This article was written by Chris Turner and was published in the Globe & Mail on March 1, 2025. Chris Turner’s latest book, How to Be a Climate Optimist: Blueprints for a Better World, won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.
To meet the needs of an increasingly electrified society, Chris Turner writes, Canada’s grids must double or even triple their total generating capacity within a generation
Last week, with the country in the grip of a nationalistic fervour the likes of which Canada hasn’t seen in decades, the federal government announced that it was investing $3.9-billion to begin design work on an all-electric high-speed rail (HSR) line from Toronto to Quebec City. This is merely the first phase in a project that – if completed – would take more than a decade and cost in the tens of billions.
That is, to be sure, a big hairy old if, hanging over the pledge of a government in limbo, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau having fewer days left on the job than your typical bullet train has passenger cars. Still, this is serious money, a new Crown corporation (called Alto), and a consortium of developers (calling itself “Cadence”) that includes Quebec’s massive investment fund CDPQ, state-owned French rail giant SNCF and Air Canada. And they’ve been tasked to build not the half-measure option of “high-frequency rail” that had long been expected, but bonafide, bullet-train-propelled HSR.
For long-time rail boosters, this was even bigger news than Canada’s victory on the ice in Boston the following day. Is the era of high-speed rail about to arrive – finally – in Canada?
There is no way to ask this question without inviting the hardest of eye rolls. HSR is, after all, a subject so exhaustively researched by various Canadian governments that the Rick Mercer Report once produced a parody commercial about Canada’s leadership in high-speed rail studies, touting the quality of the paper stock and binding sported by the latest report. The parody itself is more than a decade old – even sneering at plans for highspeed rail in this country amounts to a kind of retro-futuristic nostalgia.
But Canadian politics have been steeped in more than enough mean cynicism of late. I’d prefer instead to set aside the many arguments for why this HSR project might never be completed and consider instead why it should be – why Canadians should indeed settle for nothing less. Whether it amounts to “the largest infrastructure project in Canadian history,” as Mr. Trudeau claimed, this new HSR line would certainly be the most significant investment in sustainable long-distance transportation in this country since at least the 1970s.
And it would serve as a powerful symbol of the dawn of a new era in which Canada is again ready to dream big about its national ambitions – and to build the infrastructure essential for success in the turbulent climate of the 21st century.
There is no denying the turbulence – or fully avoiding it. The climate crisis has obliged the fundamental realignment of the entire global economy – including a new energy paradigm the International Energy Agency has dubbed “the Age of Electricity.” Electrified transport powered by clean energy is the essential building block of this new order.
Feeding on all this calamity is an authoritarian politics of nostalgia best exemplified by U.S. President Donald Trump’s absurd lust for tariffs. This may yet prove to be a strange sort of backhanded gift, as it has jolted Canadians with rare speed and unity into taking nation-building and selfreliance more seriously than they have in generations. It’s a perverse opportunity, but one that shouldn’t be squandered.
To properly address this interlocking web of challenges – a “polycrisis,” the political scientists sometimes call it – Canada must embark on an infrastructure building boom without recent precedent. It needs to electrify much of its transport and at least double its electricity production in the next quarter century to meet demand growth and its climate goals. It needs new transmission lines linking provincial grids that have long viewed each other as rivals and the customers to the south as the real prize. It needs abundant new housing that isn’t just affordable but clean-powered and ready to withstand the trials of this century’s altered climate. And it needs real partnerships with Indigenous communities nationwide to earn permission to build it.
Canada needs all of this and more, as fast as it can be built. And, yes, it would benefit enormously from an HSR line from Toronto to Quebec City as the backbone of a new age of electrified transport and a symbol of Canada’s commitment to investing in the best infrastructure of this century and not the last.
I’ll come back to the climate benefits of electrified trains supplanting driving or flying for intercity travel in its most populous region. First, though, let’s simply gawk at the miracle of high-speed rail. I am excessively biased on this subject. I can report firsthand that HSR is quite simply the pinnacle achievement to date in human transportation.
