Two important things about Canada have changed since the last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway was put into the ground in 1886. Canadians and their government have woken up to the realities of the global climate crisis, which threatens the existence of both Canada and the globe. Simultaneously, rail policy has experienced a devastating fall from grace. Across much of Europe and Asia, ambitious policymakers have set a global standard of excellence for rail networks which Canada has failed to meet. Canada’s railways, once the pride of a newly-incorporated nation, have become an emission-heavy, slow-moving global embarrassment. 

In the age of the automobile, efforts to expand and improve Canada’s railways have stagnated. Many routes have experienced “bus-titution” while others have seen service cuts and delays become increasingly prevalent. However, on December 15th, 2022, Minister of Transport Omar Algahabra announced the formation of “VIA HFR-VIA TGF Inc.”, a body that will supervise the implementation of a new High Frequency Rail (HFR) network that will operate in the Quebec City-Windsor Corridor (QWC). 

The new network will service major municipalities from Montreal to Ottawa to Toronto within the bounds of the QWC, an area where approximately half of Canada’s 38 million residents live and work. It will add stops in the previously unserviced cities of Peterborough and Trois-Rivieres, as well as several towns across Ontario and Quebec, opening the doors to a large new group of potential riders desiring to use the newly added stops. 

HFR aims to fix several key issues of the existing QWC rail network that have rendered it a poor transportation option for people living in and visiting the QWC. First, because Via Rail–– the Crown Corporation that runs Canada’s passenger rail networks––operates its trains on track owned by the Canadian National Railway (CNR), its passenger trains are obliged to yield to the CNR’s freight trains. As a result, passengers cannot rely on consistent and timely arrivals, often experiencing delays that severely inhibit travel plans. In addition, speed limitations on older trains past their prime, and tracks intended for freight trains mean that trips are not only frequently delayed but only ever capable of moving at speeds of up to 98km/h. It is difficult for such statistics to elicit anything more than disappointment amongst residents of the QWC when contrasted with the standards of Europe and Asia, where maximum speeds rarely dip below 200km/h.

By increasing predictability of arrival times, improving travel speeds and creating infrastructure to make trains available to new communities, HFR has the potential to offer a fast, reliable transportation option for tens of millions of Canadians and tourists looking to travel within the QWC. In doing so, HFR can replace automobiles as the most efficient and affordable means of travelling to and from places like Trois-Rivieres and Peterborough. For residents of communities like Drummondville or Kingston, as gas prices remain high and traffic congestion increases, many individuals will see HFR as their preferable means of transportation within the corridor. Additionally, due to the success of individuals like climate activist Greta Thunberg in promoting concepts like Flygskam (roughly translating to “flight guilt”), many young Canadians in the QWC may see rail transportation as a more climate-friendly, affordable and even more efficient alternative to flying.

Research by Matthew Boulden, McGill MA ’21, highlights the effectiveness of HFR as a means of national emissions reduction. For Boulden, much of the political viability of implementing HFR stems from its expected economic benefits for the Canadian government and Canadians at large, an aspect of the policy which may be attractive to even the most social spending-averse conservative governments.

While Boulden highlights emissions reductions as the most important feature of HFR for the federal Liberal government, its expected ability to increase ridership and decrease federal subsidies for Via Rail has made the policy viable to economic critics. Furthermore, while increasing ridership will benefit attempts to reduce the national deficit, it should also allow Via Rail to sell tickets at competitive prices, potentially making HFR a more feasible option for those who would otherwise fly or drive. Evidently, financial viability may be an underexplored key to success for environmental policy in Canada’s current political climate. 

Despite its anticipated benefits, some critics of HFR see the policy as ‘too little too late’ for Canada. Reece Martin, a Canadian transportation policy wonk whose Youtube channel boasts more than 27 million views, has used a comparative approach to criticize Via Rail’s proposed HFR network. Martin cites HFR as a significant improvement from the current QWC, but ultimately meagre relative to the High-Speed Rail (HSR) networks seen across Europe and Asia. Many of these HSR networks have the same advantages as HFR but simultaneously employ electric trains that can reach speeds of up to 460km/h, more than double the maximum expected speed of the HFR trains. In Martin’s eyes, there is no defensible reason for Canada not to aspire to such feats, especially given the fact that many of those countries implemented HSR as early as 1964. 

Nonetheless, Via Rail has sold its HFR network to investors as “one-third of the costs of HSR for two-thirds of the speed.” Furthermore, it is capable of being implemented much faster than HSR, with trains expected to operate sometime in the next decade. HFR will fix Via Rail’s most critical issues in the QWC, specifically its limited network, lack of ownership of rail tracks and low speeds. All of these factors have contributed to a network fraught with delays and low ridership. Implementing HFR will meaningfully address these problems in a cheaper and faster manner, factors that may have been the reason Via Rail was able to upgrade its services at all. Should HFR deliver the results Via Rail has promised the federal government, Canadians could soon see their pride in Canada’s rail networks restored, ushering in the beginning of a new golden era of rail travel for riders and the environment.