Alberta has a plan to create a “master plan” for a huge passenger rail network around the province! Really.
The central showpiece will be a high-speed super-train whizzing between Calgary and Edmonton – powered by mighty engines that, presumably, generate steam produced by coal from the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains.
I jest. They’ll run on hydrogen, of course.
Whatever they run on, these imaginary trains, we can be pretty sure it won’t be electricity generated from wind or sunshine. This is Danielle Smith’s Alberta, after all, where the sun isn’t allowed to shine at night.
Way back on Monday, before more news broke out, the government’s news release about its plan to spend an insignificant $9 million drafting the so-called rail master plan was positively poetic. It sounded as if it might have been penned by Pierre Berton, the iconic Canadian author of pop histories gone now these 20 years.
This was supposed to make a nice distraction after the introduction of some very controversial and unpopular bills.
But even though Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen told a news conference at Calgary’s Heritage Park the government is serious, all they’re likely to be serious about is the boondoggle potential. If anything ever gets built – a really big if now that we know what they really think about public transportation – it’ll likely only be the ritzy tourist train to Banff.
But the distraction might still work because Albertans have a romantic attachment to the rails and an enthusiasm for new-fangled technology. This makes talk of high-speed trains a hardy perennial of Alberta politics – and a terrible idea that both left and right can embrace.
That’s probably why the piece below, which I published on Feb. 7, 2014, just a little more than 10 years ago, was one of my least popular columns ever. Rail romantics of all political persuasions hated it.
A few things have changed in the past decade. Alison Redford isn’t premier any more. The Van Horne Institute appears to be in bureaucratically induced coma. The coal-fired plants are gone, or converted to fossil gas. Paula Simons sits in the Senate of Canada, having had a great story idea turn into a lifetime lottery winner. And the cost estimates, undoubtedly, have risen dramatically.
As illustrated by this rerun, which hasn’t changed either, some ideas are like the proverbial bad penny. They just keep turning up. You hardly even need to change the headline.
Anyway, here’s the 2014 story that in all but the details noted above and the links that don’t work anymore could have been written Monday night, in 2024.
DJC
High-speed rail in Alberta: a terrible idea that won’t go away
The Van Horne Institute? The Van Horne Institute? As in William Cornelius Van Horne, late of the Michigan Central Railway, the Chicago and Alton Railway, the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Cuba Railway Company?
Well, whooo, whooo, whoooooo-oooo better to advocate the loony idea of a high-speed rail link between two Prairie metropolises separated by a fine highway that takes less than three hours to drive in most weather conditions and with two of the industrialized West’s most primitive public transit systems at either end?
It doesn’t seem to say on the website if that’s the Van Horne this newest “institute” had in mind when it set up shop, though I might have missed it, but one look at the directors that grace its board gives a pretty good indication he’s probably the guy: representatives of railway companies, petroleum companies, railway petroleum companies, construction companies, engineering companies, electrical companies, telephone companies, the usual smattering of folks from acceptable departments of government and the University of Calgary, and one guy who runs a food bank. You get the picture.
Since an Alberta Legislature committee has been holding hearings lately into this fast-train idea — which in this province seems to rear its head about every three years, the last times being in 2011 during the Progressive Conservative leadership campaign and before that in 2009 as a newsworthy idea to burnish the image of the government of then-premier Ed Stelmach — it should be no surprise it’s back on the agenda in 2014.
And here we go again. According to a report by the Van Horne Institute, which is somehow affiliated with the University of Calgary, it could cost as little as $2.6 billion to build a line on existing CPR right of way but about $5 billion to do a bang-up job, and $5.2 billion for a superlative new line on which trains could run at a breathtaking 320 k/mh.
OK, those are big numbers. But let’s just stop for a moment because it is said here there’s no way the basic project can be completed for $5.2 billion, let alone the bells-and-whistles version — and, by gosh, those whistles are going to have to be loud if this sucker is moving at 320 kilometres per hour!
In 2008, a proposal for a similar line in California between San Francisco and Los Angeles, 614 kilometres, put the cost at $33 billion US! That has since gone up to $68.4 billion — and, people, when you start talking mega-projects, you are entering the land of the cost overrun.
OK, it’s a little less than half the distance between Calgary and Edmonton — 276 kilometres — and the countryside is less crowded, so maybe we’re only looking at $20 billion or so by the time the dust has settled. But $5.2 billion? Just forget about it!
Back in September 2011, when Alison Redford was the third-place candidate in the race to lead the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party, she had something pretty sensible things to say about this idea. To wit: think of all the schools and hospitals you could build with the money it would take to build a high-speed rail link!
