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Front Burner Transcript for November 12, 2024

Host: Jayme Poisson

JAYME POISSON: Hey, everybody. Jayme here. In the coming weeks, the Trudeau government is expected to announce plans for a high-speed train connecting Toronto to Quebec City. Just imagine being able to get from Toronto to Montreal in three hours. That is easily faster than the whole process of flying, better for the environment, way faster than driving or taking our current trains. Our lack of such a cool and convenient option is something that I am sure, if not you yourself, you've heard all sorts of people returning from Europe or Asia complain about. So today we're going to talk about how high-speed rail has transformed other places, why we've never been able to get it up and running here, and whether you should take the bet that we could actually pull it off now. Reece Martin is with me. He's a transportation planner and makes videos about infrastructure and transit projects from all over the world on his YouTube channel, RMTransit.

[Music: Theme]

JP: Reece, hi. It's such a pleasure to have you. Thank you for being here.

REECE MARTIN: Thanks for having me on.

JP: So on your channel, you look at rail systems across the world, as I mentioned. A lot of it looks really advanced and impressive. And where would you say Canada ranks when it comes to travelling by train across the world?

REECE MARTIN: We're close to the bottom. I mean, among countries that have trains, we are one of the worst. I mean, there are many, many developing countries with substantially better rail service than we have in Canada.

JP: Well, that's great to hear. Just paint a picture for me. What does rail travel look like in other countries, the countries that are doing it well?

REECE MARTIN: Well, in the countries that are doing it well, of which there are at this point lots, in rail travel--

JP: Everyone but us, it sounds like.

REECE MARTIN: Yeah, in the developed world, definitely everyone but us. Rail travel is typically pretty accessible. You know, usually you can go to a large quantity of places. Usually it's quite fast. You can usually show up at a station and travel in pretty short notice. It is inexpensive and affordable in most of the good cases. And so it's really just a comprehensive transportation system in the way that you think of, like, highways in Canada. Like, there are highways that go all over the place and [JP: Mm-hmm.] you can just get on a highway and use a highway and it's available and accessible.

JP: Right. Just like a very obvious and normal thing to expect. I travelled across Spain on a high-speed train in five hours last year. You know, I've been on the Shinkansen trains in Japan. I imagine a lot of people listening have had similar experiences and probably share the feeling of, like, absolute bewilderment, annoyance, frustration sitting on those trains and watching the scenery whiz by and wondering, you know, why we don't have this here. And I just, how would you say that high-speed trains have transformed those places, like Spain, like Japan, like other places in Europe?

REECE MARTIN: Well, they've brought them together, right? I mean, ultimately, in Japan or in China or in, you know, all across much of Europe, you can travel from place to place incredibly quickly and affordably. And so that just means that people do a lot more travelling, right? On a weekend in Toronto, you know, you could travel to Montreal. People do do weekend trips to Montreal. But you could do a day trip to Montreal with high-speed rail. And, you know, you could go for an evening. And if you had a lot of service, you could go on short notice. So you could wake up, your friend in Montreal or Quebec City could say, Hey, like, We're having dinner tonight. You want to come over? And you could just do that. It would be possible. You could go on pretty long journeys for summer vacation and do it affordably and do it quickly on short notice. And so it's just, it gives people so many options and it allows people to travel and to do things that they couldn't otherwise. You can imagine... you know, super commuting is something that gets talked about. And I think that there's obviously some unhealthy elements to travelling two hours a day for work. But if people are working hybrid and maybe they're only in the office once a week, well, it would be very possible with high-speed rail to have an office job in, in Toronto and commute from Ottawa.

JP: Totally.

REECE MARTIN: And that would be totally reasonable. So, there's a lot of options.

JP: You know, and I think what might pop into people's minds right now is like, Oh, wow, maybe I could afford, maybe I could afford a house if I didn't have to live so close to the city centre.

[music]

JP: Just talking about Japan specifically, their first high-speed train was in 1964.

SOUNDCLIP

[archival news clip]

SPEAKER: On regular runs between Tokyo and Osaka, nearly 500 miles, the bullet will keep the speed needle steady at 190 km, about 120 miles an hour. Even with five stops, it cuts the journey time to four hours...

