I trace the collapse in state capacity to the election of the Trudeau Liberals in 2015.
When the Harper government failed to get things done, it often seemed to be the result of concerted political opposition as in the case of pipelines or simply being a minority government facing a hostile but fractured opposition. Oddly, though, most of the Harper government’s accomplishments seem to have occurred during those years of minority government.
During the Trudeau years, there’s been further centralization of decision making in the PMO. Harper era ministers would complain about being given directions by “boys in short pants”, but Trudeau’s ministers largely seem barred from making any decisions. The problem is that the micromanaging PMO hasn’t got the bandwidth for something as big as the federal government. They’re also led by an incompetent PM - great at campaigning, terrible leader and manager.
I understand your jaded expectation that the Poilievre Conservatives will be unable to fix these problems, but I think we need to start by removing the guy who seems most responsible for facilitating the decline since 2015. Get somebody other than Justin Trudeau, and let’s see what happens.
The way the Trudeau government has operated since Day One is no different than if Sir Humphrey Appleby, head of the civil service on the old British TV show Yes Minister, had become PM. His one and only goal is to maintain the status quo, grow staffing, grow budgets, and prevent any big ideas or solutions from being implemented.
I dunno, man. I can't accept this. This is like arguing that something tastes bad OBJECTIVELY. The only measure that matters is popularity. Trudeau has been effective at giving enough voters enough reason to vote for him. That's the only metric that matters and by it, he is very successful. One could say "great."
With equal respect, politics is playing to the audience as it exists. In that way it is distinct from leadership. I have never said PMJT is a great leader. I think he is a poor leader. But I maintain that he is an excellent politician.
"no one in Canada is against rail" is correct maybe on abstract level. Once the project actually planned, there will be money that needs to be allocated, people living in the area, pro-environmentalist that doesn't want it to run past nature preserve, government bureaucrats, etc.
I for one am happy that High Frequency Rail isn;t getting built, and likely never will. When I was young I worked as a transportation engineer for the federal government. I was involved in three separate studies of High Speed Rain between Toronto and Montreal, and all three showed that the service was uneconomic, even counting all those phantom indirect benefits that consultants and politicians love to point to.
While HFR would be cheaper than HSR, the demand would also be lower. How much lower? I don't know. But I do know that, on the Toronto-Montreal route, end-to-end speed was crucial. That included from and to final origins and destinations. HSR cuts just enough time off the Toronto-Montreal run to make it an attractive alternative to air and private automobile (with its flexibility). I can't imagine how HFR would be attractive enough, absent a huge carbon tax on gasoline AND on aviation fuel.
As for Bill C-63, I suspect that the hate speech provisions are what the government really wants. The measures against child porn and reverse porn, while undoubtedly meritorious on their own, are bundled here for camouflage. I mean, how can a reasonable person oppose these measures? So unbundling would defeat the very purpose of the way the Bill is structured.
Considering the predecessor for C-63 had 0 mention of children (as Matt said last week), I suspect you're right. They are wrapping poison pill they want with honey trap that they can use as attack ads on the Conservative.
If you did a little deeper into HFR, it will make you throw up a little. They've already spent more than a billion dollars, don't have an exact route or a foot of track. They still haven't decided what speed of service they're going to run; it can't be a true HST because they can't have crossing of any kind for obvious reasons, and that becomes a cost roadblock. This is just like Metrolinx.....a bunch of 3P partnerships lining their own pockets while accomplishing next to nothing, with a non-existent building schedule.
VIA was created to fail. No government has put the desperately needed money into it. The Canadian is still using 75 year old cars on a schedule 24 hours longer than it was in 1975 to cross the country. Geography meant Canada's government put its money into air for mass travel. But we've grown, and Toronto-Montreal is HST worthy. But as you've mentioned numerous podcasts ago, we don't do big things anymore. We're too risk averse. HFR might be built by 2050. It will probably have a top speed of 100mph.....but a lot of people will have gotten rich off it.
The NIMBYs will fight the train every single foot. They want it....just not close to them. And then Kingston will complain that they didn't get it, and the political paralysis will continue because these idiots still don't accept that you can't please everyone.
Isn't the biggest problem that Canada is facing is that no one from any party has solutions to the issues in front of us?
