The country’s largest airline signed up with one of three consortiums seeking to design, build and run a new passenger rail line linking Toronto with Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City. The “Cadence” team includes Quebec’s CDPQ Infra and engineering firm AtkinsRéalis (the former SNC-Lavalin) and newly added France’s SNCF Voyageurs railway. (The Logic)

Talking point: The winning consortium won’t run only the new high-frequency system—it’s to take over Via’s existing rail service in the central Canada corridor. That worries rail advocates like Transport Action, which argues that Air Canada could get commercially sensitive information from Via and that if Cadence wins the bid, Air Canada’s involvement could impede air-to-rail links involving other airlines. How to build high-frequency service into crowded downtown cores is a major challenge for the HFR project; a new line that runs from airport to airport in each city but relies on local connections to downtowns could be one way of addressing that.