JP: And why do you think Japan was so ahead of everyone else here? Just talk to me about Japan specifically as a case study.

REECE MARTIN: Well, Japan, after World War II, essentially made a very different decision than most of the rest of the world. A lot of the rest of the world decided to invest in highways, and Japan decided to invest in rail transport. And they actually did it for the Tokyo 1964 Olympics. So we've literally gone through Tokyo having the Olympics twice in the span of them creating high-speed rail, and Canada still not having even trains that are powered by electricity travelling between cities.

JP: What do you think building something like that, something big like that does for, like, the psyche of a country like Japan? Do you think it contributes to, like, a national pride, this idea that we can build big things?

REECE MARTIN: Oh, I mean, absolutely. Right? Like, it's this incredible system. I mean, Japan's system is kind of far and away, along with perhaps the system in France, far and away the greatest in the world. And I mean, it hasn't had a single accident in, like, over 50 years of operation. Like, no one has lost their life on that system. Imagine how many, how many people have gotten in car crashes or how many planes have crashed in that time. And this system has a perfect safety record. So it's definitely got, it's definitely created a lot of national pride. But I think it even goes beyond the system itself. And it, you know, when you have this kind of accessible transportation, it means that people in Japan can just travel to other places in Japan really easily in a way that Canadians aren't used to. You know, I'm always shocked in Toronto, having grown up in Vancouver, how few people have been to Vancouver. And I imagine, you know, what if Vancouver was cheaper to fly to? And what if cities that are closer to Toronto, you could take a train and be back the same day? I mean, it would really make it so that people could see more of our country, right? And I think that would connect them to it.

[music]

JP: So let's talk about why, why we haven't been able to get this done. We're expecting this announcement in the coming weeks. But this is, of course, as you well know, not the first time our politicians or people here have been talking about high-speed rail. This country has been dreaming about it for decades, really. Let me just give our listeners a bit of a list here. So Liberal leaders, Michael Ignatieff and Stéphane Dion, promised high-speed rail. NDP leader Jack Layton. Kathleen Wynne in Ontario...

SOUNDCLIP

KATHLEEN WYNNE: This has been talked about for decades. Not, you know, not a couple of years, not a few months, not one generation, but at least two, probably three generations. So we've got to move ahead on this.

JP: Alison Redford in Alberta. We have become experts in this country at commissioning studies on high-speed rail. I feel like we have spent, you would know better than me, just millions and millions of dollars on studies. Should we do a corridor, Windsor to Quebec, Calgary to Edmonton? And yet we have no high-speed rail. So why haven't we been able to get this done? I imagine there's more than one reason, but please take me through it in whatever order you'd like.

REECE MARTIN: Well, I mean, I think that there's a lot of factors. And as a country, we are increasingly unable to deliver infrastructure. And in many ways, we are reacting to that in ways that make it even harder for us to deliver infrastructure. I think everyone almost in the country at this point would have heard that Toronto's Eglinton Crosstown project, which is just like a subway line/tram line across Toronto.

JP: Yep.

SOUNDCLIP

NEWS PRESENTER: Okay, it's official. The Eglinton Crosstown LRT will not open in 2024. Metrolinx says that significant process has been made to the LRT when it comes to testing and construction. It was supposed to be finished by 2020, but has faced constant delays linked to the pandemic and other complications.

JP: Yeah, Ottawa's light rail Confederation Line. It has all these malfunctioning doors, flattened and cracked wheels, busted power lines, broken axles. Like, you name it.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER 1: Just weeks after it opened, the train doors jammed. Those trains purpose-built for Ottawa's climate, but cold weather, hot weather and freezing rain have all shuttered the system multiple times. It's not just all Mother Nature's fault. The city admitting the train's wheels aren't perfectly round. The track itself could also be the problem. But as of now, the core issue hasn't been found.

JP: The Green Line project in Calgary is at risk of falling apart. Anyways, please continue.