I work on international standards development for hydrogen and fuel cells, including a standard for hydrogen fuel cell trains. At a workshop, one of my European counterparts mentioned his company was doing some proposals for Canadian projects and noticed that our rail standards seemed 40 years behind everything in Europe. I had to chuckle and point out that so are our passenger trains.
Jen and Matt - Tghanks for noting that the results of the byelection are indicative of the trend that is in the polls!
Ah, just so you are aware, there is a s**t load of country that doesn't have rail service and that is outside the golden horseshoe folks. Yes Jen, you live in Calgary but you have an LRT don't you. Would Canadians outside the Totonto Montreal corridor want our tax money to go to the project? How be we build the LNG facilities in jig time to, you know, get some capitalin the country and good jobs for taxes to build - oh I don't know ... train lines??
You haven't gone the one extra step that a lot of us in what passes for the real world have realized long ago - there is no plan for Canada in this government's agenda. We want to virtue signal, fund UNRA and every other two bit initiative in OTHER countries instead of building something here! Trudeau Sr had the Constitution repatriation and then messed that up with Multiculturalism (folks can come to Canada and live in their own little language/culture enclaves instead of becoming Canadians). Mulroney had Free Trade, ended teh manufacturers tax and replaced it with the GST knowing that he would end the Conservative government in the process. Harper had his six things we are going to do in the first mandate then that petered out and what have we had since in regards vision? Cretien lining his pockets and his home town with federal money plus all the other scandals then we have JT sho seems more interested in destroying the country than actually building anything as a legacy project even.
Don't you dare say that Canadians do not support the military either!! There is no will in the government to support the military. Harper ordered the jets and helicopters which were promptly cancelled by, who was it again?? The feds seem to believe that allowing soldiers to die their hair, grow a beard and so on will help recruitment while telling them that they are systematically racist and misogynist.
As to the online harms Bill why defend it by saying that PP will use it to lock up protesters chanting 'from the river to the sea? How bbe you look at how JT used the Emergencies Act to freeze bank accounts of those who held views different than his own - would what he said about the protesters in Ottawa be considered 'hate speech'?
OK, you generated a reaction in my heart Jen and Matt - if that was the point good on ya
Agreed, but Harper didn't order jets; he just talked about it, ands was only going to order an insufficient 55. Chretien cancelled the helicopter deal.
Our respective kids are still young enough that that isn’t a conversation we are anywhere close to having. I know better than to try and guess what kind of shape the world will be in by the time it would be an issue. Any advice I could give now would be a guess. It may not apply in a decade.
But. I am encouraging them to become multi-lingual. Start early. I’m learning Spanish in my 40s because it’s a useful language in many places. I’m making real progress but it is hard. My brain ain’t that stretchy anymore.
We had our four kids become fluent in French via the immersion program (Kindegarten through Grade 8) at our small school here in rural Alberta.
Our oldest spent three months in Germany when he was 13, and the family he stayed with sent their son to live with us for three months. He's now in his mid-20s, and just returned from a 3 month backpack tour of Europe, where his French ability came in very handy as he toured through France and navigated areas where English was not spoken or displayed.
Two other of our kids spent 3 months each when they were 15 in SE France living with separate French families, and we also hosted two children from those families. Their fluency was such that when each attended high school in France, they were mistaken for native French speakers (albeit with a strange Canadian accent).
None of these experiences were expensive for our family (or the host families, but all these experiences were enriching for our children, our family and friends, and our small rural Alberta town.
I want our kids to feel they have options elsewhere in the world if, as I fear, Canada goes from broken to unrepairable.
¡Felicidades! Aprender otro idioma es una excelente manera de retrasar la aparición de la demencia. ¿Hablas francés también? Saber un segundo idioma hace que aprender un tercer idioma sea mucho más fácil.
You're more advanced than I am. I can understand 95% of this and guess, based on the context, the other five per cent. I can answer in pretty limited Spanish (I won't use any translation tools, so this will likely sound broken): Gracias! Yo hablo frances pero solo un poco — mi frances es muy malo. Yo aprendo frances in la escuela cuando tengo 16 anõs pero nunca hablo frances en mi trabajar. Quiero aprendar frances pero espanol es primero. Mi esposa habla frances muy bueno, ella es un maestra de frances. Mi hijos hablan frances tambien. Pero me, no. Yo estudio espanol para 11 mes y necesito mas clases. Quiero ser bueno con espanol en un otro anōs. Yo quiero tambien aprender portugeues. Estoy muy ocupadas.