Of course, Ms. Redford said a lot of sensible things back in those days and we know now she can’t always be depended upon to follow through.
So there’s probably more hope to be found in the fact well-read and respected journalists like the Edmonton Journal’s Paula Simons are skeptical. In an excellent column, Ms. Simons observed that despite all the boosters’ fantastic promises, there’s no way this project will succeed without fully developed public transportation systems at either end, as exist in Europe where high-speed trains are a partial success.
Otherwise, I say, it’s just a big boondoggle and a transfer of taxpayers’ money to big corporations’ pockets.
So let’s review the principal problems with this idea, which haven’t changed since I first wrote about it for the now-departed Saint City News in 2009:
The idea fails for three principal reasons:
- Providing power to run the trains would be both a financial and environmental burden
- The line itself would create grave environmental problems
- The project would cost a fortune and fail commercially
Modern high-speed passenger trains are not pushed forward on billowing sails. They need electricity, and lots of it, to move. Just how much is subject to vigorous disagreement — they may be more efficient than passenger airplanes, or less efficient than automobiles. It depends on which scientist you’re talking to, and often who he or she works for.
But one thing is certain. In Alberta, the power required to drive fast trains from Edmonton to Calgary would still have to come mostly from coal-fired plants. That means greenhouse gas emissions. So while the train itself would be superficially “clean,” its power would not be.
So if we build this line, expect calls soon thereafter for a nuclear power plant — another spectacularly expensive technology that is superficially clean but really isn’t.
High-speed trains are almost unimaginably fast. The old ones run at about 250 kilometres per hour. An experimental train in Japan, where they don’t have to contend with blowing snow or Chinooks, has hit speeds in excess of 580 km/h!
There are deer in Alberta. They can jump high fences. Can you imagine what happens when a train hits a deer — let alone a pickup truck — at that speed?
So forget about level crossings anywhere between Calgary and Edmonton — and add that to the cost. You can bet on it most high-speed rail boosters haven’t.
Expect significant impacts on animal migration, surface roads and existing rail lines. Get ready for lots of bird deaths along the power lines as well. This being Alberta, count on there to be unexpected and expensive impacts for farmers along the route. So be prepared for significant upward impact on initial cost estimates.
The most compelling argument against this idea, however, is the gaping flaw in its business model touched on by Ms. Simons.
It simply cannot succeed without billions of dollars of infrastructure at either end. A big parking lot in Edmonton and Calgary isn’t going to do the trick.
Travellers will not use a high-speed rail connection without efficient public transport at the other end. If they can’t get around the other city — and they can’t now — they will drive. The trip takes three hours. They can even stop for coffee in Red Deer!
Oh, and one other thing. Ms. Simons suggests security on a high-speed train line would be less rigorous than at a major airport. Don’t bet on it. High-speed rail is a major target for terrorists everywhere it’s been built and requires security checks every bit as intensive and time-consuming as in airports, even Edmonton’s.
So two more multi-billion-dollar mega-projects would be needed just to make the business plan make sense.
As I said in 2011, this is a political idea, not a practical one — and with another election looming, it now may seem like a fine distraction to Ms. Redford and her advisors.
But if Albertans are looking for an environmental project that makes sense, we should spend our bitumen billions on such unsexy but workable ideas as public transit in cities and a government-run bus system for rural areas, both of which would offer huge environmental and financial benefits at a much more modest cost.
Now and then, whenever there was, either, nothing going on, or there were so many crises afoot, some genius in the Alberta government trots out the completely insane idea, again, of a trans-provincial railway network. Yes, like that well-loved Monorail episode from the ‘Simpsons’, where some grifter rolls into Springfield and convinces the entire city that they will be better in every way if they have a Monorail. (Queue the song & dance…) As everyone should know, the Monorail was built, but it proved to be a complete disaster, causing mayhem and destruction in its wake.
This project has been reviewed many, many, many times, and each time it failed to even be considered viable on every level. Of course, the UCP trots the idea out again, to impress the rural bumpkins and the Hill People, and declares that this time it’s for real. Well, yeah. It’s for real, alright. Considering Queen Danielle’s addiction to various types of boondoggles, I can see this as being a more ambitious exercise in crazy. Unlike other high-speed trains in other parts of the world, Alberta’s will NEVER run on electricity. At least not the kind that comes from the usual, sustainable sources. Rather, it will run on electricity that is generated from powerful nuclear reactors. Yes, Alberta will become a nuclear power. Take that, Trudeau. And failing the electricity option, the train will run on hydrogen, though there is no viable example of such a high-speed train using a hydrogen power source. But, who cares? We want that train, so hubba, hubba.