REECE MARTIN: Yeah, it's just, as a country, we have a real deficiency in our ability to deliver projects like this. And despite the fact that everyone's aware of it, we haven't done like some national commission on megaprojects or like, you know, let's kind of get the ship in shape, let's get things in order, despite the fact that this is just lighting enormous amounts of taxpayer money on fire. I mean, there's a huge opportunity cost to spending all this money and not having a line, for example, in Toronto for 15 years. And I think that a big problem here with our high-speed rail efforts is we talk a lot about high-speed rail, but we never talk about the fact that we're not good at doing big projects. We used to be better, actually. I mean, we have a lot of big infrastructure in this country, but we've gotten worse and worse over time. And things are just kind of spiraling out of control and nobody seems to want to take responsibility and try to sort things out.

JP: Well, why do you think that is, Reece? Like, why are we so bad at building these big, big things, these big infrastructure projects?

REECE MARTIN: The most kind of convincing thing I've heard is that fundamentally, when we have a problem in Canada, we naturally look to other places and try to learn, you know, how did they do it. And when you look at Spain or France, you can learn a lot. But unfortunately, Spain and France are countries that-- the institutions are not English speaking. You can't go and read technical documents about how the TGV was designed, in English, for the most part. And so what we do is we go to places like the United Kingdom and we say, Hey, well, like, they're English speakers, they have a way better train system than us, they must have the answers for us. And so we've adopted a lot of practices that were kind of originally created in the United Kingdom, like public-private partnerships and, and various other things. And what that's done is, I think, taken us down the path that the United Kingdom has gone down, which is of projects that get more and more expensive because public-private partnerships don't actually make projects more affordable. They kind of... they're kind of a financial game. And we've kind of adopted a lot of their practices with planning that involve, you know, a lot of consultation, kind of in excess, the way that you see with housing projects. You know, NIMBYism, etc., etc., etc. And so we've tried to learn lessons basically, but we've learned lessons from places that famously aren't good at building things. And, you know, the U.K. famously has a high-speed rail project underway and, you know, it's super delayed, super expensive, not going to connect to London directly at the moment, not going to connect to Manchester.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER 2: HS2 is the U.K.'s largest infrastructure project. Five hundred new bridges are being built across the route and 100 km of tunnels. But as construction costs have ballooned up to an estimated $170 billion, the ambitions of HS2 have been cut back or delayed to save money.

REECE MARTIN: This is kind of the problem, right, is that we are, we know that there's a problem, but we're not looking for answers in the right places. And when we look for answers in the wrong places, we end up getting answers that make things even worse.

[music]

JP: Just to be clear, this announcement that we're expecting in the coming weeks about the line, the high-speed line connecting Toronto to Quebec City with stops in Peterborough, Ottawa, Montreal, Trois-Rivières and Laval, is that going down the same path that you're talking about here? Is that going to be one of these private-public partnerships as well?

REECE MARTIN: That is the plan, yeah, unfortunately. Which is... And I think to really kind of cement why this is problematic, I mean, that is not what the vast majority of countries that have successfully built high-speed rail have done. They have built it via state agencies. You know, the national rail operators like SNCF in France and RENFE in Spain. And we're walking right into this.

JP: I just wanted to ask you, where does VIA Rail fit into the conversation that we're having right now?

REECE MARTIN: Yeah. So unfortunately, the situation I think with VIA Rail is that VIA operates the train services in the country today. And if this was France, for example, they might be the ones leading up this high-speed project. But there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem, which is that, how do you have an agency that has never really built any modern rail infrastructure ever, deliver a modern rail project? And there are different ways that you could do that. But I think the decision that seems to have been made is that since they haven't ever done this, they couldn't ever do it and there's no way of really integrating them into the process. And so they're kind of being sidelined, so to speak. That's unfortunate, but it's, in some ways, you know, VIA brought elements of this on itself because VIA has increasingly provided, I think, worse and worse service for customers over the years. And it hasn't really inspired a lot of confidence that this is the beginnings of a modern rail system.

SOUNDCLIP

[Rick Mercer Report comedy clip]

RICK MERCER: [as train attendant] You can count on VIA Rail for the same low-speed train service that we had when we incorporated in 1977. Across the ocean, they have bullet trains.

ACTOR: [as passenger] Sounds scary.

