Evidence of meeting #35 for Transport, Infrastructure and Communities in the 40th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was alberta.
A recording is available from Parliament.
7:10 p.m.
Liberal
Joe Volpe Liberal Eglinton—Lawrence, ON
Mr. Chairman, I must compliment you and all the rest of the committee members for having made the decision yesterday to invite the gentlemen before us today to come on such short notice. The reason I say that is not so much to applaud you and us but to thank them for having come and for having provided us with a perspective that has been so completely different from all the others that we have received. We have been missing on this committee a public polling perspective on where high-speed rail would go.
I'm tempted to ask Mr. Graves a whole series of questions, but I think I would be committing an injustice, because there are people around the table who aren't already as convinced as I am that his studies are reflective of the public mood. So I'll leave some of the more skeptical questions to members who represent that 6% that you identified in your poll.
I'm intrigued as well, Mr. Cruickshank and Mr. Chaput, by what you said, because I had this perception that the Government of Alberta, as you very politely put it, expressed a political will that was contrary to the proposal that you are advancing.
I have done a quick analysis here, and I hope my mathematics are right. I'm not an engineer, but I think your cost is about $10 million per kilometre for the project. It seems to be not an insignificant amount, but it's in the ballpark for highway construction in and around the Toronto area.
7:10 p.m.
President, Alberta High-Speed Rail
Does that include the cost of the trains?
7:10 p.m.
Liberal
Joe Volpe Liberal Eglinton—Lawrence, ON
Well, in Toronto, it wouldn't include the cost of a whole pile of things, but $10 million has been tabled.
In this committee, we were initially looking at the one corridor. We decided to take a look at a second corridor, the one in Alberta. As you heard earlier, we've now started to seize ourselves with the idea of a third potential corridor.
On the issues you've raised—and I want to thank you for being so methodical in the economic and engineering analysis and the environmental perceptions that you've laid out for this committee—you're right, although I'm tempted not to say completely so. I'm obviously talking to an expert and I'm just somebody who has read about this material, but I'm tempted to ask, have you taken a look at what would happen in the Windsor-Quebec City corridor? And if you have, from your perspective, what would the technical challenges translate into in terms of cost?
7:10 p.m.
President, Alberta High-Speed Rail
I'm not particularly familiar with this part of the countryside. In fact, this is the first time I've ever been in Ottawa, even though I've been in Canada for 46 years.
What works in Alberta is that Canadian Pacific's line to Edmonton is a secondary main line. It is not a main line. The main lines run east-west. In Ontario, you have the main lines running east-west.
I have given this some vague thought, with no basis of foundation, as to whether you can find some way to consolidate the CP and CN usage of track and find abandoned routes or abandoned rights of way that are still available to get you in and out of the cities—because that's your big challenge, getting in and out of the cities—if those options are open to you, or building alongside either the CP or the CN.
John is from Ottawa originally. He's much more familiar with the countryside. So I'll let the other expert speak.
7:10 p.m.
Vice-President, Operations, Alberta High-Speed Rail
Thank you, Bill.
The terrain that you're dealing with here in eastern Canada, particularly more or less from Ottawa east, is in the Canadian Shield. It is considerably more difficult to work in than the bald prairie, where for the most part we have to deal with a few creeks and a few rural roads and one or two major valleys carved out by rivers but which is really quite straightforward. It is not highly developed; and I don't mean to demean agriculture, but most of it is under agriculture at the moment. So we're not uprooting families and businesses if we proceed.
The real dilemma that faces the Windsor-Quebec corridor is finding the right of way and making sure that construction costs are not going to go crazy. At some point I believe you're going to have to cross the Ottawa River, which is not an insignificant obstacle. The terrain is pretty rough, as I'm sure you all know. The big thing, as Bill has already said, is finding the right of way to get in and out of the cities.
High-speed rail at 300 kilometres per hour and beyond, which is now quite practical, up to about 360 kilometres per hour, simply cannot run on the same tracks as freight trains. It's not safe, and technically it doesn't work.
So getting into downtown Montreal, downtown Toronto, and Ottawa for that matter, is the big challenge for the line. The other issue that always faces any railroad or any corridor of this nature going through a highly developed area is that everyone wants a station. If you get too many stations, you don't have high-speed rail any more; you have a commuter service. I don't mean that as a death knell for the corridor at all; it's just one of the other complications that surfaces on that route.
7:15 p.m.
Liberal
Joe Volpe Liberal Eglinton—Lawrence, ON
I didn't read that at all, Mr. Chaput. What I read into that is that you're probably advocating complementary regional services that feed into the hub of a high-speed rail system.
7:15 p.m.
Liberal
Joe Volpe Liberal Eglinton—Lawrence, ON
I think that's great.
We don't have a lot of time, but I have an opportunity to ask you some questions—
7:15 p.m.
Liberal
7:15 p.m.
