To the Editor,
“Not In My Back Yard” (NIMBY) pushes the issue to ‘In Someone Else’s Back Yard’!
Our federal government created Alto, and Alto seeks to drive a railroad through many hundreds of kilometres of rural land and to divide rural communities.
Alto claims enormous benefits: a $35 billion annual increase in Gross Domestic Product, 50,000 new jobs, and 100,000 cars off the road!
But there has been absolutely zero published data to verify those claims. Perhaps that’s exactly how Alto wants it?
Until such data is made transparently and verifiably available, these claims can only be seen as marketing hype.
To fund such a railroad our federal government will borrow in the order of $50 billion from private investors and pay them eight per cent interest. In addition, the government will borrow in the order of $25 billion of publicly funded debt.
Together, servicing those debts will cost taxpayers across the entire country over $5 billion per year, every year, for the next 50, or so, years.
Servicing the current federal debt is already costing every Canadian taxpayer just under $2,000 a year. The railroad will increase that by another 10 per cent!
And that cost does NOT include the 50 years of fares and railroad operating cost subsidies that our tax dollars will be sunk into.
If every rural community who will potentially be railroaded by this project works together to force Alto’s publication of the transparent and verifiable data behind their claims, open, honest and respectful discussion can then take place.
Perhaps resulting ‘In Nobody’s Back Yard’.
Geoff Anderson
Vankleek Hill