And the weirdness will be even more impressive when there’s a theoretical estimated allocation of billions and billions of dollars to the project, the reactor(s) and the railway’s construction. It will be announced as the biggest project in Canadian history, and Alberta will do it without Ottawa’s help, because Alberta is the most important province ever.
Honestly, the pile of B.S. in Alberta is getting to be so large and high, you need wings to stay above it.
Well said. Big dreams (nightmares) from tiny brains.
If I was going to write a story, and having to use trains as my main focus, it would probably go something like this in a first draft.
JK proposes linking Alberta railway with line being built in Alaska; that would go across the Yukon and NWT to the north east corner of Alberta- because of the left leaning politicians in BC.
Having major discussions with FN Chiefs to get them on board with the benefits of economic development for them, especially since they have suffered so much due to the wildfires.
Then I would make a deal with a Canadian railway that took over/ merged with an American one.
Next is put money up for a proposed railway line for bringing tourists to those idyllic mountain spaces. Unfortunately that fails to happen, but since we don’t want taxpayers to foot the bill, we will be economically prudent and use the line to transport the coal from said mountains to the US. Having made the business connections with the apropos governors in Feb .( coal mining states) .
This covers the taxpayers from being sued by Australian coal Magnates, and with the 35k view perimeter, no one will see the decimation of the pristine land. Win,win for all Albertans.
There may have to be an extra chapter, if the unions (10,000 workers) negotiations aren’t settled ,and they could go out by May 22— causing “major supply chain issues, like Canada has never seen”.
Still a work in progress, may have to shelve the plans for a later release, due to research constraints. Fiction, fantasy or chronicles of Marlaina??
This is a very foolish venture, while there are so many other areas of concern that aren’t being looked after by the UCP. Knowing how the UCP are, this will end up costing us a fortune. When the Alberta PCs were in power, this idea surfaced, and the high speed rail plans were shot down, because of the costs, and it being impractical.
Nothing to see here, just another way for Alberta’s TBA government to funnel money to their political owners.
If I was to give this idea a grade, it would be a D, which not coincidentally is what distraction starts with. Its probably also not a coincidence this has been a go to idea that past Alberta governments have regularly trotted out when talking about the present was starting to get too unpleasant.
On a more positive note for us, the distraction didn’t work out in the past, but to be fair, Smith and crew are much better at and more diligent about spin and communications than say Stelmach. However, I wouldn’t give this an A for effort either. That train in the picture does not look very high speed to me. So it seems like they are just going through the motions here. Although perhaps that picture was intentional, say a modern prototype in the picture, might lead to more questions than the UCP was prepared to answer. So better not to make the idea too real, but just stick with vague fuzzy nostalgia.
But that picture does also say something about Smith and the UCP – high speed trains powered by steam. Only the UCP could take us backward with an idea that is supposed to move us forward.
DC, interesting. I love trains, but I don’t see this happening in Alberta or elsewhere in Canada. While I am by no means an expert on NAFTA or its successor, the US-Mexico-Canada agreement, I believe most economists saw NAFTA as killing any opportunities for high speed rail (HSR) at the provincial level, because it prevented technology transefers and preferential treatment for locally manufactured rolling stock that would otherwise be a major benefit from development of HSR. In contrast, China, the world’s HSR leader, has been able to use its planned economy and enormous market to force foreign manufacturers to allow technology transfer and ensure in-China manufacturing. According to the Wikipedia entry for HSR in China, one of the economic justifications has been to develop an indigenous (i.e. Chinese) HSR equipment industry: “The expansion into HSR is also developing China into a leading source of high-speed rail building technology. Chinese train-makers have absorbed imported technologies quickly, localized production processes, and even begun to compete with foreign suppliers in the export market. Six years after receiving Kawasaki’s license to produce Shinkansen E2, CSC Sifang can produce the CRH2A without Japanese input, and Kawasaki has ended cooperation with Sifang on high-speed rail.” [Footnotes omitted]. In short, both Alberta and Canada are probably shut out of HSR unless significant amendments to free trade agreements can be negotiated.
Another red herring tossed out for its perceived value as a distractor.
Economic corridor? Maybe the minister responsible has spotted one, its difficult ascertain. The legislature’s very own Maga Nut’s vacuous mind seemed not to have sprung into action, or to have been overly troubled by the actions of the Coutts highway blockaders.
A comment re US cost, enc.
