Alto is Go!

Canada's 300-Kilometer-an-Hour High-Speed Rail Project Gets Another Shot in the Arm

// Last week, there was big news in the world of passenger rail. Canada, the one G-7 nation without a single mile (er, kilometer) of high-speed rail, announced that it would be fast-tracking the plan to build a bullet-train line between Quebec City and Toronto.

In fact, the announcement had already been made by outgoing Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in February, as I wrote in this dispatch. At the time, the Conservatives had a good chance of winning the federal election, but Donald Trump's trade war, and revulsion over DOGE and MAGA, kept Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, seen as closer to American Republicans on many issues, out of office.

Trudeau announced that a consortium had been chosen to oversee the project: Cadence, as it was known, is made up of SNCF Voyageurs (the operator of France's passenger rail), CPDQ Infra (an arm of the massive Quebec pension fund), Air Canada, AtkinsRéalis (formerly the engineering giant SNC-Lavalin), Keolis, and SYSTRA.

Here's what's changed: On Sept. 11, 2025, prime minister Mark Carney announced the formation of a Major Projects Office, and published a list of ten projects it planned to fast-track. Most were conventional Canadian resource and fossil-fuel centered projects: a liquefied natural gas plant in Kitimat, mines in B.C. and Saskatchewan, expansions of container ports in Churchill, Manitoba, and Montreal. (The MPO, as it is to be known, is to be overseen by Dawn Farrell, former CEO of Trans Mountain, the pipeline company, and it immediately earned the praise of Danielle Smith, the reliably fossil-fuel-obsessed premier of Alberta.) Among the projects, though, was one that would actually reduce emissions, and help Canada to meet its climate commitments: the Alto high-speed rail project, which had more or less disappeared from the headlines since the election.