No, it would definitely be required. There are rules in the Canadian Transportation Act about any infrastructure improvements for rail and about when an environmental assessment is required, and the exemption is very limited: it's within a three-kilometre maximum length and within 300 metres of the right of way. This definitely exceeds three kilometres. Something like this, as I mentioned, has to be fully grade-separated, so there would be large amounts of bridge structures, large amounts of grade separations, all affecting various communities. All of that would require environmental assessment work to be completed, and that in and of itself could take a few years and would take significant funds to do.
Then there are the detailed engineering studies about what you're going to do in terms of the construction: the constructability of it, the actual routing of it. You then also need to start looking more in depth at the technology options, because what this study is going to say is that there are such and such possible technologies that could be suited for a Canadian environment and could be adapted to operate in Canada, but you would want to get more precise information on them.
So there would be a lot of upfront work that would be fairly costly and would be necessary, in effect, to make a final decision on where it should go.