In 2008, a proposal for a similar line in California between San Francisco and Los Angeles, 614 kilometres, put the cost at $33 billion US! That has since gone up to $68.4 billion — and, people, when you start talking mega-projects, you are entering the land of the cost overrun.
I am not sure how much better Canada/Alberta might do especially after watching the Ottawa rail transit fiasco but quoting US prices is questionable. The US model for building even subway lines let alone a high-speed rail line is horrible. It is as if they have the Keystone Cops + the Mafia running the projects. IIRC Spain brought their latest high-speed line in on time and on budget.
Actually the 70s were kind of great, in an oily sort of way. I regularly commuted between my Innisfail farm when I was a U of A student, by using the “Dayliner” running on the CP line. The stewardess was nice, the coffee was fresh, and the sandwiches were white (you can’t have everything). It was not high speed but a reasonable ticket price for a working person, with a pleasant and relaxed trip that ended on your choice of Whyte or Jasper Avenues in Edmonton or in downtown Calgary if you went the other way. The Fed Liberals, along with the Cons working for the railways, allowed CN and CP to drop passenger service along with all the branch rail lines serving the rural prairies, ultimately killing the Wheat Pool Cooperatives and their grain elevators.
My grandfather, from east of Stettler, used to tell the story of how, when the railroad wanted to discontinue passenger service from Lacombe to the Saskatchewan border, a delegation of residents of the area went to Edmonton to meet with a representative of the railroad. The railroad executive listened to their concerns sympathetically, then at the end of the meeting thanked them for coming and invited them to give him their train tickets, so he could validate them for a refund. Sheepishly the delegation had to admit that they hadn’t taken the train to get to Edmonton.
Personally, I think it was paving the highways that was the death knell for train service in rural Alberta.
Bob: It was also the death knell for many family businesses in small town Alberta. DJC
Not only that but the improvement over the last 50-60 years in fuel efficiency killed the rest of them, as motorists can now speed past the places they were likely to stop “in between”
Y’all seen those abandoned rest area/ gas station / family restaurant and amusement parks, that was their business model.
Bob: your apocryphal story validates the old aphorism about people that “there is nothing so old-fashioned as the desire to appear modern.” The same sort of thing happened with the abandonment of the branch line rail system for moving grain from the farm gate to the rail-head in the 1980s. The highways were good and it was fun driving a tandem truck, at least for a while. The railways kept upping the rail car spotting requirements for the elevators every few years, progressively bankrupting the elevator system and making farmers buy ever larger trucks to subsidize the railways’ profits. Many of the old bucks like your grandfather thought it was progress until they got the bill for highway upgrades and their kids were left with the choice of expanding to afford the railways, going into cattle to go broke slowly, or just quitting. In my experience, some of the most unaware of them came from the areas of Alberta, like Stettler-east, that were most dependent on the branch-line rail system. They are almost all gone now and the next wave of farm consolidation is now picking up speed with giant investment trusts buying up vast tracks of prairie farm land for their serfs to farm. Agriculture has always been a leading sector of the economy and we are well on our way to industrial feudalism there.
Your little urban democracies will not survive under it any better than democracy and the rule of law has survived in rural Alberta today. Come to think of it, what is Bill 18 or is it 20 about anyway?
I’m not saying this specific “plan” is a good idea (I’m definitely a proponent of HSR between Edmonton and Calgary, and generally expanding rail connections for Alberta, but I wouldn’t trust Smith and the UCP to do it), but I also don’t agree with many of the arguments you’ve made against it.
We have “a fine highway that takes less than three hours to drive” does not strike me as a good reason to build rail, anymore than our over-abundance of roads with Edmonton and Calgary holds water as an argument against expanding public transit. Many people don’t have cars, and even for those that do we want fewer of them driving them. You might suggest that for those we at least have busses that can drive on those highways, but they’re dropping passengers off in the same transit-light cities as the train would.
And as for security, I wouldn’t say I’m an expert on the matter but I’ve taken a few trains in Europe. And I’ve never encountered any security even halfway approaching that of an airport.
Two things:
1. We can’t get our act together to build an urban LRT for an entire quadrant in a city of 1.6M people to get to the downtown core. This was a simple line that was supposed to have been completed in 2025, according to an old master plan. Instead, there is constant bickering about adding a complicated extension to areas that are already served well by public transit and which already have LRT lines in their quadrants. The people of the SE quadrant are not served at all by LRT and it’s almost 2025. Where is the LRT line?
