OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney’s direction to start building a high-speed rail line in Ontario and Quebec within four years raises some questions for the people charged with doing it. Like where to get 300,000 tonnes of steel for the tracks.

“We need 4,000 kilometres of steel track that has a high carbon density. None is produced today in Canada,” said Martin Imbleau, chief executive of Alto, the Via Rail subsidiary in charge of the multibillion-dollar job. 

He said Alto is up to meet the shorter deadline Carney set for it when he included high-speed rail on a longlist of high-priority national construction projects earlier this month. Alto signed a contract with an international consortium called Cadence just this year, expecting to spend up to six years “co-developing” the plans, and Imbleau said he had been prepared for the planning and permits to take as many as eight.

Now, although construction could begin on part of the line without every other section being approved, the target is to start building within four years, with much of the time savings to be found in processes like environmental approvals.

Alto will have to do more planning in parallel instead of in sequence, and that will cost more upfront, Imbleau allowed, but Alto roughly estimates that the project’s costs will escalate by $3.5 billion with each year that passes, so speed now will save in the long run.

But meeting the tighter deadline will bring challenges, particularly when it comes to “strategic procurement”—buying things in a way that supports broader Canadian economic goals.

When the Liberal government under Justin Trudeau started pushing high-speed rail in earnest in 2021, its demand for Canadian materials and workers was a secondary consideration. Now that Canada is in a trade war with the United States, with steel among this country’s hardest-hit industries, buying domestically is extra important.

Imbleau said former transport minister Chrystia Freeland asked him to consider Canadian suppliers, and “we’re doing everything we can to respect that.”

But the stuff needs to be available in quantity, pretty soon, and at a fair price. That’s a tension for any project, especially a publicly backed one on Carney’s list of national priorities.

“What is the depth of the market—who can provide it?” Imbleau said, rhyming off the questions Alto has asked itself about the materials it needs. “Do we have enough competition to keep the competitive tension, to avoid having a sole supplier and increasing the cost?

Canada used to make rail steel and can do it again, said Catherine Cobden, CEO of the Canadian Steel Producers Association, but it doesn’t so now because of decades of free trade integration with the United States.

“Rail lines and certain beams we use in construction and that sort of thing have been served by the U.S. steel supply,” she said.

Three hundred thousand tonnes is both a lot of steel and not very much, Cobden said. Ordinarily, Canada’s industry produces about 12 million tonnes of steel a year and exports about half of it to the U.S.—so although the sector is suffering under 50 per cent American tariffs, tooling up for a new product that would make up only a small fraction of the lost business isn’t an easy yes.

One possible supplier for Alto is ArcelorMittal, a global steel producer with mills in Quebec and Ontario. The company makes rails in Spain, Luxembourg and Poland, so it has the know-how—just not in Canada.

“It’s too early to say whether producing this type of product in Canada would be strategically beneficial for us,” wrote Jean-Philippe Grou, director of communications for ArcelorMittal Long Products Canada, in an email. 

The company will look at the opportunity, but that’s as far as Grou would go.

“Many details remain to be determined—including the long-term potential of this specific market and a better understanding of future demand,” he wrote. In other words, after the Alto project, how much more rail steel might ArcelorMittal be able to sell from its Canadian operations?

Algoma Steel, another major potential supplier, didn’t respond to inquiries from The Logic.

“The business case will need to be determined by the companies based on how much they have to pivot,” said Cobden.

The federal government might be willing to help pay for that pivot, Industry Minister Mélanie Joly has said. It has already pledged ArcelorMittal and Algoma more than $800 million to upgrade equipment and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Other steel will be needed for bridges and stations and the trains themselves. Canadian producers will have no trouble supplying almost all of that, Cobden said.

Alto will also be looking for Canadian sources of copper for the electric trains’ wires and aluminum for the poles that hold them up, Imbleau said—and they’ll need gravel and aggregates to support the tracks, wherever they come from.

Having the rail project on Carney’s list, though, is already making it easier to deal with potential suppliers, said Imbleau, a former executive at gas company Énergir, Hydro-Québec and the Port of Montreal: “The next day after the announcement, I had tons of emails by old colleagues and construction companies and providers saying, ‘Wow, now you’re credible. Now we can start thinking about how we will support you.’”