(Edited to fix one thing I should have gotten right, but for autocorrect: primero, not prime).
Anyway, I'm sure the above is full of little errors I can't spot yet, but I suspect a Spanish speaker could understand me, even if I sounded like, well, a white dude from Canada trying to pick up Spanish in his 40s. It's humbling. Makes me appreciate how brave all the people I encounter in Toronto with imperfect English are — it's humbling, in a good way.
As a resident of Ottawa, I know all too well what can happen when the government tries to build a rail line. Yikes! I think we're on our fourth or fifth delay for just the second phase of our broken-since-day-one LRT.
As for HFR, or whatever they're calling it, the end result needs to be affordable for most, otherwise it's just replacing air travel with train travel for the same number of well-monied travelers. An American friend once remarked that Canada has a "transportation problem" - the government doesn't want us to drive, so it heavily taxes fuel. At the same time, a lack of competition due to government involvement (plus taxes, etc) means that flying domestically is typically a four-figure expense. Meanwhile, the cheapest VIA tickets need to be purchased 6 weeks in advance and the system only serves a small portion of the country. And the train is comparatively slow and unreliable.
So, if we're to be a modern country where people leave the city during their lifetime (like people born after 1800), HFR needs to be significantly cheaper than flying. And can it be built for something less than a trillion dollars? I would suggest employing exactly zero Canadian consultants in the execution of this plan. Asian and European brainiacs only, please.
G&G, your larger point in terms of the delays for getting the HFR underway is obviously true. But there was a fair bit of mischaracterization in how Matt described the CURRENT state of the project. I can offer clarity as I work for a company that is part of one of the three consortiums shortlisted to bid on the Request for Proposal issued in Oct 2023.
The last announcement made in Oct 2023 is THE RFP - meaning this is it. The selected consortium will begin to design and construct the HFR based on this RFP (expected this Fall). Note that this RFP includes the evaluation of two primary options - one where trains run with a top speed of 200 kmph, and another where there is no upper limit to the speed. This is a fairly detailed, technical evaluation that will be one (early) part of the overall design/build package. To that extent, the 'route survey' that you refer to is still to be done to accommodate those train speeds. But the key here is that the RFP is not JUST for the route survey. The entire project itself will actually be underway by the end of this year.
But what I do take issue with, however, is Jen labeling the entire group of shortlisted companies as "a cult list of preferred service providers" who would win the project because they have some "connection to someone with the federal govt". Yes, SNC-Lavalin IS one of the companies involved (no association with them) and I make no comments about it. But every company on those consortiums is one of the largest design/ construction companies in North America and are involved in some of the largest infrastructure projects here in Canada. I have personally worked for or with multiple companies on that list and it is quite inappropriate to broadly label them in such a critical manner.
Just so that we're all being honest with ourselves: "The selected consortium will begin to design and construct the HFR based on this RFP (expected this Fall)."
No it won't. That's not going to happen. Once you win the RFP and create a beautiful, intricate survey, it will go to the federal government who will take one look at it and decide it is too costly and difficult to accomplish. One of these three consortiums shortlisted (let me guess which three) is going to collect significant government largesse and devote hundreds/thousands of man hours to the policy equivalent of SimCity. All so the government in question can sincerely say it studied the possibility of a HFR train that it literally never had any real intention of building. Better yet; it will be delayed long enough to be killed by the Conservatives once they take power, so the Liberals can bemoan how wicked and awful the Conservatives are for nixing a fantasy.
The purpose of the thing is what it does. The purpose of this thing is to generate announcements and to re-distribute taxpayer dollars back to one of the three select consortiums shortlisted to create a fantasy proposal. Everyone in this process wins, except for the taxpayers fronting cash for a train that will never be built. JG
tl;dr: It's turtles all the way down, dude. The cake is always a lie.
Counterpoint: they won’t reject doing it. They’ll study it. They’ll study it for so long that by the time they might make a decision the work will need to be redone.
So you've spent more than a billion dollars so far, don't have a route, haven't picked a speed profile, have no idea what the cost of grade separating to allow speeds that need to be in excess of 200kmh to lure people from the plane, haven't picked who will build it, or the equipment that runs on it. I predict you won't have laid a foot of track by 2030 because when the actual cost comes out, the government will choke on it(and Metrolinx has proven how much skimming there will be), and the project and VIA itself will follow the death spiral of the military.
