Canadian federal government will stop investing in new road infrastructure
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
"Feds will stop investing in 'large' road projects, environment minister says"
(emphasis mine)
> Guilbeault later clarified his remarks, telling reporters Wednesday that he meant to say Ottawa will not put up the cash for "large" road projects.
> "Of course we're funding roads. We have programs to fund roads," he said.
> Guilbeault said Monday the federal government will be there to support provinces paying for maintenance but Ottawa has decided that existing road infrastructure "is perfectly adequate to respond to the needs we have."
> "There will be no more envelopes from the federal government to enlarge the road network," Guilbeault said, according to quotes published in the Montreal Gazette.
> "We can very well achieve our goals of economic, social and human development without more enlargement of the road network."
> Guilbeault said the federal government is intent on moving people out of their cars and into public transportation, which the government has spent billions to build.
> He said the federal government also wants to encourage "active transit," which means getting people to walk and cycle.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240214164536/https://www.cbc.c...
> Feds will stop investing in new road infrastructure, environment minister says
They say the minister later clarified his remarks.
I really wish news sites had a wikipedia style revision history, would do wonders for transparency.
We've had ~100 years of bad ideas that we need to undo. (specifically related to this issue)
This feels similar to the decision to eliminate the penny. "A lot of people won't like this change, but it's the right thing to do and about time we did it." I know of few G8 countries that take those kinds of steps. Now if they could only work on serious day-to-day emergencies that are crippling this country.
Rather than citizens sending tax money to Ottowa so that the Federal Government can choose large projects in each province, it seems fairer and more cost effective to let each province decide what kind of transportation infrastructure makes the most sense for them. Some will choose to widen highways, others will choose to invest in mass transit, and others might decide to lower taxes. But with a couple exceptions like the Trans-Canada Highway, many of the projects that receive funding seem more like local projects that don't need to involve the Federal Government.
Also see https://www.strongtowns.org/highways
The point is another: large roads with melting permafrost, over the Canadian shield are simply untenable in the long term. The answer is going by air and water, air is everywhere, water not much so, but that's is.
Doesn't feel at all look eliminating the penny. Maybe eliminating cash?
Buses are a thing of the past in Canada, they're far too slow and the countryside is too spread out to make feasible routes. They also used to cost almost as much as a plane ticket and take 10x the time. When intercity lines outside dense population centers DID exist they were pretty much empty all the time, hence their extinction.
High speed rail could only serve major centers across the country. Other than the Toronto to Montreal corridor, population centers along the rail lines are too far apart. For example the distance between Toronto Ontario and Kenora Ontario is roughly 1500+km, so a high speed rail trip would still take 6-8 hours between them at best. The train would be mostly empty too because there's just not a lot of people going between non-major cities. It's not like just because a rail line appears between places people are going to start going between those places all that much more. There's just no way the operation costs for high speed rail would be covered by fares from a handful of people.
Air transportation is only good for longer trips between two major centers in Canada. If you're going to/from smaller regional centers for most of Canada the commercial airports don't even exist, and if they do the flights are infrequent and the costs to fly in/out of them are absurd and the flights might even take far longer than just driving. For example to fly between Kelowna BC and Kamloops BC, a 150km drive, costs $300-$500+ for the ticket and takes about 5 hours (not including travel to/from the airport, check-in time + waiting at the gate + waiting for luggage) due to a stop in distant Vancouver. It's just not feasible to airlines to have short direct routes, so they don't. But again you're not going to find airports with commercial flights for about 90% of the towns in the country because the towns are small and don't have airports (except if they don't have roads to connect them like in the north).
To summarize, unless you don't go anywhere or you're only going between Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal by train or flying between distant cities or in a remote village, you're likely going to want to use a car otherwise the alternatives can be absurd.
Connecting just the majoriest of cities, the Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Toronto/Hamilton, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec, and Halifax metro areas would cover, by some quick math, over half the country's population already. You'd get a good chunk more if you add in the rest of the Golden Horseshoe - Waterloo/Kitchener, London, Windsor, Kingston - and a few other major regional centres (your Sudburys or what have you) to break up the trip.
A hub-and-spoke model - with high-speed rail connecting those major centres, conventional rail connecting those to smaller - but still regionally significant - large cities like Kelowna and Kamloops, and then buses from there to further flung places would easily cover a more-than-sizable majority of the country's travel needs.
