Promise of high-speed rail by 2025 is fake news
We got some fake news on Monday, and it didn’t even come from U.S. President Donald Trump.
Instead, the deliverer was Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, who came to town to participate in a “fireside chat” at a meeting of the Greater Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber of Commerce.
As we journalists waited at the back of the room for her remarks to start, we were told a news release about high-speed rail would shortly be emailed to us.
I eagerly checked my inbox. But I was disappointed.
The “news” was that a planning advisory board is being established to provide “strategic support” for the project, which would whisk people between Toronto and Kitchener-Waterloo in 48 minutes. Lengthy delays on Highway 401 would be a thing of the past.
The creation of an advisory board is not exactly a stop-the-presses piece of information. It’s an unremarkable part of the process, not worth even a couple of paragraphs on the sleepiest, slowest news day imaginable.
It’s not real news. It’s election campaigning dressed up to look like news.
The Liberal news release calls it “an important step forward” and says advisory board members “will include the best and brightest” from engineering, finance, environmental and other related fields.
Asked for more details about this planning board, Wynne said: “We’re in the process of putting it together right now.”
In other words, there’s really nothing to say yet.
What’s really happening is that the Liberals have long outstayed their welcome with Ontario’s residents.
From gas-plant scandals to selling off hydro assets to sky-high electric bills, this government has earned its low ratings in opinion polls.
Yet its leaders hope the bright prospects of high-speed rail by 2025 will make us forget their past misbehaviour and vote them back in for another term.
But if their past record is any guide, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that high-speed rail will be up and running in 2025.
Look at the desperately needed new Highway 7 between Kitchener and Guelph, which is coming together at a glacial pace. It has been in the works for decades and is now scheduled to be finalized after 2021.
If it is taking so long to put together that relatively simple and short stretch of road, what makes anyone think the much more complicated project of high-speed rail will be finished in just eight years?
What about the long-promised all-day two-way GO trains, another project that’s moving along at a snail’s pace?
High-speed rail is fraught with difficulty. It has been studied for 50 years already. Technical design concerns, plus the high cost of building high-speed rail in a huge country that is sparsely populated, even in its urban Quebec City-to-Windsor corridor, kept shutting the plans down.
In 2009, Ottawa, Ontario and Quebec jointly funded a feasibility study which estimated the cost at $20 billion. That was deemed too costly and the plan was shelved. The latest cost estimate for the Kitchener-to-Toronto section is estimated to be $4 billion.
The Liberals face the voters in June with a well-established reputation of being poor managers of our money. They’d rather we thought about something else instead, and that’s why we’re getting this “news” about high-speed rail. What you make of it is up to you.