In 2009, I boarded a highspeed train for the first time – an AVE train, run by the Spanish national passenger rail operator Renfe (among the losing bidders on the Alto project). I travelled from Málaga on the Costa del Sol to the centre of Madrid, a journey of about 500 kilometres, essentially the same as the distance between Toronto and Montreal. I was hurtled across the surface of the earth at speeds greater than 300 kilometres an hour. The ride was smooth, even elegant – the reasonable ticket price included a glass of cold sherry with my lunch. A little more than two hours after departing from the coast, I stepped off the train at Madrid’s Puerta de Atocha station in the centre of the city, feeling absolutely certain I had just experienced the best mode of transport ever invented.
Riding a high-speed train is not just a little better than driving, not slightly less hassle than the grind of air travel, not merely a modest improvement over VIA Rail’s existing service. It is epochally better on all fronts, a revelation, something like the huddled masses of the 19th century must have felt as they abandoned rattling horse and wagon over rutted roads for the ease and baffling speed of the first passenger trains. If and when Canada completes its first high-speed line, the unfortunate souls lurching their way down the 401 in their cars will look downright pitiful as train passengers race past them in a blur. They would also boast carbon footprints smaller by a factor of at least five than those drivers behind the wheels of cars still sporting tailpipes.
I don’t want to focus too tightly on statistics – surely a nation’s ambitions amount to more than a few lines on a graph – but there is no shortage of numbers to indicate how Canada is progressing in pursuit of its intertwined climate change and energy transition goals. The country has pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 40 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. As of 2022, emissions were down 6.4 per cent. The pace and scale of the transition simply must increase dramatically.
This goes far beyond electric trains, of course – and it’s a question not just of the planet’s health but of Canada’s economic competitiveness. The pace in the global energy transition is already being set elsewhere – by the United States, the European Union and especially China. The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act provided a massive boost to clean-technology industries from solar panels to carbon capture, creating momentum that will endure regardless of how much of the act Mr. Trump’s wrecking crew attempts to dismantle. The EU, meanwhile, has been a clean-energy pacesetter for decades, with ambitious targets that include netzero electricity as soon as 2035 in seven EU countries (Germany and France among them) and a ban on the sale of vehicles with internal combustion engines by the same date across the entire region. And China has established itself as by far the world’s leading maker and user of clean energy – not just manufacturing more than 80 per cent of the world’s solar panels, for example, but installing more of them each year than the rest of the world combined. (China is also adding more new track to the planet’s largest HSR network each year than the rest of the world combined. Virtually everything about China’s role in the energy transition amounts to more than the rest of the world combined.)
This poses a simple, vital question to Canadians: From fast trains to electric grids, will we find the wherewithal to keep up? The most basic foundations on which a century of progress in the industrialized world were built – its geopolitics, its economic priorities, its primary energy sources – are now being fundamentally realigned. Will Canada act boldly enough to rebuild its own foundations to ensure another century of success?
I spent much of the past year immersed in the analysis of Canada’s position in this new age on the electrification front, assisting the Canada Electricity Advisory Council (CEAC) with the production of its final report. CEAC was an arm’s-length roundtable of electricity experts assembled by Natural Resources Canada to advise the federal government on how to help Canada’s electricity sector chart a path to net-zero emissions. The council’s conclusions are simultaneously encouraging and deeply worrying.
On the upside, Canada has begun its energy transition with an enviable head start – more than 80 per cent of the country’s electricity is already drawn from emissions-free sources, a gift bestowed by its legacy of large-scale hydro and nuclear power generation. And there has been some real effort already to begin building this cleaner economy across the country, from British Columbia’s pioneering net-zero building codes to Atlantic Canada’s enthusiastic embrace of hyperefficient heat pumps for home heating.
But CEAC’s report also noted a troubling lack of sustained national resolve. To meet the needs of an increasingly electrified society, Canada’s grids must double or even triple their total generating capacity within a generation. No jurisdiction in the country is moving at anywhere near that pace, and CEAC warned of a “bottleneck” threatening electrification efforts across the country – Canada ranks second-worst among its peers in the OECD, for example, in the pace of permitting for new construction projects.
