In this second article in a series about passenger train service in Canada – past, present and future – we look at just how dramatically passenger rail service has been diminished, the myriad problems VIA Rail faces, and at the efforts by some parliamentarians to support and protect the Crown corporation responsible for passenger rail service in the country. Part 1 is available here, and if you want to know what inspired this series, you can read about that here.
If Green Party leader Elizabeth May had her way, VIA Rail would have its very own legislation, something the Crown corporation has not had since its creation in 1977.
A VIA Rail Act, she says, would enable the Crown corporation to fulfil its mandate to provide modern, safe, efficient, climate-friendly and reliable passenger rail service in Canada.
That’s why, in 2022, May tabled Bill C-326, the VIA Rail Act, that she hoped would accomplish just that
Alas, as a private members’ bill, the VIA Rail Act didn’t go anywhere after first reading, and is still languishing on the table.
But May hasn’t given up hope for improved and expanded passenger rail in Canada, as she says in a phone interview from her home in British Columbia.
Sentimental journeys
May’s love of train travel started early.
When she was a child growing up in Connecticut, her activist mother used to take her on the train to political events, many of them related to ending the Vietnam War, at which May also recalls being tear-gassed.
She reminisces about train trips at Christmas, when she would lie on the top bunk and gaze out the window as they moved through small towns, aglow with twinkling Christmas lights.
“It was magical,” says May, who has been MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands in British Columbia since 2011. Today she and her husband regularly take VIA Rail back and forth to Ottawa at Christmas time, and May still enjoys the glowing lights in small towns. “It’s a very sentimental thing,” she says.
May spent a good chunk of her life in Nova Scotia, where she was also a regular on trains. Her family moved to Cape Breton in 1972, and when she headed off to law school at Dalhousie University in 1980, the train was still running between Sydney and Halifax, albeit with some idiosyncrasies.
In those days May lived in Margaree, so the closest train station was in Orangedale, made famous later by The Rankin Family in their popular 1990 song “Orangedale Whistle” that laments the end of the train service.
May recalls how she went about about boarding at that station in the 1980s:
The Orangedale station was no longer open, but my mom would drive me to Orangedale, even in winter and in snow. And when you got to Orangedale, because there was no stationmaster, no one selling tickets inside, and there was obviously no website where you could buy a ticket or tell VIA Rail you were coming, you had to know what you were doing.
There was this really, really long metal pole, and at the top of it, there was a piece of bright orange metal. It was called a flag. You had to affix it to a hole in the ground, so that when the train came along from Sydney — and it had a big bend before Orangedale coming out of Little Narrows — and as it slowed down and they saw the orange flag, they would stop the train to pick up passengers. Then you bought your tickets on board.
“It was a beautiful route,” May says. “The train went to Havre Boucher and followed the coast, before it ducked down to stop in Truro, and then to Halifax.”
VIA Rail service from Halifax to Sydney and to Yarmouth ended in 1990, part of a round of severe cuts that almost halved the entire VIA Rail network, cuts that were loudly condemned by the Liberals and NDP.
May never stopped taking the train whenever she could, whether from Vancouver to Toronto on the Canadian, or from Nova Scotia to Montreal on the Ocean. She says she hates flying, and improved rail travel is an important matter of public policy.
May is very concerned about the current state of passenger rail travel in Canada, which she calls “an experience in antiques.”
‘In Canada your trains just stop’ anywhere
May recalls a train trip she and her husband took in the summer of 2023, when they were sitting beside a tourist from Switzerland.
“He looked across at one point, and said, ‘In Canada your trains just stop, they stop. For a long time. Anywhere. Where no one is around.’” May laughs, saying she had no choice but to agree with the tourist.
In her view, this is because VIA Rail has to give way to large freight trains, and this could be solved with bypasses for passenger trains:
The problem of why rail passengers have to sit on the sidings a lot is complicated by the fact that freight trains have gotten so long. Cutting corners and cutting costs for CN [Canadian National] and CP [Canadian Pacific], they’re running very, very, very long freight trains that are double-loaded. So there’s no siding that can take those trains; they’re too long. VIA Rail is short enough to go to the siding. That’s why VIA Rail passengers have to sit and wait for hours, to let freight go by. If we were to have even a limited number of bypasses for rail passenger trains we could avoid those pinch points where we get stuck for hours because freight has priority, because they [CN and CP] are the owners of tracks.
May bemoans the 1990 cuts to VIA Rail service, remembering when she first lived in Nova Scotia how easy it was to commute between cities by rail, and how many of those routes were simply eliminated “without rationale.”
Tragic loss of rail service in BC
This is especially important for Indigenous communities, says May:
I am increasingly angry as a British Columbian when I look at how few routes we have here that we used to have. One of the findings of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Inquiry was that one of the reasons Indigenous women go missing and are murdered is because they’re hitchhiking on the Highway of Tears [a 725-kilometre corridor of BC Highway 16 between Prince George and Prince Rupert]. There’s a railroad route right there.
