Teamsters Canada Rail Conference

A newly released confidential report about speeding up Canada’s passenger rail service made a series of recommendations that could have been completed by today if it had not been lost in the transition between the Liberal governments of former prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin.

The plan, obtained by Canwest News Service, projected substantial short-term improvements, including a new fleet of 200 kilometre per hour intercity trains, and a link to one of the country’s biggest airports.

At a cost of $2.6 billion over five years, the “ViaFast” plan from 2002 would have introduced faster service between Quebec City and Windsor, Ont., while building new tracks that would reduce congestion for both passenger and freight trains.

“This exciting project, to be realized over a period of 4-5 years, will radically change the role of passenger and freight rail in Canada’s transportation industry,” said the report — marked “strictly confidential” that was produced by Via Rail. “The investment will produce a positive return to all parties and will give the country a more robust, secure transportation system.”

The ViaFast plan would have allowed passengers to take a trip from Toronto to Ottawa in two hours and 15 minutes, and then from Ottawa to Montreal in one hour and 15 minutes. The Montreal-Quebec City trip time would be reduced by nearly half to two hours, while a Toronto-Windsor trip would be down to three hours and 20 minutes.

Other anticipated benefits included: The creation of 40,000 jobs during construction and 1,700 jobs during operation, a reduction in annual traffic equivalent to taking one million cars off the roads in the Quebec City-Windsor corridor, fewer serious road accidents and deaths, a new rail link from downtown Montreal to the Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport, annual savings of $125 million for Via Rail, and annual savings of up to $200 million as a result of reduced maintenance and traffic from cars and trucks taken off the road and replaced by passenger and freight trains.

Via Rail also predicted in 2002 that its plan would reduce Canada’s annual fuel consumption by 262 million litres and lower greenhouse gas emissions by 824,000 tonnes per year.

But Paul Côte, the Crown corporation’s president and chief executive officer, explained that it has now adopted an incremental approach to achieve elements of the plan, one step at a time, through new investments by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government.

“In the end, if ViaFast had been implemented, we still believe that we would have been able to achieve those (estimates) that had been listed in the document in terms of reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, car traffic and so on and so forth,” said Côte in an interview. “But at this particular juncture, we would have to identify specific benefits based on the incremental approach that we are taking now.”

The former head of Via Rail, Jean Pelletier, in an interview published after his death by Quebec City newspaper Le Soleil, said he had reached deals with freight rail companies to launch ViaFast. But Pelletier, a former chief of staff to Jean Chretien, blamed former prime minister Martin for cancelling it and other infrastructure investments that had been announced by the outgoing government.

Martin’s supporters, along with opposition MPs from the Canadian Alliance, were highly critical of new investments for Via Rail announced during the last days of the Chrétien government in 2003.

Recent multimillion dollar announcements of infrastructure investments between Montreal and Toronto were all part of the original plan to eliminate traffic congestion conflicts between freight and passenger trains that often cause delays on Via Rail’s schedule, said Côte.

“We’ve used the ViaFast blueprint as the style to move forward,” said Côte.

A Transport Canada official estimated last spring that the current infrastructure plan will help reduce the passenger train trip between Montreal and Toronto to three and a half hours, which is the same time estimated in the ViaFast document.

The Harper government said it did its own analysis of proposals on the table, and has worked to accommodate Via Rail’s infrastructure needs.

“While we didn’t take ViaFast, the program the Liberals were asked (to approve) in 2002, and then did nothing with for four years, what we have done is work with Via to provide the necessary components that they need to improve passenger rail service,” said Chris Hilton, a spokesperson for Junior Transport Minister Rob Merrifield.