Plus, there’s a vocal opponent who often speaks out against the Green Line. He’s a retired resource millionaire who lives in the mansion enclave of Bearspaw. Yes, folks, some of the houses out there have carriage houses and were inspired by European castles. Anyways, the thinks the working class (“poors”, as the kids say) in one quadrant don’t need LRT. Let them use cars! And we should listen to him why, exactly? Rich man who doesn’t pay city taxes says blue collar folks don’t need LRT to get to work. He certainly wouldn’t use public transit if he did live here, which he does not. One rich old white guy vs. 400,000 commoners of various, assorted colors. Who do you think will win? This is Alberta.
2. Japan.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/07/02/national/japan-trains-cars-carbon-emissions/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/japanese-rail-operator-now-entirely-powered-by-renewable-energy
https://japan-forward.com/jr-west-announces-first-ever-renewable-energy-powered-shinkansen-trains/
https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/society/general-news/20230702-120028/
This is would be expensive for a population of 4.8M. Japan’s rail lines were already in place. Their plans involve converting existing infrastructure.
The idea that won’t go away rears it ugly head again. Just a cover for that private tourist train to Banff, so tourists can skip Calgary altogether and spend all their money in Banff. Something, something Banff Centre.
BTW, are we still talking about the hyperloop?
“Rich old white guy”?
Hmmmm… who could that be? Brett Wilson?
Ah, yes. Alberta’s other clown show. About a decade ago, he wanted to underwrite a Ricky Gervais world tour, claiming he was worth $1.5B and could do anything, even get a date with Canadian chanteuse, Sarah McLachlan. (Well Wilson did date her during some Vancouver Winter Olympics event.) since then, Wilson has become even more boastful about his celebrity and importance. However, his sudden and public ejection from the Dragon’s Den show may have soured him. He’s spent a lot of time on Twitter slamming the ABNDP, Notley, Trudeau, Biden, Globalists, and claiming he has regular confabs with Elon Musk. That alone explains a lot. Wilson went into some hilarious damage control after the CBC put out a press release regarding his departure. No doubt Wilson put the CBC on his personal hit list because of that. The best thing about the MacLean’s interview is that he both deflected and reinforced all of the CBC’s statements about his departure. Comedy ensues…
https://macleans.ca/work/entrepreneur/on-dragons-who-cant-make-deals-kevin-oleary-and-what-he-thinks-of-the-bachelorette
Wilson and his fellow travellers are clearly not serious people.
This idea about the Banff Centre, how would tourists skip Calgary altogether, and why ? It’s certainly not lacking in amenities, other than a usable transit system.
The fact that there’s less than five million people living here is MORE of an argument for building out public services than an argument against, it’s a very serviceable population for the untold wealth of the province.
These are policy decisions, made for a reason, and not because of poverty. Please be real.
A minor quibble about your 2014 column, David – “…two of the industrialized West’s most primitive public transit systems at either end…” – I don’t know what Edmonton’s public transit system is like, but I’ve been impressed by Calgary’s ever since I moved here in the late 70s.
I grew up in Toronto, and it was very easy to imagine that the TTC’s mission statement stated that every transit passenger was an adversary and their plans for getting from Point A to Point B must be made as difficult as possible, if not thwarted altogether. When I first arrived in Calgary, I was gobsmacked when a bus drives saw me running (from some distance away) and waited for a couple of minutes at the next stop for me. Even more surprising was that this wasn’t an aberration.
I suppose you’re right about chinooks in Japan, but I’m pretty certain they have snow, they also have deer and other animals, as well as *checks notes* earthquakes and tsunamis ?
China built a HSR line all the way through the perilous Tibetan mountains, I don’t think that it’s necessarily the conditions that are the issue. We don’t usually fly planes when there’s a huge snowstorm I doubt that trains would be all that different.
The main reason why it wouldn’t be a great fit now is the shoddy state of transit in this province, and that’s an intentional creation of policy that I don’t see changing ever; as long as this province is dominated by foreign oil.
Something else I’ve heard is that because of CP right of way and their extremely favourable gift of a lease, it’s basically a non started using the already graded track that taxpayers paid for so it would be necessary to run an entirely new line with all the land appropriation and engineering etc that would entail.
So yeah, I would say the UCP aren’t being honest; but the actual reasons we can’t have this in Alberta is the same reason as all the other things, intentional policy decisions made decades ago to enrich the business class.
As long as we act like they should be the folks in charge this is what we are going to get.
Yeah and I will add CP/CN LEASES are also a policy decision to enrich a particular class of crown loyalists and this is also (as all policy decisions are) ultimately reversible.
Just sayin.
As I commented on Kelly C’s column in the Globe, this announcement of a nine million dollar plan is so obviously a “shiny object” distraction from the disasters of Bill 18 and 20. She thought it was a marvellous idea but the citizens of exurbs like Airdrie or St Albert can’t even get downtown in a timely manner, let alone find a parking spot.
