Human and Financial Costs of Alto's High-Speed Rail Project
Last September 11, Prime Minister Carney announced that, besides the first five projects of "national interest" to be reviewed by the new Major Projects Office (MPO), "there are several strategies for projects that could be truly transformative for this country, which are at an earlier stage and require further development."
Amongst those named was the Alto High-Speed Rail (HSR) described as "Canada's first high-speed railway, spanning approximately 1,000 km from Toronto to Québec City and reaching speeds of up to 300 km/hour to cut travel times in half and connect close to half of Canada's population." The statement issued that day by the Prime Minister's office said that "The MPO will work to accelerate engineering, regulatory, and permitting work to enable construction of the project to start in four years, cutting the original eight-year timeline in half."
What Carney had in mind was to streamline the environmental regulations and land expropriation through Bill C-15, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on November 4, 2025, adopted on February 26 by the House of Commons, with Liberals and Conservatives voting in favour.
By modifying the Expropriation Act, Omnibus Bill C-15 eliminates the most owner-protective steps (negotiation attempt, public hearing, independent inquiry) specifically for HSR land acquisition. The consultation process for land expropriation is thus shifted from a hearing before an independent public board to the Minister of Transport, while adding a two-year deadline for the government to "use it [the expropriated land] or lose it."
Now, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is having second thoughts about the whole HSR project and on March 31 he held a press conference in Peterborough, Ontario where there is a proposed station for the Ottawa-Toronto section. "Carney Liberals will confiscate farmland and private property, disrupting communities and harming the quality of life of local residents who will not even get to use the train because it won't have any stops near their homes," said Poilievre. "This $90 billion Liberal boondoggle does not make sense and it does not make dollars," he added, highlighting existing issues with Via Rail delays, and said the funds could instead be used to lower debt, taxes and inflation.
"In terms of the Conservatives, they used to think big," Liberal Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon told the host of CTV's Question Period on April 5. He said "You know, Brian Mulroney used to think big," adding "Heavens, John A. Macdonald used to think in terms of building an intercontinental railroad."
What seems to escape all these cartel party representatives is the growing and organized opposition amongst farmers, private landowners and citizens from all walks of life along what would become Alto's Quebec City-Toronto HSR corridor.
Alto Has its Own "Recipe" for Getting Things Done
Martin Imbleau, Alto CEO, gave an interview on January 25, to La Presse that is very revealing on who will pay for the HSR multi-billion dollar experiment, i.e., the Canadian people, and who will profit, i.e., the private consortium chosen to build the HSR. Here are some excerpts from that interview:
Question from La Presse journalist: How will the Alto team manage to plan and build this massive infrastructure project, currently the largest rail project in the West?
Answer from Martin Imbleau: Alto intends to follow the approach of Professor Bent Flyvbjerg, a specialist in megaproject management who co-authored [with Dan Gardner] the book How Big Things Get Done.
For decades, this professor emeritus at the University of Oxford has studied megaprojects around the world -- examining what worked well and what did not. A world-renowned expert, he also gave evidence last autumn to the Gallant Commission on the SAAQclic scandal.
His formula: instead of starting construction too quickly, study the project thoroughly, start slowly to learn from your mistakes, then pick up the pace. "Prepare, observe, test, take your time, roll out, make mistakes, learn, and replicate the whole process with greater agility," summarizes Martin Imbleau. "We invest between five and 10 per cent of the project's cost in engineering before breaking ground. This helps avoid surprises."
That is why Alto has decided to build the Montreal-Laval-Ottawa section first -- 200 kilometres out of 1,000 -- starting in 2030. Construction of the other two (more complex) sections is expected to begin in 2032.
When Critical Information Based on Scientific Investigation Is Brushed Aside
To follow the reasoning described by Flyvbjerg and Gardner as "Think Slow, Act Fast," organizations still have, in their words, to "Plan for Problems." In the case of the Montreal-Laval-Ottawa section, the Alto High-Speed Rail Citizen Research Initiative (ACRI) conducted a detailed scientific analysis of the proposed Ottawa-Toronto section. They found many critical issues related to engineering and environment, also present on the Montreal-Laval-Ottawa section, that were never answered by Alto in their public consultation process.
