A public transportation advocacy group says that if the federal government doesn’t make key changes and investments, passenger rail outside of Central Canada is doomed.
That’s why Transport Action, and its regional affiliate Transport Action Atlantic, are calling for Canadians to sign a parliamentary petition demanding measures to preserve and grow passenger rail service in Canada. Over 4500 Canadians have so far signed the petition, which closes April 7, and is sponsored by Taylor Bachrach, a member of parliament from BC, and NDP transport critic.
Tim Hayman says that the current trains being used to run The Ocean are at the end of their useful life, and may not be viable much past 2030. The Transport Action Atlantic president says VIA is ready to go with the long process to procure new trains, but needs a substantial funding commitment from the federal government to start the process. The alternative, says Hayman, “is potentially the end of all passenger rail service outside of the Quebec City—Windsor corridor, which is obviously a situation we don’t want to find ourselves in.”
Transport Action’s petition is calls for a federal commitment in this year’s budget towards renewing the long-distance fleet. It also calls for the government to give passenger rail, and VIA Rail itself, some legal standing, much like its counterpart in the US, Amtrak.
VIA is a crown corporation but has no rights over any of the rail network it uses to transport passengers in Canada. Instead, the crown corporation must negotiate with private track owners, such as CN.
“It’s resulted in VIA having little control over the performance of their network,” says Hayman, “and also the frequencies they can run and the schedules they can maintain… It’s had a really detrimental effect across the country.”
Hayman says the plight of passenger trains is particularly notable in northern New Brunswick, where CN has not maintained tracks to passenger rail standards, which has in turn added several hours to the Ocean’s travel time.
“The train just crawls along,” says Hayman of the trip through parts of northern NB. “And a lot of that is on sections of track that are dead straight.”
Hayman says the track is simply not a CN priority. “They run very little freight traffic over that line,” he says. “There’s been no incentive to maintain that and actually keep that up to the standards that they need to facilitate passenger speeds.”
Hayman says that giving VIA Rail some legal rights over the rail rights of way in Canada, would help “mirror what exists already in the United States,” where Amtrak has legal rights to service standards that track owners must meet.
The petition also touches on the future of a major new Canadian passenger rail project, demanding that it stay in public hands.
Since 2016, VIA has been trying to establish its own high frequency rail corridor between Windsor and Quebec city, its most profitable corridor. Hayman says this corridor could, “effectively kind of cross subsidize the rest of the network.” But in 2023, the government issued a request for proposals to three potential private sector partners “to co-develop and execute the project” according the project website. https://hfr-tgf.ca/faq/ With the project in private hands, Hayman is concerned that key revenue for VIA Rail will disappear, leaving the Crown corporation only its less profitable routes to run.
“Once you start going down that road and into the realm of privatizing services,” says Hayman, “I think it’s very reasonable to worry about the long term future of any services outside of the [Windsor to Quebec City] corridor.”
Despite the belief held by many that Canada is just not suited to rail, Hayman says Canadian geography and demographics are actually similar to other places with far superior public passenger service, and that dwindling service has been a result of government decisions, not natural conditions.
It’s been 34 years since the federal government made major cuts to passenger rail, nearly cutting VIA Rail services in half. And in the Maritimes, services have continued to dwindle.
“The reason that we have fewer the trains running across the country right now is because federal governments at various times decided to stop supporting them,” says Hayman. “They didn’t stop because people en masse stopped using them.”
The Transport Action petition remains open until April 7 at about 4pm.
