file A-2025-00333 — simulated base case versus estimated higher-speed times.

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, ALTO Financial Analysis (methodology paper and supporting research notes) — cost-per-kilometre model, ridership frontier, subsidy spectrum, benefit-cost ratio, and lifecycle carbon. ALTO-Financial-Analysis.pdf

ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative, 50-Year Lifecycle CO₂ Budget — Parametric Analysis (March 2026) — construction, operational, payback, and modal-comparison figures, drawing on HS2, UIC, and international HSR lifecycle studies.

Statements examined: public video by an ALTO Vice-President (June 2026).

June 7, 2026

Tag: HSR economics

Three Claims, One Fare

Three claims that are only ever made separately

Everything runs through the ticket price

1 — The fare sets how many people ride

2 — Ridership sets both the benefits and the revenue

3 — So the first two promises are the same promise

Three numbers agreeing is not three checks passing

4 — And two propositions have one joint answer

How much intercity travel there is to win

Three realistic fare levels, and what each one buys

Why cheap tickets cannot fix the finances

The ceiling is about two-thirds

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

Against the cost of building it, nothing reaches a dollar

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

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

No ticket price escapes the problem

Fixing one promise at a time

A larger travel market — reaches all three

Longer journeys — does not move ridership

Lower running costs — covers costs only

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

Summary ledger

What this brief does not claim

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

The 428-kilometre average journey is an assumption

The construction cost figure is not ALTO’s

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

The model of the train service is coarse

Primary documents and companion notes

At Face Value

“$49.5 billion in benefits”

“$24.5 billion in added GDP”

“1.1 per cent of Canada’s GDP”

“50,000 jobs and $86 billion”

“24 million riders a year”

There is no benefit-cost ratio

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

The benefit table cannot be audited by a reader

The same thing has happened to every number

What this brief is not saying

Credit where it is owed

And the limits of what we show

Five questions for anyone quoting these figures

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

2. What is the lower estimate?

3. What is the benefit-cost ratio?

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

5. Where do the new passengers come from?

Each of these numbers has its own brief

Primary documents

Hours Are Not Dollars

What a discount rate is, in ordinary words

How much the answer moves

A number with a family tree

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

The last time anyone published these numbers for this corridor

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

1. The appraisal rate — 3.5 per cent

2. What it costs the government to borrow

3. What a private partner needs to earn

How the Montréal REM is actually funded

What this does not claim

On the rate

On the comparisons

Two questions, answerable without releasing a model

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

2. What fare, and what revenue?

Primary documents

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

Why this matters

What the report gives you

What its own cited source requires

What that leaves a reader with

What the report borrowed, and from where

The numbers come as a set, not a menu

What a project this size is supposed to publish

Re-run the numbers at a different discount rate

Re-run the numbers with a rising value of time