Curious to know where you learnt that a billion dollars has already been spent. And, on a separate note, you really do not have to convince me of the ineptitude of this government or our public institutions.
Going back to 2016, when this novel, poorly though out fiasco began, over a billion. That includes the $490 million in budget 2021 to be spent over 6 years.....so there's still some time, but it's crystal clear that a billion will have been spent before a foot of track is laid. Wait until the politicians in Kingston start screaming that they're left out. Or PP wins the election and kills the entire thing off as a needless expense; probably cutting VIA's inept funding at the same time.
And with all this, there is still no plan; oh right, that's still to be done, on how to get in and out of downtowns Toronto and Montreal.
I suspect Matt is spot on. It will be studied because that's what we do now. The Chargers will run back and forth on CN's tracks, get screwed regularly by Metrolinx's inept dispatchers, the Canadian will keep getting shorter as equipment failures remove cars from service, and VIA is wound up once and for all.
Public transit doesn't pay for itself. It never has. The government of Canada would prefer to leave mass transit in the hands of the airlines and provincial commuter groups; Metrolinx getting a shout out for being the most useless of all.
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I trace the collapse in state capacity to the election of the Trudeau Liberals in 2015.
When the Harper government failed to get things done, it often seemed to be the result of concerted political opposition as in the case of pipelines or simply being a minority government facing a hostile but fractured opposition. Oddly, though, most of the Harper government’s accomplishments seem to have occurred during those years of minority government.
During the Trudeau years, there’s been further centralization of decision making in the PMO. Harper era ministers would complain about being given directions by “boys in short pants”, but Trudeau’s ministers largely seem barred from making any decisions. The problem is that the micromanaging PMO hasn’t got the bandwidth for something as big as the federal government. They’re also led by an incompetent PM - great at campaigning, terrible leader and manager.
I understand your jaded expectation that the Poilievre Conservatives will be unable to fix these problems, but I think we need to start by removing the guy who seems most responsible for facilitating the decline since 2015. Get somebody other than Justin Trudeau, and let’s see what happens.
The way the Trudeau government has operated since Day One is no different than if Sir Humphrey Appleby, head of the civil service on the old British TV show Yes Minister, had become PM. His one and only goal is to maintain the status quo, grow staffing, grow budgets, and prevent any big ideas or solutions from being implemented.
I dunno, man. I can't accept this. This is like arguing that something tastes bad OBJECTIVELY. The only measure that matters is popularity. Trudeau has been effective at giving enough voters enough reason to vote for him. That's the only metric that matters and by it, he is very successful. One could say "great."
With equal respect, politics is playing to the audience as it exists. In that way it is distinct from leadership. I have never said PMJT is a great leader. I think he is a poor leader. But I maintain that he is an excellent politician.
"no one in Canada is against rail" is correct maybe on abstract level. Once the project actually planned, there will be money that needs to be allocated, people living in the area, pro-environmentalist that doesn't want it to run past nature preserve, government bureaucrats, etc.
I for one am happy that High Frequency Rail isn;t getting built, and likely never will. When I was young I worked as a transportation engineer for the federal government. I was involved in three separate studies of High Speed Rain between Toronto and Montreal, and all three showed that the service was uneconomic, even counting all those phantom indirect benefits that consultants and politicians love to point to.
While HFR would be cheaper than HSR, the demand would also be lower. How much lower? I don't know. But I do know that, on the Toronto-Montreal route, end-to-end speed was crucial. That included from and to final origins and destinations. HSR cuts just enough time off the Toronto-Montreal run to make it an attractive alternative to air and private automobile (with its flexibility). I can't imagine how HFR would be attractive enough, absent a huge carbon tax on gasoline AND on aviation fuel.
As for Bill C-63, I suspect that the hate speech provisions are what the government really wants. The measures against child porn and reverse porn, while undoubtedly meritorious on their own, are bundled here for camouflage. I mean, how can a reasonable person oppose these measures? So unbundling would defeat the very purpose of the way the Bill is structured.
Considering the predecessor for C-63 had 0 mention of children (as Matt said last week), I suspect you're right. They are wrapping poison pill they want with honey trap that they can use as attack ads on the Conservative.
The bill has many mention of children, and in fact most of the bill is devoted to stopping content of that nature. JG
@jengerson: "Assuage?"
