Every political leader wants to create a legacy project while in office. They dream of an everlasting piece of public infrastructure that may be renamed after them by a future generation. These projects are usually driven by personal vanity and political favours rather than national need. Prime Minister Mark Carney has already laid out his dream with the Alto high-speed rail project in Ontario and Quebec, and while future generations may not stand around and venerate it as he hopes they will, they certainly will pay for it. The price tag will be staggering.Alto is the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high-speed line with about 900 kilometres of new dedicated track hosting trains travelling at 300 km/h or more. Stations are still unfixed, and construction is not slated to start in earnest until around 2030. The Crown corporation and Ottawa keep repeating the $60-to-$90 billion capital figure. They also keep saying it is not a budget. Those two sentences should not be allowed to live in the same briefing.The $90 billion cap is the optimistic reading of the projected cost of the line. When comparing costs per kilometre on high-speed rail lines in other countries, Canada is lowballing. Documents in Parliament said Alto’s midpoint works out to about $83 million per kilometre. Spain, California, France, and the United Kingdom averaged about $237 million per kilometre for their lines. Are we really to believe Canada is capable of building a project of this scope for well under half the price of other nations? Nationalizing the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project quadrupled the cost of construction, and that project was simple in comparison to building a high-speed rail line in populated regions.If Alto’s costs are comparable to those of other countries, the capital expense will land north of $200 billion. That’s over $19,000 for every family of four in Canada. The vast majority of Canadians will never set foot on this line for three reasons. First, they don’t live in areas or have jobs where they would need to use it. Second, they wouldn’t be able to afford to ride it after paying the bill to construct it. Third, they may not live long enough to see the line come into operation..Imagine what the operating costs of such a line will be if it is ever completed. Ticket prices will have to be in the thousands if the government dares to believe it can recover capital costs. Unionization and poor management at VIA Rail have ensured taxpayers are constantly footing the bill to keep the Eastern rail service alive. Alto will be no different. The tickets will have to be heavily subsidized to keep the white elephant operating.North America has a living, stark warning about the pitfalls of high-speed rail dreams in California. Their high-speed rail project theoretically should be more viable than the Canadian one due to population density and a year-round construction season. Instead, it has been an ongoing catastrophe of delays and cost overruns. Voters were sold a San Francisco–Los Angeles bullet train in 2008 at roughly $33 billion to $45 billion, to be in service by 2020. None of it is operational today, and only a tiny segment of track has been laid. The government won’t back off from the sunk cost, though, and the disaster just keeps rolling along. The 2026 business plan put a “right-sized” full Phase 1 near $126 billion and an unoptimized original design near $231 billion. They keep shrinking the scope and increasing the price. They now hope a small segment of the line may be operational sometime in the 2030s.How can anybody look at the California experience and think it would be a good idea to replicate it up here? Welcome to Canadian politics.One of the most famous Simpsons episodes was released in 1993, and it was the monorail one. It was loosely modelled on The Music Man, and the plot revolved around a grifter who came into town to sell a monorail project promised to bring prosperity, happiness, and national recognition to their town. It, of course, brought none of those things and was a scam. The reason the plot line worked is that people had seen and heard of such mass transit ripoffs so many times before. And they still fall for them.The Alto plan isn’t a nation-building piece of infrastructure, and Mark Carney is no John A. Macdonald. It’s a boondoggle in the making at a scope never imagined in Canada before. If it is ever completed, it will only serve a tiny segment of the nation, while indebting the whole. But as long as the prime minister can imagine a bronze plaque in a high-speed rail station bearing his name as the visionary who laid the track, none of the costs will matter to him. It’s not as if he will have to pay the bill.
