By Doug Nesbitt
The crown corporation, Alto, is now holding public consultations in the regions where it is proposing to build a high-speed rail between Quebec City and Toronto. The project costs are estimated between $80 billion and $120 billion, and have ignited opposition along the entire corridor.
Numerous townships have voted outright opposition. Local organization and networks have been activated around a series of concerns centred on lowering land values, environmental destruction and the enormous costs. There is also disappointment and resentment along the “401 corridor” because the proposed high-speed rail bypasses numerous cities, big and small, that are served by the 401 and throttled VIA Rail passenger service on CN privatized rails.
Alto’s main proposal is to run a high-speed rail from Quebec City through Montreal to Ottawa, and then down the sparsely-populated Highway 7 corridor to Peterborough before connecting to Toronto. Alto has also floated an option of running a southern route to serve Kingston, although Alto representatives have said at public consultations that no stop will exist between Ottawa and Peterborough. Alto engineers say it would be cheaper to build along the southern route to avoid Canadian Shield granite. Kingston is the largest centre between Ottawa and Oshawa and a major junction for existing VIA Rail passenger service. Kingston is in fact the fifth busiest VIA Rail stop in Canada, behind Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Quebec, all of which will be served by the high-speed proposal.
South Frontenac, the rural township north of Kingston, was the first local government to oppose Alto. The Township’s council vote was unanimous. Unanimous votes of opposition followed in the neighbouring townships of Stone Mills and Rideau Lakes. Tyendinaga and Belleville also oppose Alto. The Cataraqui Conservation board around Kingston is now calling for a study to expand the 401 rail corridor to protect the local environment and water systems. In Quebec, the farmers union mobilized a tractor protest that rolled through Montreal’s Mirabel airport area, opposing further expropriation of lands following expropriations for the airport.
Kingston City Council has voted 9-2 in support of the southern route while Kingston’s Member of Parliament, Mark Gerretsen, and his provincial counterpart, Ted Hsu, both Liberals, support the southern route that would provide a stop close to Kingston. Gerretsen is reportedly lobbying for the southern route and Kingston stop within the Liberal cabinet. Rural provincial and federal representatives aligned with the federal Conservatives or Ontario Progressive Conservatives have followed the lead of the townships and now oppose Alto.
Alto’s CEO, Martin Imbleau, spoke to the Senate Committee on National Finance in Ottawa on February 26. He claimed that too many changes to the original proposal would likely kill the project. Alto’s plan, said Imbleau, was to complete its public consultations and put out a final proposal at the end of 2026.
Rural concerns are centred upon land values, expropriated and bi-sected properties, and environmental destruction. There is also great concern about the costs. How and why will the project cost between $80 and $120 billion? Many are calling for this taxpayer-funded proposal to disclose its cost calculations in what amounts to a demand for an open budget.
The corporate agenda behind Alto
The structure of Alto has not been addressed in the media or debated by elected representatives in municipal, provincial or federal government. The political and media establishment are silent on this question despite Alto being a dangerous privatization project that will put corporate profits ahead of a wide range of public democratic concerns.
Alto was one of Justin Trudeau’s last acts as Prime Minister. It was created in early 2025 to take over the project from VIA Rail, which has a public service mandate. VIA has been reduced to a consulting role on technical and operational matters. At the time, the union representing VIA Rail workers, Unifor, said the Alto takeover “means public funds being used to build a system that will strip public oversight and hand the corridor over to private operators.”
Unifor’s analysis is correct. Although Alto is a federal crown corporation, it is not like VIA. It is in fact a shell corporation – a “Project and Contracting Authority” – to oversee a multinational corporate consortium called Cadence. The current “co-development” contract awarded to Cadence is worth $3.9 billion. At the centre of Cadence is AtkinsRéalis which is the new name for SNC-Lavalin. Many Canadians will know SNC-Lavalin for its long history of corruption scandals. In the past few years alone, SNC-Lavalin was at the centre of the corruption scandal involving the Prime Minister’s Office of Justin Trudeau, and the criminal convictions of former corporate executives. SNC-Lavalin rebranded 2023 as AtkinsRéalis.
Other multinationals in the Cadence consortium include CPDQ Infra, Keolis, Systra, SNCF Voyageurs and Air Canada. Air Canada was privatized in 1988 by the corrupt Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and has since become one of the most unpopular corporate monopolies in Canada. Only last year, the public rallied behind the rebellion of Air Canada flight attendants combating unpaid work.
Systra, a public transit engineering corporation, was accused in 2021 of corruption in Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan and paid fines to avoid trial. In 2019, one of Systra’s subsidiaries was sanctioned by the World Bank for corruption with infrastructure projects in Tanzania, Mozambique and Ghana. Keolis is another multinational corporation that is contracted to operate public transit systems around the world while taking a profit.