“Oh there was a time in this fair land when the railroads did not run” G. Lightfoot
High speed rail between Calgary and Edmonton, that ought to be fun. Wonder who gets the contract to build it. Can we have a poll? It has been some years since I’ve driven the highway between the cities but I do recall it was fine, made good time, got a speeding ticket. If it takes 3 hours to drive, why take a train. By the time you park, get on the train, and it gets going, you could have made a fair distance driving.
You make very good points regarding the impact on wild life. Given we have climate change and an increasing number of wildfires which certainly burn like it was hell itself, that won’t work well for a fast rail system. Wild fires can burn roads, rails, whole towns.
If Smith wants a railway from Edmonton to Calgary it would be best if it were built under ground, like some of the rail lines in the Netherlands
Spending that kind of money on rail is not a smart business move. As you suggest local bus service would be so much better.
Wonder what hair brained scheme the UPC is going to come up with next.
Well, at roughly 300 km Edmonton–Calgary and a train speed of 320km/hr, even with a short stop in Red Deer you are looking at ~1 hour travel time.
A modern ticketing system would allow you to buy a ticket while sitting at home and store it on your smartphone. Just flash it at a turnstile to walk on to your train with its reserved seat. You can relax, read, or maybe get some work done. Any decent trail will have WiFi.
No parking problems when you arrive; no real worries about the weather in winter.
Well, at least now we know why Danielle chopped $9 million out of Edmonton’s budget. The $6 million out of Calgary’s budget is for contingencies.
Always love the photos and captions, hilarious!
Trans Alta just pulled three, count ’em, three wind farm plans worth untold fortunes and carbon credits due to Marlaina’s new restrictions aka deterrents to renewables.
Her fantasy train definitely won’t run on wind other than the kind she blows out her arse or Watreous’s, aka Strathcona Resources’, natural gas; the other dreamer in the rails across Alberta scheme.
Watreous even expects Parks Canada to approve a gondola from Norquay, which he owns, to Sulphur mountain. Parks keeps saying no and he keeps asking. What part of No means No don’t these privileged modern day oil barons get? And Dani, their hand maid.
We know farmers aren’t on that rail corporate board, history speaks volumes
Also one more point of contention; the folks saying everyone would just rather drive has never taken the Red Arrow bus service from Calgary to Edmonton; not only does it not take really all that much longer, you’re not the one driving; which makes the trip a WHOLE lot safer and more relaxing. Now imagine it was a train with regional connections in Edmonton, Calgary, and Red Deer. Now imagine the train is even MARGINALLY faster than driving. Sure, Johnny Righand isn’t going to want to park his Ram, who cares !? Nearly everyone else that lives in between those locations (the vast majority of people in the province) would benefit.
Who actually likes driving the QE2 expressway? How many people die a year driving it? Why does Jasper need to be developed like Banff is? What makes the railways so powerful that they still dictate the terms of the relationship, all these years later ?
Like y’all know not everyone in the province owns a car, right ? And if they did, that’s a net negative for everyone??
Sometimes good ideas get hijacked by bad people for opportunistic reasons ; that doesn’t make it a bad idea.
Funny how really bad ideas keep surfacing from this UCP government. The rail idea noted above, the starting of an Alberta Pension Plan about 15 years ago and shot down in the days when Conservatives actually listened to voters. I can hardly wait to see what is the next bad idea previously shot down will come to the surface.
In many ways Alberta and BC are the Jekyll and Hyde of the Western Cordillera, a divide ofttimes of continental magnitude. But, for all that, Alberta, for 44 years as one of the twin babies of confederation (until Mother Ottawa adopted that screeching new-foundling in ‘49)—is as stuck with that middle brother, paid to just stay out on the West Coast, vape mushrooms and do Mr Natural resource extraction, as they both are with their oldest sister, ever lamenting her spinsterhood since Papa Lester chased away her beau (way back in ‘67). The boomin’ bitumen province is old enough by now to know that you can pick your enemies but you can’t pick your family.
BC and Alberta share important aspects, too: BC has its little piece of the Great Plains on the other side of the Rockies in the northeastern, gassy part of the province while Alberta has its little piece of wine country in the Okanagan and on the Big Island of Vancouver, its diaspora growing in leaps and gulps every time Edmonton boycotts BC vintages or abuses its own healthcare professionals.
