With a multibillion-dollar plan to build a dedicated electric passenger line for Via Rail, the federal government is betting that faster, more frequent service in the busy Toronto-Quebec City corridor will turn the Crown corporation’s fortunes around.

At a cost between $6 billion and $12 billion, it would be “one of the largest infrastructure projects in Canada in decades,” Transport Minister Omar Alghabra said last week while kicking off an announcement tour in Quebec City. The Liberals contend it will knit together the biggest population centres in the country’s biggest provinces by 2030, contribute to a green economy and employ lots of people.

Just don’t expect it to make Canada a world leader in rail transportation, or even to pay for itself.

The minister spent the day before the official announcement on an 11 1/2-hour trip from Toronto to Quebec City by Via train, dropping news of his intentions in social media posts along the way.

“While the trip was pleasant, it took a long time, including interruptions by freight traffic,” Alghabra said at the announcement.

That’s the main problem the project means to solve.

Nearly all the track Via uses in Ontario and Quebec is owned by CN Rail, which prioritizes its own services—if a freight train and a passenger train need the same track, the freight train goes first. The longer the train, the longer the wait, and those trains have been getting longer: Railways Canada, the industry’s trade association, reported recently that the average length of a CN or CP freight train was 87 cars in 2009, but 113 cars in 2018. That’s a major reason only 70 to 75 per cent of Via’s trains run on time, depending on the year.

Matti Siemiatycki, who holds a Canada Research Chair in infrastructure planning and finance at the University of Toronto, said Via is “in a real pinch,” having had to cut back service over the years and living at CN’s mercy.

“With our greater recognition of the impending implications of climate change, we have to get a handle on this,” he told The Logic.

Via estimated in a 2018 strategic plan that building a high-frequency line would produce 50,000 person-years of work.

Standing with Alghabra at the announcement, Treasury Board President Jean-Yves Duclos, a Quebec City MP, touted the economic-development benefits of new rail options in communities along the route. He also said every dollar spent on private transportation means $5 in costs for governments.

“We often talk about the costs of projects like this…. We don’t often realize that the cost of not doing such a project is even greater—not just for the environment, but the financial cost to governments,” he said in French.

Between Toronto and Montreal, the scheme Via has put forward calls for building new lines (or revitalizing underused ones) through Peterborough and Ottawa. That’s a more northerly route than the current CN tracks Via uses that run close to the shore of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River.

Between Montreal and Quebec City, a new line would go through Trois-Rivières on the north bank of the St. Lawrence, instead of the current route that goes through Drummondville south of the river.

Montreal itself remains a choke point. The high-frequency trains will have to keep sharing rails with freight trains there, and furthermore will have to run on diesel on those tracks, Transport Canada spokesperson Sau Sau Liu told The Logic by email.

The government has already bought a new fleet of trains for Via, at a cost of nearly $1 billion. The first of them is to board passengers next year, and they’re supposed to last three decades. They’re diesels, but they are “capable of being upgraded in the future to provide both electric and diesel propulsion,” Liu said.

Canada should have better passenger-rail service than it does, said Clarence Woudsma, who studies and teaches rail transportation at the University of Waterloo’s urban-planning school. But he’s skeptical that Via’s plan will have much effect on greenhouse-gas emissions.

“One of the concerns is that the feds made the commitment that we’re going to stop selling internal-combustion-engine vehicles in Canada in 2035,” he said in an interview. “How many years do you think it’s going to take for you to get the train going, and with the electrification of the automobile, is the impetus going to be there for [potential riders] to say, ‘Oh, let’s take the train, it’s a more sustainable option’?”

Electric mass transit is still more energy-efficient than having people in their own electric cars, Siemiatycki said, and the logistics of using electric cars for long trips could remain daunting for a long time. There’s also some movement globally toward banning short-haul flights of the kind that criss-cross the central Canadian skies, for environmental reasons. That might be desirable or it might not, he said, but it’s only remotely plausible with a good rail alternative.

Besides which, he said, decent intercity travel options that don’t require owning your own vehicle are important for social equity.

High-frequency rail—a term apparently coined just for this project, Siemiatycki said—evokes the idea of high-speed rail without being high speed. The phrases are so easily confused that Toronto Liberal MP Adam Vaughan called the plan “high speed” at the Toronto version of the announcement.

There’s no official definition of “high-speed rail,” but the International Union of Railways, of which Via is a member, says it starts at about 200 kilometres an hour, or 250 km/h for newly built systems. Alghabra said trains on the system Canada is planning will likely top out at 200 km/h.

Nevertheless, Alghabra said the new lines could shave 90 minutes off a trip from Toronto to Ottawa, and half an hour off the journey from Montreal to Quebec City.

The government estimates ridership in the corridor could increase dramatically by the 2050s, from 4.8 million passengers a year to 17 million. Both Woudsma and Siemiatycki said that’s in keeping with reasonable estimates of population growth, not necessarily because of a mass shift to train travel.

Reports have previously put the estimated price of such a project at $4 billion to $6 billion. Former Via president Yves Desjardins-Siciliano testified to a Senate committee in 2016 that it would be about $5.2 billion, including $1.2 billion for new trains (which are now on the way, for a little less). So the former maximum price is now closer to the minimum the government is expecting.

Intense work over two years “has led to more robust estimates and forecasts, and many key elements have also either evolved or have been refined, including trip times, routing, and max speed,” said Transport Canada spokesperson Cybelle Morin. “This evolution of project characteristics is typical with such a large-scale megaproject.”

The pandemic year of 2020 was shattering for Via, which is still offering reduced schedules. Even before COVID-19, that February’s rail blockades caused massive service disruptions.

But in its most recent annual report, Via said ridership had risen steadily from 2016 to 2019 (from just under four million passengers to just over five million), and passenger revenues along with it (from $301 million to $411 million).

Its operating losses also grew, albeit more slowly, from $267.5 million to $280.7 million.

None of Via’s services makes money, but the really expensive routes are those serving remote communities. Take the service between Sudbury and White River in Northern Ontario, where Via says each of the 121 weekly passengers in 2019 was subsidized by $4.38 for each mile travelled.

Via’s Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec City services are subsidized $0.15 a mile, or $23 to almost $35 a trip, depending on the route.

Siemiatycki said it’s just possible a high-frequency line will be able to cover its own operating costs, but it’s far from certain, and there’s no way it will also repay the initial capital expense. If private money helps finance the construction, the government will need to guarantee returns, he said

“I think some of what I read is they’re talking about it being at least revenue-neutral, if not revenue-positive. And I think with rail projects like that, that that seems optimistic and ambitious,” he said. “The research on big rail projects shows the costs tend to be underestimated and the benefits overestimated.”