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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 hig

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.

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.