For example, Alto hasn't revealed the millions of cubic metres of plastic foam required to build high-speed rail through soft ground, both as thermal insulation under the track and as lightweight structural fill over unstable soils such as the Leda clay present along the Ottawa valley. Buried plastic foam leaches chemicals into groundwater over decades, including a potential human carcinogen and substances that harm aquatic life. At end of life, the foam must be dug up and disposed of, a liability because some of this foam may legally qualify as hazardous waste. [1]
Cost Estimate to Be Disclosed Before Starting Construction
In the January 25 interview given to La Presse, Martin Imbleau added that another lesson learned from Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner is to not publicly announce a project's cost estimate too quickly. Imbleau himself said that Alto does not expect to be able to provide an official cost estimate before 2028. The reasoning behind this is, he said:
"Canada often gets it wrong by releasing budget figures too early, when not enough engineering work has been done to know for sure. You cannot have a final budget until 30 per cent of the engineering work has been completed, and we haven't even done five per cent of the work yet."
Even so, what Imbleau forgets to mention is that it is the Canadian government which is taking all the risks by footing the bill for the selected private consortium building the HSR. Amongst the companies that make up the consortium is AtkinRealis, formely known as the corrupt and discredited SNC-Lavalin.
However, he is quoted in that same interview as saying that "China has the world's largest high-speed rail network, operating under more challenging conditions than Canada." Someone should remind him that the Harbin-Dalian HSR in China, completed in 2021 and running in climate conditions similar to Alto's proposed HSR, exceeded its initial building cost estimates by 25 per cent.
Also, Imbleau doesn't want to talk about what ACRI revealed about the book How Big Things Get Done: "Bent Flyvbjerg has spent decades studying megaproject performance. His database -- the world's largest, covering more than 16,000 projects across 136 countries -- reveals a stark finding: nine out of ten megaprojects run over budget. Rail projects are among the worst offenders, with an average cost overrun of 44.7 per cent and ridership shortfalls averaging 51.4 percent." ACRI added: "Transport Action Canada has pointed out that the original 'high-frequency rail' concept studied in 2016 -- 170 km/h trains on dedicated tracks -- was estimated at less than $5 billion (under $10 billion in today's dollars). The escalation to $60-120 billion reflects a fundamental change in project scope that has never been subjected to a publicly released cost-benefit comparison. [...] Alto's current estimate is already described by Transport Canada as an "early capital costs estimate" -- a category that historically represents the floor, not the ceiling."[2]
Notes
1. What is foam doing under a railway?
"Extruded polystyrene (XPS) is a dense, rigid foam board -- the same category of material as the pink or blue insulation boards used in building construction. In railway engineering, XPS boards are laid continuously under the entire length of the track to stop winter frost from penetrating the ground beneath. Without this layer, repeated freezing and thawing would heave and distort the track. Frost in the Montreal-Ottawa corridor can penetrate 1.2 to 1.8 metres into the ground in a cold winter. XPS keeps the subgrade above freezing.
"Expanded polystyrene (EPS) geofoam is the lightweight foam used to build up embankments over soft, unstable ground. It looks like the white bead foam in packaging, but comes in large moulded blocks. At 15-30 kg per cubic metre, it weighs roughly one to two per cent of what conventional gravel fill weighs. This matters enormously over Leda clay -- an unstable post-glacial soil found between Ottawa and the St. Lawrence -- which cannot support the weight of conventional fill without sinking by 0.5 to 1.5 metres. EPS geofoam dramatically reduces this load.
"Leda clay (also called quick clay or sensitive marine clay) is a post-glacial marine deposit laid down in the ancient Champlain Sea about 8,000-10,000 years ago. It is found throughout the Ottawa–St. Lawrence lowlands. When undisturbed it is weak but stable; when disturbed by construction loading or vibration, it can liquefy catastrophically. The 1971 Saint-Jean-Vianney landslide, in the Saguenay region, Quebec, which killed 31 people, was a Leda clay failure. High-speed rail cannot be built over it with conventional gravel embankments."
2. "What High-Speed Rail Really Costs," ACRI Cost Analysis
(With information from the Government of Canada, ACRI, La Presse, CTV)
This article was published in
Volume 56 Number 15 - April 9, 2026
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/TML2026/Articles/T560153.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca