Ontario, Quebec push for high-speed rail
Written by jrood
February 14, 2001 The Canadian federal government should get on board with a high-speed rail line linking Ontario and Quebec or risk being left in the dust by the Obama administration in the United States, the premiers of both provinces said Wednesday, according to the Toronto Star.
Emerging from a joint
cabinet meeting, Dalton McGuinty and Jean Charest warned Canada could miss a
golden opportunity on fast trains as the U.S. pushes to create 13 high-speed
corridors, including Boston to Montreal and New York City to Buffalo.
"Let’s take a moment
to appreciate the situation here," said Charest, a former leader of the
federal Progressive Conservatives. "It would, after all, be ironic if we
actually did more with the federal government of the United States than we did
with the federal government of Canada on developing a fast train."
Ontario, Quebec and the
federal government have partnered on C$3-million feasibility study of high-speed
rail due this fall. The effort is meant to update at least 16 previous studies
or attempts to study a Quebec City to Windsor rail link since 1973.
So far, both premiers have
noted the Harper government in Ottawa appears cool to the idea because of cost
concerns, with industry observers saying the price tag of a high-speed rail
corridor linking populous southern Ontario and Quebec is C$24 billion if the
estimates in a 1995 study are adjusted for inflation.
The benefits would include
less crowded highways, less pollution, fewer greenhouse gases, more jobs and
quicker travel times, proponents say, noting Europe and Japan have proven
high-speed rail is economical with trains approaching speeds of 300 km/h (186
mph) between major cities, triple the speeds of most intercity Canadian trains.
"If we build this line
here, it’s more than just connecting 16 million Canadians together,
strengthening our regional economy and better protecting our regional
environment. It’s going to plug us in to a North American network of high-speed
rail," said McGuinty. "That’s the exciting dimension to this."
However, government
insiders note that it would take at least five to eight years of environmental
assessments before shovels could go in the ground to create a rail corridor for
fast trains, and there are the challenges of expropriating properties,
particularly in urban areas.
The Obama administration,
which has a renewed push to ease dependence on fossil fuels following the Gulf
of Mexico oil spill, has earmarked $8 billion to get rolling on high-speed rail
corridors — which President Obama himself has acknowledged will take decades
longer and hundreds of billions of dollars to create.
Charest and McGuinty also
used their meeting to push the federal Conservative government on another
climate-related initiative: setting up a cap-and-trade system to limit harmful
greenhouse gas emissions by major polluting industries.
The joint cabinet meeting
was the third since 2008 between the country’s two most powerful provincial
governments. McGuinty and Charest banded together that year to push the
interests of central Canada amid concerns the Harper government was
"missing in action" on environmental and economic issues for the
region, which is home to two-thirds of the Canadian population.
The next meeting is set for
a year from now in Toronto.