@mattgurney: "Ass...Wage"
@jengerson: That's very OnlyFans, Matt!
Now THAT'S funny 🤣
If you did a little deeper into HFR, it will make you throw up a little. They've already spent more than a billion dollars, don't have an exact route or a foot of track. They still haven't decided what speed of service they're going to run; it can't be a true HST because they can't have crossing of any kind for obvious reasons, and that becomes a cost roadblock. This is just like Metrolinx.....a bunch of 3P partnerships lining their own pockets while accomplishing next to nothing, with a non-existent building schedule.
VIA was created to fail. No government has put the desperately needed money into it. The Canadian is still using 75 year old cars on a schedule 24 hours longer than it was in 1975 to cross the country. Geography meant Canada's government put its money into air for mass travel. But we've grown, and Toronto-Montreal is HST worthy. But as you've mentioned numerous podcasts ago, we don't do big things anymore. We're too risk averse. HFR might be built by 2050. It will probably have a top speed of 100mph.....but a lot of people will have gotten rich off it.
The NIMBYs will fight the train every single foot. They want it....just not close to them. And then Kingston will complain that they didn't get it, and the political paralysis will continue because these idiots still don't accept that you can't please everyone.
Isn't the biggest problem that Canada is facing is that no one from any party has solutions to the issues in front of us?
I work on international standards development for hydrogen and fuel cells, including a standard for hydrogen fuel cell trains. At a workshop, one of my European counterparts mentioned his company was doing some proposals for Canadian projects and noticed that our rail standards seemed 40 years behind everything in Europe. I had to chuckle and point out that so are our passenger trains.
Only 40? I would have thought we're about 80+ years behind Europe these days.
Jen and Matt - Tghanks for noting that the results of the byelection are indicative of the trend that is in the polls!
Ah, just so you are aware, there is a s**t load of country that doesn't have rail service and that is outside the golden horseshoe folks. Yes Jen, you live in Calgary but you have an LRT don't you. Would Canadians outside the Totonto Montreal corridor want our tax money to go to the project? How be we build the LNG facilities in jig time to, you know, get some capitalin the country and good jobs for taxes to build - oh I don't know ... train lines??
You haven't gone the one extra step that a lot of us in what passes for the real world have realized long ago - there is no plan for Canada in this government's agenda. We want to virtue signal, fund UNRA and every other two bit initiative in OTHER countries instead of building something here! Trudeau Sr had the Constitution repatriation and then messed that up with Multiculturalism (folks can come to Canada and live in their own little language/culture enclaves instead of becoming Canadians). Mulroney had Free Trade, ended teh manufacturers tax and replaced it with the GST knowing that he would end the Conservative government in the process. Harper had his six things we are going to do in the first mandate then that petered out and what have we had since in regards vision? Cretien lining his pockets and his home town with federal money plus all the other scandals then we have JT sho seems more interested in destroying the country than actually building anything as a legacy project even.
Don't you dare say that Canadians do not support the military either!! There is no will in the government to support the military. Harper ordered the jets and helicopters which were promptly cancelled by, who was it again?? The feds seem to believe that allowing soldiers to die their hair, grow a beard and so on will help recruitment while telling them that they are systematically racist and misogynist.
As to the online harms Bill why defend it by saying that PP will use it to lock up protesters chanting 'from the river to the sea? How bbe you look at how JT used the Emergencies Act to freeze bank accounts of those who held views different than his own - would what he said about the protesters in Ottawa be considered 'hate speech'?
OK, you generated a reaction in my heart Jen and Matt - if that was the point good on ya
Agreed, but Harper didn't order jets; he just talked about it, ands was only going to order an insufficient 55. Chretien cancelled the helicopter deal.
You guys both have young kids. What country would you advise them to emigrate to? Canada's future is grim.
Our respective kids are still young enough that that isn’t a conversation we are anywhere close to having. I know better than to try and guess what kind of shape the world will be in by the time it would be an issue. Any advice I could give now would be a guess. It may not apply in a decade.
But. I am encouraging them to become multi-lingual. Start early. I’m learning Spanish in my 40s because it’s a useful language in many places. I’m making real progress but it is hard. My brain ain’t that stretchy anymore.
This is wise.
We had our four kids become fluent in French via the immersion program (Kindegarten through Grade 8) at our small school here in rural Alberta.
