I don’t think we’re ever going to build high-speed rail

TORONTO—One day, I’ll tell this full story. It’s great. But today, you’ll have to settle for a very abbreviated version. For years, my family has been trying to retrofit an old outbuilding on a piece of property we own. The engineering is a bit complicated, but the regulations shouldn’t have been. The plan was simply to improve and modernize an older structure for productive purposes. No code revisions were required, no special waivers or exemptions. And it still took more than three years to get the permits. There was no particular reason for that beyond bureaucratic delay and dysfunction. That’s simply how long it took.

And I remember, sometime around the three-year mark of the entire process, thinking to myself, as we navigated yet another bureaucratic delay that arrived without explanation, “You know what? I don’t think we’re ever going to build high-speed rail.”

I’ve noted before my skepticism of the federal government’s plans to ram through major infrastructure at speeds we haven’t seen in a generation. I’ve also said that the Major Projects Office is itself a confession of dysfunction. A country that has normal and functional regulatory processes has no need of a Major Projects Office. And a country that needs multiple years to issue permits to retrofit an outbuilding is probably not a country that is going to pull off a project that would cost tens of billions of dollars, take decades, and cross numerous jurisdictions, requiring significant expropriation of private property and considerable consultation with Indigenous Peoples.

And we’re especially not going to get it done if the politicians can’t get their act together.

Last week, the Ontario government signalled that it may withdraw its previous support of the Alto plan. This is clearly in retaliation for the federal government blocking Ontario’s plans to expand Toronto’s Billy Bishop Airport to accommodate jet traffic on the Toronto Islands. News reports have suggested that the federal Liberals had told Ontario Premier Doug Ford that they would not oppose the project, but that that changed due to an upcoming byelection in Toronto that the Liberals are determined to win. The NDP strongly opposes the airport’s expansion, and were set to campaign on it. So the expansion is off.

I don’t think either side looks good here. Transparent retaliation on Ontario’s behalf is ugly and ultimately self-defeating. The feds, frankly, have a bigger stick to swing, and Ford has problems enough right now without a brawl with Prime Minister Mark Carney.

But overall, I agree with Ontario’s Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria who recently commented that a federal government that is so worried about modest public outcry that it is prepared to block a major infrastructure project can’t be taken seriously on other projects.

Sarkaria would have a little bit more credibility on this file if his government at Queen’s Park was a bit less of a five-alarm raging dumpster fire than is currently the case. But his fundamental point is actually bang on. Building at speeds not seen in generations is going to require a degree of political courage that has also been largely absent in recent generations. It’s going to mean deciding that certain things just have to happen—even if they’re unpopular—and ramming them through. There is simply no other way to get anything done in this country.

The island airport is a fascinating early test of whether this federal government has the spine to actually take these kinds of hits. Because there is not a single project in this country worth doing that is not going to cause them at least as much trouble.

I wrote in these pages more than a year ago that I found the entire topic of high-speed rail in Canada hilarious. It’s just one of those things we all politely have to pretend is a credible idea, even if we really know that it’ll never happen. And it will never happen exactly because of situations like this. Billions of dollars in borrowed money and a big shiny new Major Projects Office will all come to nothing if we are not actually prepared as a country to say that there are things we need to do that are not going to be universally popular, but we have to do them because they will serve the greater good. And so far, it looks like we are not prepared. Not prepared at all.

Matt Gurney is a Toronto-based journalist. He is co-editor of The Line (ReadTheLine.ca), an online magazine. He can be reached at matt@readtheline.ca.

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