For all the talk about needing better passenger rail service in Canada, there is not much action.
Passenger rail travel is almost exclusively the domain of VIA Rail Canada, a crown corporation created in the late 1970s to take over the responsibility from Canadian Pacific (CP) and Canadian National (CN). In VIA’s busiest area, the Windsor to Québec City corridor, where most of the country’s population lives, the service is nothing short of mediocre.
On a recent Sunday, service between Stratford and Toronto in southwestern Ontario was replaced with buses for track maintenance. Unfortunately, most of the line is single track so there was no easy solution like simply having the train follow the track not closed for repairs. Instead of a train, passengers using this line got a bus ride. Most people who want to travel by train choose it because they do not want to take a bus. The fact that a passenger rail line linking southwestern Ontario’s major cities is mostly a single-track dating to the 19th Century is embarrassing in a supposedly wealthy, developed country.
Later that day, a train to Montréal from Toronto departed 45 minutes late and eventually arrived a full hour late in Montréal. Passengers were not given any reason for the delay in departure from Toronto, and it was only when approaching Cornwall that they were offered a 50 per cent discount, and only for their next trip on that same route. Free or discounted refreshments would have been a show of courtesy to the inconvenienced passengers, but no such offer was extended. In fact, an announcement was made that due to allegedly being short-staffed, the refreshment cart would not be taken car-to-car, but passengers would instead have to walk to another car, queue up in the aisle at the galley counter and purchase their refreshments from an employee who would normally provide cart service, and then walk back to their seats on an occasionally bumpy ride while carrying hot beverages and food. No discount was offered to customers for that inconvenience either.
VIA’s economy class passenger cars are old, dating back to the early 1980s. Yes, they have been redecorated a couple of times, but they are looking dated on the inside and outside.
Like any crown corporation, VIA Rail is supposed to turn a profit, but it does not always turn out that way. Its 2024 operating budget was projected to be $771.8 million. The 2024 federal budget allocated $462 million to fund VIA’s operations, which is a decrease from $550.8 million in 2023. The 2024 federal budget did allocate capital funding for the replacement of outdated long-distance passenger cars and for high-frequency rail, but the results of that investment will not be fully seen until the next decade.
We have a federal government that claims to be promoting mass-transportation over the automobile for environmental reasons. However, that same government is chronically underfunding the operations of its existing passenger rail service, which is resulting in inefficiency, inadequate infrastructure, and poor customer service.
The federal government needs to put its money where the political rhetoric is and properly provide rail transport or let someone else do it.
