Alto wants to build Canada's first high-speed train. In August, the federal Crown corporation published an 84-page case for it, pricing the project at $60 to $90 billion and calling it nation-building. I spent the past week reading that document page by page, checking its own footnotes and its own numbers against outside sources, including the C.D. Howe Institute, Transport Action Canada, and peer-reviewed research on infrastructure cost overruns.
What I found isn't fabrication. Every date, statistic, and academic citation I checked against a source in the report holds up. The problem is what happens once those true facts get arranged, and who did the arranging.
Who Wrote It
Alto's legal name is VIA HFR -- VIA TGF Inc. It is the Crown corporation created for one purpose: build this railway. Its budget and its reason to exist both depend on a yes.
That fact appears nowhere in the report's executive summary, its introduction, or the CEO's opening letter. Readers find it only in the copyright line on the final page. The sole economic case for a $60 to $90 billion investment decision was written by the one party whose survival depends on that decision going one way.
The Price Tag
Alto lists its own cost as a "Class 5" estimate, a cost-engineering category with a standard accuracy band of roughly minus 30 percent to plus 100 percent, sometimes wider. Applied to Alto's own numbers, that band alone puts plausible costs as high as $150 to $180 billion, before any outside comparison enters the picture.
The report also says its per-kilometre cost is "consistent with international benchmark and remains within the range observed for comparable high-speed rail projects worldwide." Its own comparison chart, on page 66, says otherwise. Alto's $60 to $90 million per kilometre sits above ten of the fifteen international projects plotted on that chart, including every Spanish and French line shown.
The "consistent with benchmark" claim rests on a $77 million per kilometre global average that pools in costlier regions worldwide, rather than on the European projects the report elsewhere holds up as Alto's model. Transport Action Canada, an independent rail research group, puts Alto's real cost at more than double the European high-speed rail average.
Apply peer-reviewed reference-class forecasting -- the method a lender or independent cost auditor would use before underwriting a project this size -- and the range moves further. Drawing on a database of more than 16,000 infrastructure projects, rail megaprojects overrun their initial estimate by an average of 39 percent, with roughly 28 percent of projects landing in a "fat tail" averaging 116 percent over.
Applied to Alto's own figures: $83 to $125 billion in the average case, and $130 to $194 billion in the fat-tail case.
The two projects on Alto's own chart that actually share Canada's risk profile -- a first-of-its-kind build with no domestic high-speed rail industry -- are the UK's HS2 and California's high-speed rail line. HS2's original 2009 estimate for its full network was £37.5 billion; the current 2026 estimate for Phase 1 alone, a fraction of that original scope, is already £102.7 billion. California's has grown from roughly US$33 billion to roughly US$128 billion, a 290 percent increase.
The Ridership Number
Alto projects up to 24 million riders a year by 2055, capturing roughly 40 percent of trips on its longest routes. The report notes three bidders' forecasts were "broadly aligned" with that number. Bidders competing for the same contract share an incentive to validate the client's own assumptions, so that is not independent confirmation.
The most-cited peer-reviewed study of rail demand forecasts, published in the Journal of the American Planning Association in 2005, found actual ridership falls short of the original forecast in most cases, averaging about half. Applied to Alto's own projection, that base rate implies 11 to 13 million riders a year and a mode share closer to 19 to 22 percent, not 40.
The Benefit Numbers
Alto's report leads with $49.5 billion in direct benefits to Canadians over 60 years and a $24.5 billion annual GDP boost, both featured in bold pull-quotes. Alto's own supporting table labels the $49.5 billion figure an "upper estimate." The executive summary and the pull-quotes drop that qualifier when they repeat the number.
The C.D. Howe Institute, an independent research organization, produced its own assessment of the same project and found $15 to $27 billion in benefits over 60 years, roughly a third to a half of Alto's figure. The $24.5 billion GDP number comes from an unpublished economic model whose underlying assumptions are not disclosed, so it cannot be independently checked.
