Passengers wait at Pearson Airport in Toronto as an Air Canada plane sits outside the terminal, on July 24.Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press
Previous attempts to bring high-speed passenger rail service to the Toronto-Quebec City corridor inevitably ran up against opposition from the country’s airlines – none more so than Air Canada AC-T, which feared losing premium-paying business travellers.
Given its importance to the national economy, Canada’s flag carrier has essentially held a veto over policy decisions made in Ottawa affecting Via Rail, the country’s Crown-owned, but woefully deficient, passenger rail service.
Fears that real competition from Via could undermine Air Canada’s financial viability always derailed past proposals for faster trains.
After its 1988 privatization, Air Canada experienced a string of losses that threatened its very survival. The red ink totalled more than $1-billion between 1990 and 1993. Air Canada’s main rival at the time, Canadian Airlines, was in even worse financial shape, leading Ottawa to eventually engineer a merger of the two carriers in 2000.
Only, the tie-up left the merged carrier with more than $11-billion in debt just as the bottom fell out of the global travel industry after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Once Air Canada filed for court protection from its creditors in 2003, Ottawa prioritized the airline’s survival over high-speed rail.
Fast forward two decades and not only is Air Canada flying high, but it has ditched its opposition to faster passenger rail service and jumped on board Ottawa’s plan to invest billions in Via’s proposed high-frequency rail (HFR) project in the Toronto-Quebec City corridor.
The airline’s change of heart could clear the tracks for what Via HFR, the unit set up to oversee the proposal, calls the largest infrastructure project in recent Canadian history.
Air Canada revealed two weeks ago that it had joined one of the three consortiums that last month responded to Via’s request for proposals to design, build and operate the 1,000-kilometre-long HFR network aimed at slashing travel times by a third in the Toronto-Quebec City corridor. Ottawa intends to select a winning consortium by the end of 2024, with the aim of launching the new service by the mid-2030s.
Air Canada’s membership in the Cadence consortium, which is led by Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec and AtkinsRéalis, signals the airline’s longer-term bet on bringing European-style intermodal travel to Canada, providing its customers with easy access to rail connections on to their final destination, instead of flying there.
Indeed, Air Canada finally appears to be following European airlines, which have developed close partnerships with railways to funnel customers to each other. The location of train stations within Europe’s major airports has facilitated such alliances.
Air Canada last year introduced code-sharing services with France’s national passenger railway, SNCF, enabling customers flying into Paris’s Charles-de-Gaulle airport to purchase a single air-rail ticket for travel from CDG to 22 French cities on SNCF’s high-speed rail network. Air Canada also offers similar intermodal travel from airports in Frankfurt and Munich in partnership with Germany’s Deutsche Bahn.
“Air Canada is being reactive rather than proactive,” McGill University lecturer and aviation expert John Gradek said. “If you look at the Deutsche Bahn [partnership], that was just a competitive response to Lufthansa already doing it.”
Still, Air Canada’s move to join the Cadence consortium comes as airport congestion and climate change promise to make rail an increasingly preferable option for travellers here, provided Via HFR can deliver on its promise of providing fast electric-train service in the critical Toronto-Montreal-Ottawa triangle.
While the cost of building a French-style train à grande vitesse (TGV) has led Via HFR to settle on a more modest proposal for trains that would travel on dedicated tracks at speeds of up to 200 kilometres an hour, each consortium has also been required to submit plans to reach higher speeds on some segments of the network.
“We’re now focusing on speed and frequency,” chief executive officer Martin Imbleau told Via HFR’s annual meeting last month. “Because speed is necessary. And speed means both kilometres per hour and total travel time. … This includes having a limited number of stops, having dedicated tracks and the right configuration to avoid slowdowns, especially when entering and exiting cities.”
For the intermodal travel model to succeed here, Canada’s airports would need to have intercity train stations within or close to their own terminals. But Mr. Gradek said neither the Greater Toronto Airports Authority, which runs Pearson airport, nor Aéroports de Montréal, which runs Trudeau airport, has included building Via stations on site in its medium-term development plan. “Why hasn’t GTAA or ADM associated itself with any of these consortiums for Via’s HFR project?” he asked.
In its submission to the House of Commons committee studying Via’s HFR proposal, GTAA did recommend a partnership “to plan and design a HFR connection” at Pearson. But none of the consortiums has publicly disclosed whether its proposal includes linking Via HFR’s network with Peason and Trudeau airports.
If they have not, Ottawa should insist they do so. Intermodal travel makes increasing economic and environmental sense. And with Pearson projecting 90 million passengers by 2044 – up from about 45 million in 2023 – the case for faster passenger train service in central Canada has never been stronger. Population growth and increased foreign tourism will provide a critical mass of air and train travellers.
Even Air Canada understands that now.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to France's national passenger railway as SCNF. It is SNCF. This version has been updated.