SNCF Voyageurs is France’s state-owned passenger rail service, which includes its famous high-speed trains. Both Systra and Keolis commonly work with SNCF Voyageurs. There is good reason for Canada to seek the expertise of a successful high-speed rail operator like SNCF Voyageurs, but allowing it to extract profits from Canadians is an absurd proposition.
What are P3s?
Trade unionists and those supporting public infrastructure projects may already recognize Alto as a “Public-Private Partnership” or “P3”. It is the organizational form of infrastructure development that has become dominant in Canada over the past forty years. There are various forms of P3s, but they typically award lucrative multi-decade contracts to whatever aspect of the project is deemed to be an acceptable source of profits.
Typical P3 contracts include service and operations and maintenance (O&M) contracts. Other contracts, which are more likely with Alto, include design-build, design-build-operate, design-finance-build-lease, and design-build-own-operate. It is unclear what kind of P3 contracts Alto will be awarding.
The problems with the P3 model are numerous. Costs are a major problem. Private financing and corporate budgeting practices almost always lead to costs much greater than originally promised. Risk is taken on by the public taxpayer while contracts are hidden from public view under the guise of “trade secrets” and “intellectual property” in order to protect corporate profit streams. There is no reason such contracts need to be drawn up, but the consensus among Canada’s political elites is to allow this legalized corruption.
The typical results of P3 builds are cost over-runs, extended timelines, inferior services and equipment, downward pressure on working conditions, and problems with workplace safety, public health and environmental damages.
Costly privatization disasters are routine
One does not have to look far to find concrete examples of privatization failures. Deteriorating recycling services in across Ontario are a direct result of Premier Doug Ford’s privatization of all local recycling programs under the power of Circular Materials, a private “non-profit” corporate consortium founded by Loblaws, Metro, Coca-Cola, McDonalds and a host of other food industry multinationals busy gouging customers and busting unions.
Alto is also like Metrolinx, the Ontario transit crown corporation mandated to drive privatized transit projects like the disastrous Eglinton LRT in Toronto. The Eglinton LRT opened six years late and at least a billion dollars over budget. A similar P3 transit project is the catastrophic Ottawa LRT which has cost hundreds of millions more than projected and suffered constant equipment failures since it opened in 2019. Just last week, it was announced that 41 of its trains have to be taken out of service for more repairs. The entire Ottawa LRT fleet is a bag of lemons.
The existing 401 rail corridor, on which VIA currently operates, is owned by CN Rail. CN was a crown corporation until it was privatized in 1995 by the Liberal government of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. As reported in the Kingston Labour News, CN has been responsible for the recent deterioration of VIA Rail service by throttling VIA’s train speeds. CN, along with CPKC, has also aggressively opposed the railway unions in their efforts to improve workplace health and safety, staffing levels, training, and fatigue.
It is worth noting CN was created in 1919 due to the extensive corporate mismanagement of several large private railway corporations, notably the Canadian Northern, Grand Trunk and Grand Trunk Pacific. The Canadian Northern was the largest corporation in Canada in the early 1900s.
In short, privatized infrastructure builds serve to enrich and entrench private corporate interests against the public democratic interest.
Public development and democratic planning
The Canadian political class, from the local through the provincial and federal levels, remains silent on the privatization agenda. Politicians haven’t said a word about CN’s profit-driven throttling of VIA Rail service and are routine advocates of strikebreaking legislation against railway workers at CN and CPKC. None of these politicians seems to think VIA Rail operating on CN’s privatized rails is a matter worth discussing even as they lobby for improved VIA service on CN rails. Despite CN’s huge profits, they refuse to invest in widening the existing rail corridor to accommodate passenger demand and an alternative to the 401, which is widely recognized as the busiest highway and busiest truck highway in the world. CN’s priorities are lucrative freight rates, not passenger rail services.
More than 17 million Canadians – nearly half the country’s population – live between Quebec City and Toronto. The population is stuck between two privatized train corridors, one real and one proposed. Unless the privatization issue is addressed, the solutions are lousy.
Canadians are suffering from a profound lack of public democracy insofar as passenger rail service ought to be a program of public development and democratic planning. What we have right now is private development and corporate planning with the public veneer of a crown corporation conducting community consultations.
Canadians desperately need improved VIA Rail service and long-distance high-speed rail, but we do not need the Alto privatization scheme. It must be opposed and there are many reasons to do so. Until there is public development and democratic planning for high-speed rail, public efforts ought to be focused on bringing the existing CN Rail corridor back under public ownership in order to widen the corridor and expand passenger rail.
An earlier version of this article was published at the Kingston Labour News.