Still, siblings with benefits never admit it, even as Alberta pipes its green dilbit goo to BC (cuz then China won’t burn so much dirt coal) and BC pipes back—uh— different kinda pipe and different kinda green (Bubba Kush, Gorilla Glue, White Widow, and Willie Nelson)™.
But for all their inherited traits, the contrasts are stark: BC’s 2nd woman-premier was an MLA before becoming a right-wing radio talk-show host, then turned up again to become caretaker premier after the founder of their governing party was summarily turfed for lying, and always had a chipper smirk and messed-up hair as if answering a Saturday morning door-knock after an all night pyjama with her BFFs; Alberta’s premier wears her hair down.
Nevertheless, BC could give some good advice to its baby sister east of the Rockies: watch out for those green pennies—they can cost a lot, as many times more as the number of times they turn up.
Yes, yes, a high speed train from Redmonton and Cowtown keeps turning up like a bad penny, and most people take it for what it is—baiting the Opposition, distracting from disturbing policies, sugar-coating crazy agendas, letting conservative MLAs stampede back home from the legislative assembly for the weekend—or, at 320kph, even for the evening, and so on. For those who’ve heard it all before it’s just silly political games that’ll soon be forgotten and not worth troubling much about.
But we had our own bad penny out here in BC, too. The massive WAC Bennet Dam was completed in 1968 on the upper Peace River, flooding the pass through to the resulting Williston Lake, filling a huge reach of the Rocky Mountain Trench and, thus, also creating controversy by joining the Pacific and Arctic drainage-basins and their hitherto separate aquatic ecosystems, drastically altering downstream flows which impacted juvenile fish nursery channels in the Athabasca-Peace delta in Alberta, while completely inundating the traditional hunting & gathering territory of the Tsay Keh Dene (“Sekani”) First Nation in BC.
Just 12 years later, but before these negative impacts were widely known, the Peace Canyon Dam was completed 14 miles below the first dam. As the once-mighty Peace wended into the plains, with its highest-latitude arable land in the world, the site for a third dam, Site-C, was occasionally proposed to various BC governments of the day, but reminding of and adding to the controversies already created seemed to assure that Site-C was one of those bad pennies that kept on turning up when political circumstances required, but kept on being rejected for the reasons noted.
That is, until Christy Clark, caretaker premier for two years, won a mandate of her own in 2013–back when the NDP Opposition thought its 20-point lead in pre-election polls meant it didn’t need to show up for the campaign. BC voters came to regret the next four years of her disastrous BC Liberal government. The list of perfidies is too numerous to mention—except for one: Site-C.
Justifiably down in the polls in 2017, and a new NDP leader who wasn’t afraid to punch back, the shadowy cabinet cabal for which Christy was only ever a poster-girl decided it was time to dust off the Site-C proposal and cast her as the Edith-Prickly-like booster of the plan, keeping her unnerving ebullience as far away from the Lower Mainland as possible for the upcoming election.
Environmentalists frothed with alarm and anger at the announcement. Now BC had two bad pennies, Christy and Site-C. The BC Liberals, now 16 years old, unloved, distrusted and trailing the NDP, decided to drown out their Green and Dipper rivals, each vowing to cancel the project if and when elected to power, with the simple paean of ‘free-enterprise’ and ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ versus the NDP “Party of No”, the alleged anti-free-enterprise, anti-jobs threat to all that was holy. Christy applied her native loudness to the task by adding her own two-cents, counter-vowing that she would rush Site-C construction so’s to have it beyond the point of no-return by election day. Yeah, and then let the voters decide…
The official campaign began, Christy spent the bulk of hers stumping at the dam site to about construction 2,000 workers from the Peace River region, at the time experiencing one of its recurring slumps in the natural gas industry. They, at least, would vote for the BC Liberals —because they always did, anyway.
Meanwhile, absented from the Lower Mainland where most voters live, the BC Liberals ended up losing several seats in Vancouver and adjacent cities, coming up one seat shy of a majority. No telling how many more they might have lost had Christy not stayed so far away.
It was BC’s first minority government in 65 years since Conservative WAC Bennet crossed the floor to the upstart Socreds, managed to topple the minority and go on to become premier for the next two decades, until 1972 when BC elected its first NDP government to a three year term.
Also for the first time, in 2017, BC elected three Greens.
As the party with the most seats, the BC Liberals were recognized as government. Within the month the Green-Dippers formed an alliance and voted no confidence in the Throne Speech. The Governor refused Christy’s request to call another election; she then resigned both her leadership and her seat in a snit, solving the tricky problem of a Speaker having to break tie votes for the new Green-Dipper government’s bills. One bad penny down.