On the one hand - part of the reason for poor ridership - and thus poor cost efficiency - of buses and trains is a consequence of a 20th century planning mindset that prioritized car infrastructure. And it was a vicious cycle. Service was infrequent and slow, so people preferred cars; people preferred cars, so more infrastructure was built for cars; fewer people road the trains or buses, so economies of scale got worse, service was made even more infrequent and funded even less...so more people buy cars. More people will ride trains and take buses if they run more frequent and are faster, especially as the cost of operating a personal vehicle has gone up. If you build it they'll come and all.
But on the other hand, to me much of your cost analysis is moot. Trains and buses won't make much money in ticket sales - well, so what? How much do roads for cars make in "ticket sales"? The governments have happily funded car-related infrastructure for decades despite the fact that they don't, directly, get a penny back from it. Why do rail and bus have to play by different rules?
To your other point, the hub and spoke trigonometry doesn't apply to Canada, the population's not laid out in that way. It's already for the most part a linear layout produced by a set of parallel competing rail lines running a couple hundred km from the US border. The rail was the factor that made the majority of the country's settlements. In America or other countries I think your point is absolutely fair though, because there's actually vertical girth to the nation that makes an actual hub and spoke system feasible.
Ultimately though I just don't believe anyone would use a train to spend 15-20 hours to get from Toronto to Calgary on high speed rail. Or even 4-6 hours to get from Vancouver to Calgary (likely not possible anyway considering the terrain). They're going to fly.
And almost no one is going to take a train from Regina to Winnipeg when they absolutely need a car at their destination to do anything anyway. Even the proposition of connecting Calgary to Edmonton is massively ridiculed because people understand how exceptionally light-weight your trip must be to forgo a vehicle at either end for the sake of saving maybe an hour by taking a train. It just seems silly considering the realities.
Also bonus of developing secondary cities along routes, which is actually perfect for Quebec-Windsor corridor that contains half Canadian population along 1200km line. It's almost a no brainer if Canada wants to keep immigration flowing and decongest new comers settling in a few cities. Extra bonus it's electrified, Canada can build trains, and it's more comfy than aviation.
Primary problem is Canada/US can't build large scale infra anymore, especially not proper HSR that needs to be elevated, more so to have it route/link to networks that connect urban centres.
Actually, I'm curious - I don't know a lot about China (although I know that they're maybe not the ideal comparison for Canada for any number of reasons). What should I read? Wikipedia says...
The improved mobility and interconnectivity created by these new high-speed rail lines has generated a whole new high-speed commuter market around some urban areas. Commutes via high-speed rail to and from surrounding Hebei and Tianjin into Beijing have become increasingly common, likewise are between the cities surrounding Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou.[144][145][146]
A few points:
* the Federal government already does very little funding of road projects (directly)
* this "announcement" does not signal any increase in funding for the projects supporters here want to see
* this minister doesn't directly control any of the actual departments that would be involved in funding, beyond the approval process that makes pretty much all large projects (roads or otherwise) impossible to get started
* Guilbeault is a central-Canada true Liberal who's viewpoint represents a pretty small perspective. Given the current climate I bet he's really speaking to his base to try and get re-elected, more than any broader pan-Canadian concern.
Why Canada decide to build big new roads? Because those who take τέχνη not ideology know that the climate change means for Canada the essential impossibility to maintain most long roads in most of the country due to increasing permafrost liquefaction, large natural fires and so on. Roads will be more and more substituted by air, not by collective transports or bikes.
That's is. Heavy transports will do their best to go on water when they can, the rest by air. Because most northern countries have no choices.
This announcement pre-supposes the highway network in Canada is sufficient as-is, which is debatable. Even major cities are not well-linked; for example, Highway 1 between Calgary and Vancouver has many areas that are frankly scary to drive on and land-slides have cut off the cities. (Incidentally, there is no direct train between the two cities either, although I guess you could get onto a VIA train in Banff if you really wanted to)
This policy is also contradictory with the increase in the population that the government is also pursuing. You can only cope with so many people in Megacity 1 and 2. If a second-tier city in Canada has a large population increase, they obviously will have to revise and improve the road network.
As such, I can't really see this policy as being serious. My guess is that this is cost-cutting and virtue-signalling to and will be reversed by the next PM. The Liberals will not be lasting more than an year more at most, and they will not be re-elected.
