4 ms·

Have there been any major investments in passenger rail that I don't know about? (There has been one in Montreal that I'm aware of.) "Major" rail would not be

by jbm 3y ago

Have there been any major investments in passenger rail that I don't know about? (There has been one in Montreal that I'm aware of.) "Major" rail would not be intra-city but rather between cities, and the Canadian system (Via) is not very good at all (not even between Montreal and Ottawa). This announcement pre-supposes the highway network in Canada is sufficient as-is, which is debatable. Even major cities are not well-linked; for example, Highway 1 between Calgary and Vancouver has many areas that are frankly scary to drive on and land-slides have cut off the cities. (Incidentally, there is no direct train between the two cities either, although I guess you could get onto a VIA train in Banff if you really wanted to) This policy is also contradictory with the increase in the population that the government is also pursuing. You can only cope with so many people in Megacity 1 and 2. If a second-tier city in Canada has a large population increase, they obviously will have to revise and improve the road network. As such, I can't really see this policy as being serious. My guess is that this is cost-cutting and virtue-signalling to and will be reversed by the next PM. The Liberals will not be lasting more than an year more at most, and they will not be re-elected. The depressing part of these unserious political "announcements" is that they turn a positive into a negative. "Punitive environmentalism" for the everyday person will make it impossible to meet any climate goals.

Tiktaalik 3y ago
There's been a complete lack of investment in inter city rail and it's really depressing and something the government needs to get better at. We should have high speed rail in Canada. That being said it takes two to tango. The Feds are giving guidance here to the Provinces, who are primarily responsible for the inter city transportation network within Provinces, that they're not terribly interested in highway expansion as a further solution to inter city transportation problems. The good Provincial politicians will work with the Feds in moving forward with rail based solutions. The bad ones will be beligerant and move forward with their own solutions and forgo Federal aid. Setting inter city concepts aside, this government has made enormous investments in intra-city public transit, much more so than previous governments and should be commended for that. There's lots of major, important public transit projects that wouldn't have happened without that Federal funding.
- jbm 3y ago
  Yes I generally agree with you on most points. I don't mean to hold the provinces as blameless in this conversation. Provinces starving cities has been a thing ever since I was young and it hasn't changed. They'd rather spend money on sports stadiums than trains; the overpass situation in Quebec in the 2000s was a good example. That said, I am a bit more sympathetic to belligerent provinces now than I was before. The culture in Ottawa is based around national elect-ability; which is to say, elect-ability in Quebec and Ontario. This means there is a major cultural difference and a linguistic difference that neither province nor federal government really tries to overcome. Seeing the Western provinces as some sort of Canadian version of Texas is an online over-simplification. WRT to the intra-city transit, I agree but giving credit here is tough, this should have been the policy since the 60s. Instead we had fiscal austerity, downloading responsibilities to poorly funded municipalities, and other tricks to get a "balanced budget" and we patted ourselves on the back for it.
skeeter2020 3y ago
We have huge parts of the north (read: the majority of Canada) that don't even have year-round roads, period. Nobody aside from the federal government has the motivation or means to address this, including their own significant approval process. The irony is with global warming, population growth and resource demand these are the areas that are the best candidates for development.

by jbm 3y ago

Tiktaalik 3y ago

There's been a complete lack of investment in inter city rail and it's really depressing and something the government needs to get better at. We should have high speed rail in Canada. That being said it takes two to tango. The Feds are giving guidance here to the Provinces, who are primarily responsible for the inter city transportation network within Provinces, that they're not terribly interested in highway expansion as a further solution to inter city transportation problems. The good Provincial politicians will work with the Feds in moving forward with rail based solutions. The bad ones will be beligerant and move forward with their own solutions and forgo Federal aid. Setting inter city concepts aside, this government has made enormous investments in intra-city public transit, much more so than previous governments and should be commended for that. There's lots of major, important public transit projects that wouldn't have happened without that Federal funding.

jbm 3y ago
Yes I generally agree with you on most points. I don't mean to hold the provinces as blameless in this conversation. Provinces starving cities has been a thing ever since I was young and it hasn't changed. They'd rather spend money on sports stadiums than trains; the overpass situation in Quebec in the 2000s was a good example. That said, I am a bit more sympathetic to belligerent provinces now than I was before. The culture in Ottawa is based around national elect-ability; which is to say, elect-ability in Quebec and Ontario. This means there is a major cultural difference and a linguistic difference that neither province nor federal government really tries to overcome. Seeing the Western provinces as some sort of Canadian version of Texas is an online over-simplification. WRT to the intra-city transit, I agree but giving credit here is tough, this should have been the policy since the 60s. Instead we had fiscal austerity, downloading responsibilities to poorly funded municipalities, and other tricks to get a "balanced budget" and we patted ourselves on the back for it.

skeeter2020 3y ago

We have huge parts of the north (read: the majority of Canada) that don't even have year-round roads, period. Nobody aside from the federal government has the motivation or means to address this, including their own significant approval process. The irony is with global warming, population growth and resource demand these are the areas that are the best candidates for development.