Our oldest spent three months in Germany when he was 13, and the family he stayed with sent their son to live with us for three months. He's now in his mid-20s, and just returned from a 3 month backpack tour of Europe, where his French ability came in very handy as he toured through France and navigated areas where English was not spoken or displayed.
Two other of our kids spent 3 months each when they were 15 in SE France living with separate French families, and we also hosted two children from those families. Their fluency was such that when each attended high school in France, they were mistaken for native French speakers (albeit with a strange Canadian accent).
None of these experiences were expensive for our family (or the host families, but all these experiences were enriching for our children, our family and friends, and our small rural Alberta town.
I want our kids to feel they have options elsewhere in the world if, as I fear, Canada goes from broken to unrepairable.
¡Felicidades! Aprender otro idioma es una excelente manera de retrasar la aparición de la demencia. ¿Hablas francés también? Saber un segundo idioma hace que aprender un tercer idioma sea mucho más fácil.
You're more advanced than I am. I can understand 95% of this and guess, based on the context, the other five per cent. I can answer in pretty limited Spanish (I won't use any translation tools, so this will likely sound broken): Gracias! Yo hablo frances pero solo un poco — mi frances es muy malo. Yo aprendo frances in la escuela cuando tengo 16 anõs pero nunca hablo frances en mi trabajar. Quiero aprendar frances pero espanol es primero. Mi esposa habla frances muy bueno, ella es un maestra de frances. Mi hijos hablan frances tambien. Pero me, no. Yo estudio espanol para 11 mes y necesito mas clases. Quiero ser bueno con espanol en un otro anōs. Yo quiero tambien aprender portugeues. Estoy muy ocupadas.
(Edited to fix one thing I should have gotten right, but for autocorrect: primero, not prime).
Anyway, I'm sure the above is full of little errors I can't spot yet, but I suspect a Spanish speaker could understand me, even if I sounded like, well, a white dude from Canada trying to pick up Spanish in his 40s. It's humbling. Makes me appreciate how brave all the people I encounter in Toronto with imperfect English are — it's humbling, in a good way.
You're doing great for eleven months. Especially since you're doing a whole lot of other things at the same time.
I don’t think I have any expectation of being fluent. I’d be happy if I can function in daily life.
In Spanish I mean. But also generally I guess.
Let me know the next time you're in Ottawa and have a free moment. We can have una cerveza and check on your progress. :)
As a resident of Ottawa, I know all too well what can happen when the government tries to build a rail line. Yikes! I think we're on our fourth or fifth delay for just the second phase of our broken-since-day-one LRT.
As for HFR, or whatever they're calling it, the end result needs to be affordable for most, otherwise it's just replacing air travel with train travel for the same number of well-monied travelers. An American friend once remarked that Canada has a "transportation problem" - the government doesn't want us to drive, so it heavily taxes fuel. At the same time, a lack of competition due to government involvement (plus taxes, etc) means that flying domestically is typically a four-figure expense. Meanwhile, the cheapest VIA tickets need to be purchased 6 weeks in advance and the system only serves a small portion of the country. And the train is comparatively slow and unreliable.
So, if we're to be a modern country where people leave the city during their lifetime (like people born after 1800), HFR needs to be significantly cheaper than flying. And can it be built for something less than a trillion dollars? I would suggest employing exactly zero Canadian consultants in the execution of this plan. Asian and European brainiacs only, please.
“The Octopus Economy”. Love the analogy, this one needs to go mainstream.
I would happily pay a year's fees for a poster of Trudeau and the Buzzard. Brilliant!
G&G, your larger point in terms of the delays for getting the HFR underway is obviously true. But there was a fair bit of mischaracterization in how Matt described the CURRENT state of the project. I can offer clarity as I work for a company that is part of one of the three consortiums shortlisted to bid on the Request for Proposal issued in Oct 2023.
The last announcement made in Oct 2023 is THE RFP - meaning this is it. The selected consortium will begin to design and construct the HFR based on this RFP (expected this Fall). Note that this RFP includes the evaluation of two primary options - one where trains run with a top speed of 200 kmph, and another where there is no upper limit to the speed. This is a fairly detailed, technical evaluation that will be one (early) part of the overall design/build package. To that extent, the 'route survey' that you refer to is still to be done to accommodate those train speeds. But the key here is that the RFP is not JUST for the route survey. The entire project itself will actually be underway by the end of this year.