The depressing part of these unserious political "announcements" is that they turn a positive into a negative. "Punitive environmentalism" for the everyday person will make it impossible to meet any climate goals.
That being said it takes two to tango. The Feds are giving guidance here to the Provinces, who are primarily responsible for the inter city transportation network within Provinces, that they're not terribly interested in highway expansion as a further solution to inter city transportation problems. The good Provincial politicians will work with the Feds in moving forward with rail based solutions. The bad ones will be beligerant and move forward with their own solutions and forgo Federal aid.
Setting inter city concepts aside, this government has made enormous investments in intra-city public transit, much more so than previous governments and should be commended for that. There's lots of major, important public transit projects that wouldn't have happened without that Federal funding.
That said, I am a bit more sympathetic to belligerent provinces now than I was before. The culture in Ottawa is based around national elect-ability; which is to say, elect-ability in Quebec and Ontario. This means there is a major cultural difference and a linguistic difference that neither province nor federal government really tries to overcome. Seeing the Western provinces as some sort of Canadian version of Texas is an online over-simplification.
WRT to the intra-city transit, I agree but giving credit here is tough, this should have been the policy since the 60s. Instead we had fiscal austerity, downloading responsibilities to poorly funded municipalities, and other tricks to get a "balanced budget" and we patted ourselves on the back for it.
In reality, this is all much fluff. This article has clearly been put up by oil lobby. Guilbeault is merely a minor minister in a declining minority party, nothing he does will last.
In Canada, environmental debates have turned religious the same way abortion debates have, all backed by so-called conservatives, which really are born-again extreme far right wingers, or something like that. Trump inspired crazies do call the shots, like in many places right now.
In reality, as Premier Smith framed it, this is much more a rural vs. urban kind of debate that won't be addressed until rurality and rightists stops hiding behind oil lobby nonsense, which might never happen because money.
We're stuck.
But, beyond that, they can take buses and trains and subways and streetcars. Like most people do in Montreal and Toronto already.
Beyond beyond that, this doesn't mean all roads in Canadian cities are going to be destroyed. As the article says, the government will still help pay for maintenance. And cities and provinces - who are the ones who are actually responsible for the vast majority of the roads in the country - can still do whatever they like. It's just that the federal government isn't going to help pay for it.
And Canada's Winter climate throughout most of the country is actually a lot colder than the populated parts of Scandinavia. And I'm not talking about the far north in Canada either. Edmonton is far far colder than the populated parts of Scandinavia.
In Calgary, we have issues with safety and drug use on transit, while our mayor and city council commute by car. Moreover, while any action on transit safety gets delayed, the police get turned on the impoverished who make the mistake of being in-or-near city hall.
These issues are all connected, and the safety issue / reputational issues need to be tackled if we want people to appreciate public tarnsit.
Are you canadian? Cause I am, and I support this.
You need at least ONE reliable way to get around year-long, so you can't tell people that they will have to work around inadequate road infrastructure by biking around. Listing it as an alternative to driving in Canada is therefore a false equivalence. Work on public transit that serves people adequately and we can talk about disincentivizing people from driving, but Canada likes to do things backwards recently, which is why I no longer live there.
It's easy to talk down to people when you don't have to contend with their issues. But I don't blame you for doing so. I do blame politicians since it's their job not to.
By the way, I didn't say that I don't support better infrastructure for alternative modes of transportation. But you do it by investing there (and preferably not taking twenty years to complete every project with several extensions and exceeding the budget by a multiple), not with eco-fascist methods of threatening and withholding needed resources.
In less-populated areas, biking/walking is not feasible anyway, the distances are too large regardless of weather (see any documentary of the Amish lifestyle, many have to rely on out-of-community drivers for some errands because distances to store, doctor, etc. are too far for a horse and buggy).
With that being said I have no confidence in Canada's ability to develop a solid public transit network with people like that at the helm. Every project that I've seen recently has taken forever, ran well over budget, and barely covered any ground. If you're working from the idea of removing cars backwards instead of having a vision for a public transit system that is actually pleasant to use and would encourage people to transition organically, of course it's going to be a mess.
But it's beside the point because there exists obvious alternatives to cycling in the winter, which is to use public transportation.
The big things is clearing snow off of the paths. Canadians will spend all day in -30C out skiing. Half an hour on a bike is nothing