A high-speed train by French railway company SNCF travels on the Bordeaux-Paris route, at Chartres, northern France on July 26.JEAN-FRANCOIS MONIER/Getty Images
John Rapley is an author and academic who divides his time among London, Johannesburg and Ottawa. His books include Why Empires Fall (Yale University Press, 2023) and Twilight of the Money Gods (Simon and Schuster, 2017).
Canada’s high-frequency rail project might make sense if you wanted to prepare the economy for the 20th century – but not if you wanted to future-proof it for this one. The proposed travel times and timetables are not enough to even bring rail travel in this country up to the standard other countries have had for decades.
The country needs high-speed rail, which involves faster trains, not just more frequent ones. It’s a badly needed idea that the federal government should not have abandoned.
Whenever the topic arises, we hear there’s no need: Canadians own cars and have good roads. But that’s like saying the transcontinental rail line built at Confederation was a waste of money since everyone then had horses. It’s kind of Luddite, when we should be looking to the future.
Canada remains the only G7 country still without high-speed rail. Even the Americans, who already have half-decent fast and frequent rail options in the so-called Acela corridor between Boston and Washington, are experimenting with it.
The share of the Canadian economy’s output invested in transportation infrastructure, which already sits at the lower end of the range of developed countries, skews toward maintaining existing roads. That still hasn’t prevented Canada from having one of the world’s longest average commute times. But it’s not just in commute times but in intercity travel that the drawbacks of a car-based transportation network become most apparent.
Say you need to get from Ottawa or Montreal to Toronto for a meeting or job interview. Your options are either to fly or drive – or take a train, if you have time for a leisurely journey. The former options are expensive and cumbersome; the latter likely requires an overnight stay, making it equally expensive and cumbersome.
Compare that with a country with high-speed rail. At one time, I taught at a university in the south of France. If I needed to attend a meeting in Paris, I was able to go there and back within the day, at a reasonable price, and with frequent departures to choose from.
The reason this matters is that, as the world economy moves further away from resource-intensity toward knowledge-intensity, economies of agglomeration will only grow in importance. This is especially so in creative industries, and in engineering, finance and information technology, all sectors in which Canada has a potential edge.
And yet while Canada is one of the world’s biggest spenders per capita on higher education, the country punches below its weight in the production of patents. Arguably, that’s because of the country’s persistent diseconomies of agglomeration. To show what I mean, let’s use another illustration. When I worked in Oxford, and later in Cambridge, not only could I get to London and back in a day for a seminar, but so too could colleagues from dozens of other universities. This made networking and information-sharing among a large cluster of scholars easy and frequent.
In contrast, in the Southern Ontario-Quebec corridor, where you get a similar number of research universities, the time and cost of travelling among them raises barriers to interaction. The same goes for the ecosystem of startups that are spun off from those universities, which are more likely to gather in relatively small clusters around individual universities – think BlackBerry in Waterloo – rather than exploiting the full range of knowledge and human capital across the region.
Research on such clustering reveals that the most dynamic firms tend to form linkages with firms outside their immediate vicinity, and rely on their ability to attract workers into them. But when a train ride from Toronto to Waterloo takes two hours – add another five if you’re coming from Montreal – you’re rather restricted to your local market. Low-cost and rapid transportation options that widen the labour pool and reduce the cost of movement, and include easy linkages to major international airports, could release a lot of latent resources.
Canadians will sometimes say Europe can do high-speed rail because the continent has shorter distances and higher population densities than Canada. That’s actually misleading. Go back to the French case. The combined population of Paris and Marseille is quite a bit less than that of Montreal and Toronto, and the distance quite a bit more. In reality, most of Canada lives in a tiny sliver of its land mass, and the distances feel great only because the transportation network is so antiquated, with overland journey times little changed from a century ago.
The University of Ottawa’s Ryan Katz-Rosene, one of Canada’s leading experts in this field, tells me the real reason Canada doesn’t have high-speed rail is politics. Because high-speed rail only makes economic sense in the Alberta and Southern Ontario-Quebec corridors, the rest of the country doesn’t want to pay for it, while the short time horizons of penny-pinching politicians have precluded the strategic thinking needed for such visions.
So while at the turn of the millennium, a time when Canada was still selling train-sets to the world and a high-speed rail program might have made the country a world leader in rail, the country opted instead to become a world leader in high-speed rail studies (as Rick Mercer hilariously put it).
But unless Canada expects to live off the sale of its mineral resources forever, it needs to stop living in the past.