But what I do take issue with, however, is Jen labeling the entire group of shortlisted companies as "a cult list of preferred service providers" who would win the project because they have some "connection to someone with the federal govt". Yes, SNC-Lavalin IS one of the companies involved (no association with them) and I make no comments about it. But every company on those consortiums is one of the largest design/ construction companies in North America and are involved in some of the largest infrastructure projects here in Canada. I have personally worked for or with multiple companies on that list and it is quite inappropriate to broadly label them in such a critical manner.
Just so that we're all being honest with ourselves: "The selected consortium will begin to design and construct the HFR based on this RFP (expected this Fall)."
No it won't. That's not going to happen. Once you win the RFP and create a beautiful, intricate survey, it will go to the federal government who will take one look at it and decide it is too costly and difficult to accomplish. One of these three consortiums shortlisted (let me guess which three) is going to collect significant government largesse and devote hundreds/thousands of man hours to the policy equivalent of SimCity. All so the government in question can sincerely say it studied the possibility of a HFR train that it literally never had any real intention of building. Better yet; it will be delayed long enough to be killed by the Conservatives once they take power, so the Liberals can bemoan how wicked and awful the Conservatives are for nixing a fantasy.
The purpose of the thing is what it does. The purpose of this thing is to generate announcements and to re-distribute taxpayer dollars back to one of the three select consortiums shortlisted to create a fantasy proposal. Everyone in this process wins, except for the taxpayers fronting cash for a train that will never be built. JG
tl;dr: It's turtles all the way down, dude. The cake is always a lie.
Counterpoint: they won’t reject doing it. They’ll study it. They’ll study it for so long that by the time they might make a decision the work will need to be redone.
This scenario is more common than you think. And most of the time, it is not even intentional. They are just lazy.
So you've spent more than a billion dollars so far, don't have a route, haven't picked a speed profile, have no idea what the cost of grade separating to allow speeds that need to be in excess of 200kmh to lure people from the plane, haven't picked who will build it, or the equipment that runs on it. I predict you won't have laid a foot of track by 2030 because when the actual cost comes out, the government will choke on it(and Metrolinx has proven how much skimming there will be), and the project and VIA itself will follow the death spiral of the military.
2,887 days, now.
Curious to know where you learnt that a billion dollars has already been spent. And, on a separate note, you really do not have to convince me of the ineptitude of this government or our public institutions.
Going back to 2016, when this novel, poorly though out fiasco began, over a billion. That includes the $490 million in budget 2021 to be spent over 6 years.....so there's still some time, but it's crystal clear that a billion will have been spent before a foot of track is laid. Wait until the politicians in Kingston start screaming that they're left out. Or PP wins the election and kills the entire thing off as a needless expense; probably cutting VIA's inept funding at the same time.
And with all this, there is still no plan; oh right, that's still to be done, on how to get in and out of downtowns Toronto and Montreal.
I suspect Matt is spot on. It will be studied because that's what we do now. The Chargers will run back and forth on CN's tracks, get screwed regularly by Metrolinx's inept dispatchers, the Canadian will keep getting shorter as equipment failures remove cars from service, and VIA is wound up once and for all.
Public transit doesn't pay for itself. It never has. The government of Canada would prefer to leave mass transit in the hands of the airlines and provincial commuter groups; Metrolinx getting a shout out for being the most useless of all.
Just a minor point regarding the practice of Human Rights Tribunals as it relates to screening out frivolous complaints. Yaniv was NOT screened out on a preliminary basis - those cases proceeded to a full hearing on the merits of each - see link to decision. https://www.canlii.org/en/bc/bchrt/doc/2019/2019bchrt222/2019bchrt222.html?autocompleteStr=Yaniv%20&autocompletePos=1&resultId=67e9829560fa48409d6a7254e9652414&searchId=2024-03-08T22:03:43:314/f919a23de29a4ae09a26a92f673f3114
More Stupidity. This time from Chrystia Freeland.
Fantastic rebuttal by QuickDick.
https://twitter.com/QuickDickMcDick/status/1767747680782971325?t=tJ40Vfs8Ou0BeujOiwt8Rg&s=19
Just wanted to throw it out there that I'm totally down with the Line Editors veering into Arts and Culture and posting articles about Dune.