RICK MERCER: [as train attendant] Let me tell you how scary.

JP: I think it's like, their annual report said that only 59% of the trains [chuckles] arrived on time last year. And you see those horror stories of people stuck for like six or, in one case, 18 hours on the track.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER 3: Reactions to a VIA Rail employee grabbing a passenger's phone. Stranded for ten hours after a breakdown, tension high between agitated staff and frustrated passengers.

REPORTER 4: Well, one passenger has been trying to make her way home for more than 12 hours.

SOUNDCLIP

FRUSTRATED PASSENGER: It just sort of felt like you were like a caged animal. It didn't really feel too humane.

REPORTER 5: Food and water ran out, most washrooms were out of service, and he says people hit their breaking point.

FRUSTRATED PASSENGER: You know, they're like, Yeah, an hour and a half longer. And then, Oh, maybe three. And then, you know, three hours later...

VIA RAIL OFFICIAL: It was misinformation we offered the passengers. We exacerbated the level of anxiety of those passengers on board.

REPORTER 5: That included sending them an email saying that tree was removed when it wasn't.

VIA RAIL OFFICIAL: Obviously, they didn't take it well because they saw that the tree was still there.

JP: Do you think that if it did work better, there would, you know, there would be more people clamoring for a better-- like, high-speed rail?

REECE MARTIN: I definitely think that's the case. And I think that, you know, we have to be clear that in some cases, VIA doesn't have control over this. A lot of the time, VIA is operating over tracks owned by private companies, the freight companies in Canada.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER 6: CN owns the tracks Canada's only passenger rail service uses for the 'Canadian,' the Toronto to Vancouver route. And says its other customers pay more than $250 billion to ship products like oil, grain and timber every year. Passenger trains don't get priority on the track.

REECE MARTIN: Which is, to be clear, also something that countries that are good at rail and high-speed rail do not do. Infrastructure isn't owned by private companies. It's owned by the government, and it is kind of doled out in a way that's fair and prevents things like being stuck for 18 hours while freight trains are rolling by you. For things that VIA does have control over, you know, I'd point to the fact that when you go to a station, it's the airport experience. It's everything you don't want with a train. You know, you have to line up before the train arrives. Your ticket gets checked ten times, you know, as if you accidentally showed up and stood in line for 30 minutes and everything. [Jayme chuckles] They weigh your bags now, even though the weight of your bags is materially no difference to the cost of operating the train. And--

JP: Yeah. Very annoying.

REECE MARTIN: Yeah. Having a lot of bags is the benefit of taking the train. And so it seems like a lot of the good things about train travel have been eroded away from the VIA Rail experience. I mean, it's not even particularly accessible. At many stations, the platform does not line up with the train. And so they have to use these, these elevators like it's 1960 to lift wheelchair users up into the train. And it's just all... It's sad and antiquated and it's just, it's out of line with what countries like France and Japan were doing 50 years ago, much less what they're doing today.

JP: Is there truly enough demand for it? Because that is the difference, right, between Canada and places like China and Japan is, you know, our population is spread out over much larger distances, obviously.

