Government puts Alto HSR on the fast track

The federal government appears to finally be moving the Alto High Speed Rail project on to the fast track, recognising its importance as a nation building project, in a victory for our advocacy critiquing the multiple delays and extensions to the timeline imposed since High Frequency Rail was first proposed more than ten years ago.

On September 12, 2025 Minister Dominic LeBlanc announced that the timeline to begin construction was being shortened to four years, with and that the project would be supported by the Major Projects Office being created to fast-track nation-building infrastructure projects.  

The federal government awarded a $3.9-billion, six-year contract to the Cadance consortium to co-develop the project in February 2025. Shortening the project timeline while keeping costs under control will require significant effort, but this is an effort the Canada needs to make to show our global peers and major trading partners—many countries that already have high speed rail—what we’re capable of.

After many years of ministerial announcements followed by delays for further study of High Frequency Rail, and a lengthy process to procure a private sector partner before pivoting the project to high speed, the government also has something to prove to Canadians and needs to deliver tangible results quickly to demonstrate that the money invested in the project so far is yielding real benefits for our economy and the travelling public.

In our submission for federal budget 2025 we recommended that both Alto HSR and the Calgary-Banff passenger rail plan be designated as projects of national interest so as to speed up their delivery. Therefore, the new sense of urgency for Alto is welcome. There are several options to turn this commitment into real progress in less than four years, including:

• Providing level boarding for all tracks at Ottawa Station.
• Providing level boarding for intercity trains at Toronto Union Station.
• Double tracking from Ottawa station to the Rideau River to reduce train delays.
• Building the previously announced and funded Dorval multimodal hub station.
• Providing additional Ottawa-Montreal services by fixing the bottleneck at Coteau.
• Repairing the line from Toronto to Peterborough and providing an initial conventional service.

Transport Action Canada continues to urge the government to consider simplification of Alto’s project structure, with operations and revenue risk/profit moved back into the public sector. A streamlined availability-based contractual structure may be crucial to speeding up project delivery, and as the World Banks’s Railway Reform report points out, project-based financing through public-private partnership structures is riskier, more complicated, and more expensive than government bond financing or private financing raised by a national railway undertaking. Given a stronger regulatory framework and clear mandates, both also prerequisites for accelerating development, VIA Rail and its Alto subsidiary would be able to directly access bond market finance for this project and others, in the same manner that Deutsche Bahn and others do.

Photo: An ICE 3 high speed train on the Frankfurt-Cologne high-speed rail line in 2007, by Sebastian Terfloth (CC-SA 3.0)