No Ongoing Subsidy, Alto Says
The report states passenger rail "would transition from a publicly subsidized service to a commercially viable operation," with fare revenue covering operating and maintenance costs. A McGill University transportation researcher, Prof. Ahmed El-Geneidy, modelled the project independently and projected operating losses for approximately 47 years after opening, even using what he called generous assumptions on ridership growth.
Alto's own report points to profitable rail operators elsewhere -- Eurostar, Italo, Japan's Central HSR -- as evidence that high-speed rail can turn an operating profit. All three are decades-old networks with established ridership and supply chains already in place. None started, as Alto would, with no domestic high-speed rail industry to build from.
The Number Alto Doesn't Publish
A benefit-cost ratio -- benefits divided by cost -- is the standard figure that lets a taxpayer judge value for money on a public project. Alto's report contains none. It cites a defensible reason: its cost estimate is still too immature to produce one responsibly.
That is a reasonable argument against publishing an official ratio. It is not a reason to lead the document with the benefit side alone. The ratio implied by Alto's own bolded numbers is two to five times more favourable than the one independent inputs produce.
The Alternative Alto Ruled Out
Alto compares itself to a lower-speed "high-frequency rail" option and concludes high-speed rail delivers a GDP boost "five times larger" for only 20 percent more capital cost. Every figure on both sides of that comparison -- cost and benefit alike -- comes from Alto's own modelling. No independently costed alternative appears anywhere in the report.
The "five times" claim also compares an annual GDP flow against a one-time capital cost, not benefit per dollar spent. Measured correctly, high-frequency rail returns roughly 45 to 75 cents in benefit per dollar of capital; high-speed rail returns roughly 55 to 83 cents. That is a real edge for high-speed rail. It is not five times anything.
Two Provinces, Called Nation-Building
The report invokes the Canadian Pacific Railway, the St. Lawrence Seaway, and the Trans-Canada Highway as precedents, framing high-speed rail as the next chapter of Canadian nation-building. It leaves out that the CPR's financing survived a 1873 political corruption scandal and needed an emergency federal bailout in 1885 to avoid bankruptcy before it was finished.
The corridor itself runs from Toronto through Peterborough, Ottawa, Montreal, Laval, and Trois-Rivieres to Quebec City, with a possible Kingston stop under study. Every one of those cities sits in Ontario or Quebec. The CPR crossed the continent. The Trans-Canada Highway touches ten provinces. This project touches two.
Alto's own report notes the corridor holds 41 percent of Canada's population and generates over 40 percent of national GDP -- a real basis for calling it consequential. Whether that makes a two-province rail line "nation-building" in the same sense as a coast-to-coast railway or highway is a question the report never asks itself. It answers it anyway, on page 2, before a reader has seen a single figure.
What This Doesn't Settle
None of this proves better rail service between Toronto and Quebec City is the wrong call. The corridor's congestion is real: Highway 401 is the busiest highway in North America, and passenger rail on freight-owned track ran on time only 51 to 59 percent of the time between 2022 and 2024. The case for solving that problem is not in dispute here.
What this review shows is that the document built to justify a specific solution, at a specific price, was written by the corporation that exists to build it, reviewed no independently costed alternative, and left out the one number that would let a taxpayer weigh benefit against cost. Alto says a fully costed, decision-grade version of this business case is still years away. Until that version exists, the $60 to $90 billion figure Canadians are hearing today is not a price. It is an opening bid, dressed as a fact.
I'm running for mayor of North Frontenac, not Ottawa. But the same test applies at every level of government: when you're asking taxpayers for money, you owe them the real number, not the flattering one. That's the standard I'll hold myself to on every dollar this Township spends, and it's the standard worth asking of every government -- federal, provincial, or right here at home.
If you've got questions about how we keep our own books straight in North Frontenac, or thoughts on this piece, I'd love to hear them.
Art Hannigan
Candidate for Mayor, Township of North Frontenac