REECE MARTIN: Yeah, and it's a very reasonable thing to bring up that, you know, Canada does have a much lower population than these countries. Ultimately, you know, it's great if Peterborough and some of these other cities that don't have great rail today, get rail. Obviously, I'm supportive of that as someone who likes rail in general. But when you look at the best practices for planning a rail line, you want to put the rail line where the demand is and where it probably is going to grow. And for the Quebec City-Windsor corridor, that's along the 401, where you already have a lot of major cities. You already have a lot of rail service there. So that's places like Bellville and Kingston. These are actually where some of the most used VIA Rail stations outside of Toronto and Montreal are today. But you also have the 401 corridor, which is a, you know, big, wide corridor where you could build something like a high-speed train route. You couldn't build it down the middle of the 401, but you could build it, you know, adjacent and kind of weaving around it so that it can have nice wide curves. That would be the kind of approach that, you know, countries like Italy and Germany would take to follow a highway route. And we are instead choosing to kind of go through areas that don't have a clear rail right-of-way, and so that, that makes it a lot harder. The government already owns the land around the 401, and acquiring land is one of the biggest challenges of building a high-speed rail line. And so by not going along a route like the 401 or some of the existing rail lines, you're making that a lot harder. Now, on the demand side, I mean, I think that there definitely is demand. And something that's important to realize is it's not only the huge existing demand for flights, there's already a bunch of trains that run every day. There's a ton of people that drive because the flight options and the train options are not great for everyone for various reasons. And so there's already a huge number of people who travel between the various cities. But something that's important to consider when we're talking about demand for something like high-speed rail and something that always goes ignored, is that when you create a better option, you create demand where demand didn't exist before. I don't want to call it 'build it and they will come.' I don't think that's really a good way of explaining it. But if you could suddenly go and... you know, you could go to a Montreal Canadiens game from Toronto and, you know, I could literally leave it at 5:30 and arrive in Montreal before the puck drops, that's a trip that you just couldn't make without high-speed rail. And there's a lot of those kind of situations where if you had a fast, affordable train option, trips come and appear in places that they wouldn't even exist before because people couldn't make that trip before. And so I think that's a really important consideration. Ultimately, if you look at the number of people and the geography... you know, we're not China, we're not Japan, we don't have megacities. But we have cities that are, you know, a similar size to those in Germany or Spain that are already connected by high-speed rail.

[music]

JP: So we talked about how this government initially was interested in high-frequency rail, and there was a price tag put on that for a Toronto to Quebec City corridor -- $6 to $12 billion. Now, we don't know what the projection is for how much high-speed rail would cost, but Transport Canada initially estimated it as high as $80 to $120 million. This is an enormous price tag. And so do you think that that is a realistic goal here, you know, especially considering the moment that we're in? We have a lot of other pressing issues in this country as well, like housing affordability, a doctor shortage. Governments are under pressure to spend less.

REECE MARTIN: Yeah, I mean, I think you brought up a lot of good points. There are a lot of ways you could spend $80 billion. You know, that could buy you a lot of homes or a lot of hospitals or a lot of-- it could pay a lot of salaries for doctors. And I think that's something really important to consider. You know, ultimately, at $80 billion, this project probably barely makes sense. And, but you know, that is... that's reflected by the fact that other countries wouldn't build high-speed rail if it cost that much money. And it kind of comes back to this issue of we can't deliver projects. It's probably not wrong that it would cost, you know, tens and tens of billions of dollars under our current approach to building mega projects. And so if we want high-speed rail, we really need to address those problems of, you know, delays, cost increases. The private sector should certainly be involved. And it is, in basically every country where high-speed rail is successful. You know, the private companies are going to be doing things like running trains or doing concessions at the stations and stuff like that. They're not going to be building the whole system. And so it's, it's definitely possible. But if it does end up costing $80 billion, I do think it's a really hard sell. Especially under what will probably be a Conservative government, who probably sees the value in high-speed rail, but probably also sees the value in $80 billion going to all kinds of the priorities that Canadians have.

JP: Just to end, what do you think the likelihood is that we will have high-speed rail by mid-2030s? I think that is the number that's being thrown out there.

REECE MARTIN: I think I would put the likelihood, you know, 50-50, 60-40. I certainly think it's possible. There's no law of physics that says that we can't build high-speed rail in Canada. But I think that if we don't seriously shape up a lot of the problems we have -- and to be clear, I don't see a clear desire to do that based on the transit projects we're building in the country today -- then I think it's going to be really hard for us to build something of that scale. Certainly something that would be as good as what they would build in other developing, uh... well, developing countries. Honestly, at this point, you know, Indonesia has high-speed rail. Morocco has high-speed rail. Turkey has high-speed rail. It's really about whether we want it and whether we want to do the things necessary to make it actually feasible to deliver it.

JP: Okay. Reece, this was great. A little depressing, but great. Thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate it.

REECE MARTIN: Hey, I mean, the first thing you got to do is acknowledge you have a problem. [Jayme laughs] Thanks for having me on.

[Music: Theme]

JP: All right, that's all for today. I'm Jayme Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.

Why can't Canada have fast trains? - Transcript

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