The state of rail construction in Canada has emerged as a particularly reliable punchline in infrastructure circles. The Eglinton Crosstown LRT project in Toronto is years late and still not up and running. Ottawa’s newest LRT line seems to break down every time it snows. The minders of provincial transport policy in Alberta have balked at the prospect of digging a single tunnel under a few blocks in downtown Calgary. This is not the stuff of bold national ambitions.
What is Canada working on right now with any real collective resolve that might invite even modest praise in half a century, let alone a grateful nation’s awe at a big dream realized? This was the thought that haunted me as I finished my work with CEAC. It sent me seeking solace in an old movie about the postwar boom – a National Film Board documentary from 1958 called Trans Canada Summer.
The film is one of those postwar homages to technological progress featuring lingering shots of machinery and fastmoving vehicles, an hour-long celebration of the bustling nation being bound together just then by the construction of the Trans-Canada Highway. The narration – by Pierre Berton, no less – sung the praises of brand-new dams in New Brunswick, nuclear research facilities in Ontario, oil rigs in Alberta and timber exports at the Port of Vancouver.
In the film’s time, there had never before been a paved road across the island of Newfoundland and no fixed link between Cape Breton and the Nova Scotia mainland. Building transportation infrastructure across the vast expanse of the Canadian Shield in Northern Ontario and through the Rocky Mountains was not a whole lot easier to achieve in the 1950s than it was when the first transcontinental railway was constructed nearly a century earlier. Berton would write his own three-volume ode to that project not long after the making of Trans Canada Summer, and his narration in the documentary rolled out one of the core themes of his railway trilogy – the sheer improbability of Canada. “We’ll make these varied, separated regions into a nation despite geography,” Berton intones over the film’s final scenes. “We’ll link them – by railroad, by road. We’ll make them one.”
Those varied, separated regions, however, never quite completed the job of becoming one. And the variance and separation that have persisted since have emerged as major obstacles in the pursuit of Canada’s climate and energy goals. But the ground has shifted with astonishing speed in recent weeks. Strengthening those regional connections – by dropping trade barriers, by building interconnections between electricity grids, perhaps by launching a 21st-century rail network – has emerged overnight as an urgent priority. These can seem like daunting chores for a country that struggles to complete even modest transit expansions. But they could also be the components of an inspiring national project.
Last Thanksgiving, I found myself stuck in brutal stop-and-go traffic on Highway 400 coming into Toronto. It gave me ample time to study the billboards the Ontario government has placed at intervals alongside the highway, boasting about the $28-billion it is spending to widen and refurbish highways across the province – tens of billions, that is, simply to maintain the failing, gridlocked status quo. (Ontario’s Premier also seems determined to build some colossal tunnel whose cost would surely dwarf that budget to mirror the mess at the surface.)
There will before long come a moment when another prime minister will have to choose whether to push beyond grand designs and commit to investing tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to make Canada’s first HSR line a reality. I have no doubt many chins will be ponderously scratched over the price tag. Transport Canada once put the figure at $80-billion, which is likely low. It will unquestionably be an unnervingly large number. But consider it in contrast to $28billion just to keep the status quo lurching along Ontario’s highways for another few years. Perhaps triple that in order to build the backbone of the best intercity transport system humanity has ever devised? Seems almost like a bargain.
What would be a reasonable price to pay, after all, to change the way half the country’s population thinks about transport? To assert boldly that Canadians deserve not just another couple of lanes on a clogged highway but the cleanest, most efficient transportation system the world has to offer? To no longer settle for half-measures when it comes to vital infrastructure? To dream as big as we can about a better future? That’s a ticket well worth the cost.
This goes far beyond electric trains, of course – and it’s a question not just of the planet’s health but of Canada’s economic competitiveness. The pace in the global energy transition is already being set elsewhere – by the United States, the European Union and especially China.
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