We’ve lost our bus service across British Columbia. VIA Rail has withdrawn a lot of services. We used to have daily rail service from Victoria to Courtney, called Island Corridor Rail. And it used to run as the Esquimalt and Nanaimo railway, which is very significant issue in terms of Indigenous land claims and the fact that this was just given to robber barons back in the day, this big chunk of land.
May says First Nations communities are now trying to bring back passenger and freight rail service on Vancouver Island in the corridor that runs through 14 First Nations.
“There’s almost no place in Canada that was not once better served by rail. There’s been a massive withdrawal of service,” May says.
May was galvanized into action to protect VIA after she read a 2015 report commissioned by the Harper government. She says the report recommended axing VIA’s Toronto to Vancouver train, suggesting it “wasn’t practical, it wasn’t money-making, and there was no public purpose to it.”
May says that report “terrified” and “put the fear of God” in her, made her realize that any VIA Rail train could be cancelled at any time, because VIA Rail had no legislation to protect it.
Trying to save VIA Rail
May’s proposed Bill C-326 aims to tackle several of the major problems facing VIA Rail, including providing it with an “effective legislative basis for its operational sustainability and success as Canada’s national public rail passenger service provider.”
May says high-speed rail would pay for itself on well-travelled corridors such as Calgary–Edmonton, while also saving a lot of flights between the two cities, and with that, carbon emissions.
She would also to see VIA Rail “bring back the routes that have been cut, where the tracks are still there, like Vancouver Island, like Halifax to Sydney.”
Her dream, May says, is a network of rail and bus transport in Canada, which would provide every Canadian with “safe and affordable low-carbon options for ground transportation. So it’s rail connecting to bus right across the country, wherever you live.”
Rail and bus connections
May commends the owner of Maritime Bus, Mike Cassidy, for trying hard for years to get an integrated ticket system with VIA Rail, so people could buy a ticket to travel from Charlottetown to Montreal, connecting with the train by bus in Moncton. For his contributions to public transportation, in 2019 Cassidy won the John Pearce Award from Transport Action Atlantic.
Alas, first COVID and then the problem with the Ocean’s terrible problem with punctuality put a wrench into that system.
Maritime Bus is the successor to Acadian Lines, which Cassidy bought in 2012 after French-owned Orléans Express discontinued service to the Maritimes. In an interview, Cassidy describes his Maritime-wide bus service as “public transit on provincial highways,” and says that while it’s “a wonderful idea” to have bus and rail, it can also be “torture,” given the current state of rail service.
He says Maritime Bus is still a tenant of VIA Rail in Halifax. But the bus–train connections in Moncton just haven’t worked out, for the simple reason that VIA Rail’s train can’t be counted on to arrive on time. Cassidy points to the fact that freight on the CN tracks “moves before the passengers” so trains often arrive late, long after his bus has had to depart.
Cassidy also notes the problem with the quality of the tracks the Ocean uses. “When you come to northern New Brunswick, you’ve got D class tracks, and that train is down to 35 kilometres an hour along those tracks. So tell me how you’re going to keep time.”
These days, Cassidy is more intent on seeing a national bus network established, with regional operators that he says would operate like “the old pony express” to move people and goods across the country. In places where it works, Cassidy says those buses can connect with rail and plane services.
May doesn’t disagree that there is a place for busses and trains.
“It seems to me that if you can walk to the end of a country lane in rural Mexico and get a bus, you should be able to do that in Canada,” May says. “Now of course, there is density of population, and there are lots of issues people will raise. But in the context of decarbonizing transport, in terms of equity, creating safe and affordable, convenient ground transportation is essential.”
May knows it’s not going to be easy and that it will not be cheap to strengthen and rebuild passenger rail networks in Canada:
It’s going to be a long struggle but it needs adequate funding. And right now, VIA Rail’s business model appears to be to be a very expensive system of land-based cruises for tourists, as opposed to affordable passenger rail. As a matter of public policy, we can afford to do this. We have to do this.
Although her Bill-326 has not made it to the order paper in parliament, May is still hopeful that the federal government will act to improve passenger rail service in Canada, starting with new equipment, and replacing old diesel engines with fuel-efficient or electric engines.
Parliamentary inaction
May is by no means the first parliamentarian to try to get legislation passed to support and protect VIA Rail and passenger rail in the country.
As Erica Butler reported for the Halifax Examiner in 2016, MPs have been trying for years to save VIA Rail with bills that would give it legislated power, more autonomy, and priority on rail tracks in this country.
Related: Federal transport plan fails to give VIA what it needs to succeed
Related: Marc Garneau comes to Halifax to remind us that he’s not doing anything for passenger rail
In 2014, then NDP MP Olivia Chow, now the mayor of Toronto, tabled Bill C-577, which was also known as the VIA Rail Canada Act. Like May’s 2022 private member bill, Chow’s bill sought to establish a legislative framework for the Crown corporation, and described a plan for governing and funding it. It didn’t make it to second reading.
Later in 2014, the NDP MP for Gaspésie–Les-Îles-de-la-Madeleine, Philip Toone, introduced Bill C-640, a second attempt at a VIA Rail Canada Act, with the same goals as Chow’s bill. Toone’s bill also failed to make it past first reading.
