Alto high speed rail: The launch of Poilievre’s next wave?

Apr 4

‘Canadians need transportation that works and taxpayer dollars that are respected; this project does neither,’ says Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre about the Alto high speed rail project. / SCREENSHOT

Say what you will about the Opposition Leader, he has a sharp nose for a coming political issue.

He was the first political leader in perhaps the entire Western world to sense that post-COVID inflation would be the defining issue of the first half of the 2020s. He then staked out a proprietary claim on the issue of affordability, forcing the other parties to come his way.

There was a whiff of his political instinct for what’s coming next in his announcement this week that a future Poilievre government would cancel the Alto high speed rail project. Of course, there was a whiff of the April 13 Terrebonne by-election in his announcement as well, coming as it did just a day before Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet announced opposition to accelerating the project in the absence of meaningful consultation with local government and stakeholders. The Terrebonne riding lies squarely across any potential high-speed rail line.

Apart from the obvious short-term politics of Poilievre's move, he is positioning himself for the coming wave of complicated major project politics.

The federal government has costed the Alto high speed rail service between Quebec City and Toronto at between $60 and $90 billion. It also shapes up as a real-world application of how the Carney government will execute “major projects.”

The project and contracting authority — Alto — has been selected. Construction is not scheduled to begin until around 2030. But consultations with the public have been underway since January and are scheduled to wrap up at the end of April. To date, concerns have been expressed by municipalities and landowners, particularly around the prospect of expropriations to construct the right of way, the passing over of communities for stops along the route, and suggestions that the economic benefits will only go to big cities over smaller communities.

So, as a political and media proposition, Alto high speed rail is the first major project to come off the Prime Minister’s assembly line. That, as much as mere by-election partisanship, may be why Poilievre chose to stake out the high ground against the Alto project.

For Poilievre, the benefits of opposing Alto outweigh the risks

There may be political risk for Poilievre in promising to cancel the project. The Liberals might argue, for instance, that Poilievre has now become one of those “gatekeepers” that he accused the Trudeau Liberals of being, part of an out-of-touch elite who specialized in holding back economic development.

That much of the pushback against Alto has so far come from farmers, farming communities others who stand to have their land expropriated, Poilievre may also risk reinforcing the impression that the Conservatives remain primarily a rural protest party which cannot break through in urban and suburban centres that elect federal governments. That he chose Peterborough, Ont., to make his announcement itself illustrates the tightrope he is walking. The City of Peterborough supports the stop planned there, while small local communities are opposed.

Given the cost overruns and local opposition that doomed the UK’s HS2 and California High-Speed Rail projects, Poilievre expects much the same problems to tie the Liberals in politically uncongenial knots as the Canadian project unfolds, or rather doesn’t. Such opportunities are inherently rich fodder for opposition attacks. Poilievre likely calculates that all he has to do is wait for the negative stories to come in, and he will be the political winner.

Given the troubled history of attempts to build high speed rail between Quebec City and Toronto, the political allure of opposing is understandably irresistible to Poilievre. Liberal governments, dating back to Jean Chrétien, have serially proposed and failed to deliver viable projects and studies to build higher frequency or high speed rail in the corridor.

Contaminating Carney

More broadly, opposition to Alto affords Poilievre an opportunity to create a negative political and media narrative around Carney’s major project agenda before it really even gets underway, while contrasting what he views as impending Liberal failure with the Conservative agenda he outlined in his news release: “Conservatives want projects that make money, by getting government out of the way, granting fast permits and low taxes to privately-funded construction. We support targeted improvements to existing transportation infrastructure that can move people and goods faster, at lower cost and with less risk to taxpayers.”

Controversy around the cost or execution of Alto, which seems inevitable, will help him revive a narrative of Liberal economic incompetence, a rich vein he mined so successfully during the Trudeau administration.

What does he have to lose?

This move may seem trivial. Carney is something of a political colossus at the moment. He has a commanding lead in the polls. He has hoovered up MPs from both the Conservatives and the NDPs. He seems on the verge of gaining a majority in the House of Commons should the Liberals sweep the April 13 by-elections. And Canadians seem to be in no mood for political gamesmanship at a time when so much is at stake for their families and their future.

But Poilievre knows, from bitter experience, the temptations of complacency, even arrogance, that come with great poll numbers. Complacency and arrogance seem embedded in the Liberal Party’s political DNA.. He also knows only too well that voter sentiment can turn on a dime.

Remember when he launched his jeremiad against post-COVID inflation, he was trailing the Trudeau Liberals. A year from now, he may have caught the next wave and positioned himself as the prophet of Liberal failure.