However, there was still that toxic green penny of Site-C. Despite strident promises to stop Site-C on campaign, Premier John Horgan’s first job was to pursue the books and the progress to date, revealing that he’d be forced to announce that expenditures were too far sunk and writing it off—and laying-off all those workers— would be too much. Remind, he was also seeing BC Liberal books for the first time, and the news was grim: BC’s debt had increased by 25% in just the last four years and BC Hydro, the venerable public enterprise, was teetering on the brink of insolvency because the BC Liberals had been stashing tens of billions of dollars of “deferred debts” onto its books to make their annual budgets look balanced—but just as likely to bankrupt BC Hydro so’s to sell it for pennies on the dollar to its insider cronies. With BC Hydro legislatively forced to buy private “run-of-river” power at several times the cost than it could produce for itself, writing-off Site-C would collapse the continent’s cheapest source of electric power—BC citizens and industries had been enjoying rates about one-third the North American average.
In 2007, Site-C was estimated to cost $6.6 billion. By expected completion in 2025, the estimate is now $16 billion. Not counting impacts on Treaty 8 and non-treaty (BC) First Nations, agriculture, wildlife, and the environment.
So, my Alberta compatriots, remember how a bad penny —in BC’s case, two bad pennies—might seem ignorable at first flip, but it can really cost a lot if you lose the toss.
Smith can name this crown corporation Taggart Transprovincial Railroad, and ride around cosplaying as Dagny Taggart, foiling the nefarious plans moochers, parasites and looters, who wish to seize the wealth of productive capitalists, through the use of Reason and rational selfishness. A few cigs while she’s doing this will add to the authenticity of her role. Ayn would approve.
Too bad she won’t be able to find any Reardon Metal for her tracks. And I don’t think she’ll ever realize that John Galt hasn’t left the building, because he never existed.
I grew up in Vancouver so I remember the doom and gloom about the Seabus, that nobody would ever take it, that passengers would get seasick and vomit over other passengers etc. None of that came true – well maybe there was some vomit, but that happens on buses and cars too. The Seabus is well used and reduces the number of buses on the two bridges connecting the North Shore and Downtown Vancouver.
I also remember the doom and gloom about the Skytrain – too expensive, too many level crossings (are there any?), too loud (rubber coated wheels made it pretty quiet), not enough coverage (how many lines are there today?). Vancouver’s Skytrain is a success because city/regional planners were able to look past the complaints and see the value, not necessarily today, but in the not too distant future.
And then the Skytrain was not going to have drivers, that will never work, it won’t be safe etc, etc. The system has run since 1985 without drivers. Although they did use drivers when the Royal Family was on it.
The doom and gloomers will stop all progress because there is some perceived problem that they will endlessly whine and winge about. Planners should look at their concerns, but see these as being absolute limitations but find ways to address them while looking to the future. One of the things that I do agree with the worrying class is that people will need cars at either Edmonton or Calgary (or even Red Deer), so the obvious fix for that is to build proper public transit in those cities so cars are not needed.
Metro Vancouver has funded their public transit with a gas (Translink) tax which in the Vancouver area works out to be about $0.185/litre. There are other gas taxes in BC that are specific to transportation for the Province or for areas like Metro Victoria.
One of the few times I agreed with Danielle Smith is when she stated that we can’t just keep adding traffic lanes to our highways.
It is time to seriously look at moving people other than in private cars. Let’s not just dismiss an idea because it seems pie in the sky but look seriously at the long term benefits.
why can’t you keep adding lanes to a highway. if there is room, its fine. now if you’re concerned about the enviornmental impact, don’t think Smith cares about the enviornment. People tend to think gas from vehicles are a problem and yes it is, but have you ever seen the figures regarding carbon from plastic. Makes carbon from cars look like a pimple on Trump’s ass.
Just another shiney object to move attention away from the fiasco in health and in education.
Not to mention CPP, the pending Municipal bill etc. the list is getting longer each day.
Danielle might start this Alberta rail renaissance by just running a dedicated bus between Edmonton International Airport, a couple of downtown hotels and the crummy VIA station in the northwestern industrial area of Edmonton to allow potential passengers to connect with VIA’s twice-weekly train to and from Jasper and Vancouver. Offering up a provincial contribution to encourage the feds to bump up the abysmal frequency of that expensive, low-ridership vestige of our transcontinental rail passenger service would be nice, too.
But why take on practical and affordable solutions based on an existing service when you can get more media attention by offering up hopeless fantasy projects that will allow you to dole out millions for hollow consulting projects undertaken by friends of your government and will produce nothing but more photo-op events and consulting studies?
The public pays again.