Conservative
7:15 p.m.
Bloc
Mario Laframboise Bloc Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC
Thank you, sirs, for sharing your time with us this evening.
Your poll focused in part on public-private partnerships. I understand that you asked a number of questions about the construction of the high-speed rail line. Are the people polled aware that in the case of public-private partnerships, a substantial portion of the investment is made by the government?
I also plan to put this question to the representative of Alberta High Speed Rail. In a public-private partnership, the government covers the cost of laying the rail line. This represents a significant investment. Are people aware of that fact?
7:15 p.m.
President, EKOS Research Associates Inc.
I think part of the appeal of the public-private partnership is that it allows the public to evade the hard choice that this might have to be funded principally by government.
If you look at the poll a little more carefully, though, those who didn't pick were given three choices initially between public-private partnerships, private sector, or public sector. When you exclude those who picked the very popular, but easy to pick, public-private partnership, the remaining portion, by a two-to-one margin, assigned governments the responsibility.
When we probe further, of those who picked either government or public-private partnership and were asked which levels of government should be most responsible, by an overwhelming majority the federal government was tagged with the ultimate responsibility. I believe it was something like six times as large as the instances of people who assigned responsibility to the provincial government. Nobody in the poll thought the municipal governments were going to be paying the freight on this one.
I think the public actually have a reasonable understanding of this. We had other questions, for example, that asked whether people thought this would be self-sustaining eventually. By a margin of about 60-40, the public felt this would require an ongoing commitment from governments, in particular the federal government--something they said they would support.
People glaze over at the enormous sums being spent on infrastructure and deficits and so forth, but we mentioned billions of dollars explicitly in the explanation to the respondents, and although it did tend to reduce the enthusiasm somewhat, it did not increase the opposition. People answered with an understanding that this was not a trivial investment; this is not something that private sectors were going to produce and that the public would then be able to purchase. They didn't think that once it was put in place it would be profitable and wouldn't require ongoing support. The public support for this exists even with an assumption that it will require substantial ongoing support.
7:20 p.m.
Bloc
Mario Laframboise Bloc Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC
Did you do a breakdown by province? Do Quebeckers have the same reaction as Ontarians or Albertans?
7:20 p.m.
President, EKOS Research Associates Inc.
Yes, we did, and we had enough of a sample size that we have reasonable scientific certainty about what the differences are.
People who lived in proposed corridor areas, including the Alberta corridor, were more aware of these issues. They were somewhat more supportive, but they certainly were more aware. Ontario and Quebec were the most supportive of the proposals, and they were the most supportive even after the various arguments against were presented. Quebeckers were distinct in that I think they had the highest levels of fluency. Actually, B.C. also had high fluency, which I didn't quite understand. The Quebeckers were the ones who seemed to see high speed as being associated with even higher speed. In the Atlantic, it was seen as anything better than the current system, which was kind of a pokey definition. But in Quebec it was that it has to be very fast. Quebeckers were the most likely to assign responsibility to the federal government, and to see it as an ongoing responsibility, which I thought was interesting.
7:20 p.m.
Bloc
Mario Laframboise Bloc Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC
I have one final question about polls. You said that people who are more affluent tended to be more supportive of the initiative than those with lower incomes. I was under the impression that people with lower incomes might benefit more from a rail system, for travel purposes and so on. Did you probe further in an attempt to understand why people who are less affluent are less supportive of high-speed rail?
7:20 p.m.
President, EKOS Research Associates Inc.
Yes, we did. Not to be overly convoluted, but support was linked to awareness and understanding of the issues. Frankly, education was a more important variable than income—income was important as well—and they were the ones who seemed more informed and had thought about the issue. I think one of the reasons we found that the less affluent and less educated hadn't really thought about it was because frankly it hadn't crossed their radar screen.
By the way, the travelling public we looked at, particularly those taking rail, air, and also bus, were really interested in moving over if high-speed rail were to exist. Car travellers were as well, but the interest was less pronounced. I think you have a lot of people on the roads who would be in planes or trains if they could afford it, so this was a factor.
Interestingly, some of the questioners at the conference pointed out that the experience with high-speed rail in the United States has been that some of the most important customer base are those of less affluent means—in other words, precisely the people in Canada who are not showing much attention to the issue right now.
7:20 p.m.
NDP
Dennis Bevington NDP Western Arctic, NT
Thank you.
I enjoyed your presentation. I can see how your thinking goes.
About the existing rail system between the two cities, for a while you had a dayliner on--is that correct?
7:20 p.m.
President, Alberta High-Speed Rail
Yes. That stopped in 1985. There had been a number of bad accidents. VIA Rail said that the volume of passengers was not there and that the problems with level-crossing accidents were too much. They cancelled it.
7:25 p.m.
NDP
Dennis Bevington NDP Western Arctic, NT
Your system would, in the dedicated line, have overpasses for every single one?