Giving people priority over freight?
Now, there is another bill that aims to help VIA Rail.
On December 13, 2023, NDP transport critic and MP, Taylor Bachrach, who represents Skeena–Bulkley Valley in British Columbia, tabled Bill C-371, the Rail Passenger Priority Act. Bachrach’s bill would amend the Canada Transportation Act to give VIA Rail priority on the tracks.
Introducing the bill in parliament, Bachrach noted that the United States has a similar law that gives passenger trains priority.
In a telephone interview, Bachrach tells me that while VIA Rail’s lack of priority on the tracks is only one of “many factors that need to be addressed to have a high-performing passenger rail system in our country,” it is still important.
“It’s a simple fix, and it would make a big difference,” he says.
Bachrach recounts his own recent experience on VIA Rail:
I did the trip in five days, but the interesting thing is that the Canadian, the train from Toronto to Vancouver, used to take around three and a half days. Now it takes four and a half days, almost five days. It’s funny that despite all the advancements we’ve made as a country, it takes longer today to travel across the country by train than it did 60 or 70 years ago.
Asked whether he has heard about his bill from CN and CP, which own the tracks, Bachrach replies:
I would characterize the tone so far as a bit dismissive. Obviously CN and CP make a lot of money shipping freight in this country. And the idea of allowing passenger trains priority isn’t seen as in their commercial interest.
CN and VIA Rail respond
I contacted CN for an interview to get a response to Bachrach’s proposed Rail Passenger Priority Act.
No interview was granted. Instead, I received this CN “official / corporate position” on the bill:
Any such proposal must be considered carefully in consultation with railways of all types and shippers across a range of industries that depend on safe, efficient freight rail service to get their resources to market and essential products to communities across Canada. Separate, dedicated rail lines, for passenger and freight respectively, are ultimately necessary to ensure freight and passenger rail needs are sufficiently met.
Asked for its response to Bachrach’s Rail Passenger Priority Act, VIA Rail sent this statement:
VIA Rail owns only 3% of its 12,000 km network. Freight railways own and operate the vast majority of Canada’s rail infrastructure, with a business model based on moving freight as efficiently as possible.
There are currently no regulations in Canada that give passenger trains priority when meeting a freight train, forcing VIA Rail trains to give way to trains owned by the infrastructure owner, resulting in chronic delays for passengers across the country.
VIA Rail believes that a multitude of measures could be used to guarantee the reliable and punctual service expected by passengers, including a clear priority for passenger trains.
A rail passenger bill of rights could be a useful tool to achieve this goal, and VIA Rail will always support initiatives and projects that enhance our national passenger rail service and promote the use of this sustainable and accessible mode of transportation for all Canadians.
Trying to ‘get Canada back on track’
Bachrach acknowledges that CN and CP are almost solely responsible for developing and maintaining the rail infrastructure their trains run on, and that if passenger rail is to be expanded and improved, the government will have to play a larger role in developing that infrastructure.
“Particularly the twinning of tracks and the construction of sidings do it’s easier for trains to get by each other,” Bachrach says.
“We’re seeing an increasing volume of freight moving through our rail network and that has many economic benefits, or at least supports jobs here in Canada,” Bachrach adds. “And it is vital for Canadian businesses that rely on rail to ship both raw inputs and finished products. But at the same time, passenger transportation is the glue that holds our country together.”
“And with the loss of Greyhound [Bus] a few years ago from our country, people have fewer options than ever,” Bachrach says.
Bachrach continues:
I’ve heard from so many citizens that they see the train as holding real potential for passenger transportation. There are many changes that need to be made to catch up with other countries. The reality is Canada has lagged far behind most of our peer countries when it comes to passenger rail. And we need to start now and work as hard as we can to get Canada back on track.
Bachrach also encourages Canada to look overseas for lessons on how to proceed and fix its passenger rail services, and that doesn’t mean more privatization:
We see a number of models around the world, from fully private services to publicly delivered passenger rail. And while countries like the UK provide a cautionary tale of privatization, there are certainly other countries like Spain, for example, and some of the services in France that show how viable a public passenger rail service can be. There’s always going to be a role for the private sector in building new infrastructure, and we don’t deny that. But when it comes to the ownership and operation, we believe that Canadian citizens are best served by keeping passenger rail in public hands.
Nevertheless, keeping it in public hands doesn’t seem to be what the federal government has in mind for a good chunk of Canada’s passenger rail service.
Next: Privatization ahead
Let’s talk about the environmental impacts. An electrified Via system vs flying. Particularly on key short hops such as Edmonton to Calgary or Halifax to Moncton.
What a detailed article. Thank you. I love trains. I hope that somehow passenger rail service can be brought back to it’s glory days of the 1970s. I enjoyed many a train ride in those days. The cross country treck from Toronto to Vancouver is still very nice and well run. It’s the Atlantic portion that is lacking. Montreal – Toronto is basically a commuter train now.