{"id":16437,"date":"2018-10-27T17:27:13","date_gmt":"2018-10-27T21:27:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/?p=16437"},"modified":"2018-10-27T17:35:03","modified_gmt":"2018-10-27T21:35:03","slug":"via-rail-canada-at-40-four-decades-of-cuts-heartbreak-and-lost-opportunities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/2018\/10\/27\/via-rail-canada-at-40-four-decades-of-cuts-heartbreak-and-lost-opportunities\/","title":{"rendered":"VIA Rail Canada at 40: Four decades of cuts, heartbreak and lost opportunities"},"content":{"rendered":"

Forty years ago this Monday (October 29), VIA Rail Canada was born as an operating railway when it assumed the operation of The Canadian<\/em>, the Super Continental<\/em>and the other remaining Western Canadian passenger trains from Canadian Pacific (CP) and Canadian National (CN).<\/p>\n

\u201cThe sad reality is the high hopes of the Canadian public and the railroaders who diligently maintained those trains were dashed almost at the outset,\u201d says Chris West, founder of the All Aboard St. Marys citizens\u2019 rail action committee.\u00a0 \u201cThose not privy to what was going on behind the scenes in Ottawa were totally misled.\u00a0 We were told by politicians and bureaucrats this was the start of a rail renaissance.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn fact, it was just a method for cutting the partial and totally inadequate 80% subsidy to CP and CN to run the service-worn trains they were compelled to operate in the face of massive subsidies to air and highway travel.\u00a0 VIA was just a mechanism to kill our passenger trains, dressed in Ottawa doublespeak.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first of a long line of cuts occurred on the very day VIA took over the western trains from CP and CN when pieces of the CP Canadian<\/em>and CN Super Continental<\/em>routes were immediately dropped under what Ottawa lightly dismissed as \u201crationalization.\u201d\u00a0 It was a preview of further and even larger cuts that would occur in 1981 under the Trudeau Liberals and in 1990 under the Mulroney Conservatives, both of which had previously made grand election promises of VIA investment, renewal and service expansion.<\/p>\n

More major budgetary and service cuts were made by other governments in 1995, 2002 and 2012.\u00a0 Three VIA routes \u2013 Montreal-Gaspe, Winnipeg-Churchill and Victoria-Courtenay \u2013 are now partially or totally suspended because the feds have done little to assist in the rehabilitation of the infrastructure on which VIA\u2019s trains depend.\u00a0 These three routes are now unsafe and impassable by all trains.<\/p>\n

Says \u00c9ric Boutilier, founder of All Aboard Northern Ontario, \u201cParts of Canada have always been hit harder than others.\u00a0Northern Ontario and Quebec, Atlantic Canada and the West have seen their services cut to the point of irrelevancy.\u00a0On Halloween, every Greyhound bus route west of Sudbury will meet the same fate as those vanished VIA trains.\u00a0 Canadians are being immobilized to the point where we are unable to even travel and communicate with each other.\u00a0 It\u2019s becoming a race to the bottom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nationally-known rail analyst and policy adviser Greg Gormick, who serves as an adviser to both All Aboard committees, has had a ringside seat for this decades-long tale of the passenger train\u2019s decline at the hands of every federal government, except Prime Minister Joe Clark\u2019s.\u00a0 A fourth-generation member of Canada\u2019s rail industry, his clients have included VIA, CP, CN and elected officials of all political stripes.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf VIA wasn\u2019t set up to fail, it was born to have nothing but trouble,\u201d says Gormick.\u00a0 \u201cThat was the view of the late Garth Campbell, VIA\u2019s first marketing vice-president and a visionary who helped craft CN\u2019s successful revival of its passenger business in the 1960s.\u00a0 It was all pulled apart on orders from Ottawa politicians and bureaucrats, some of whom I knew and who were proud of their destructive work.<\/p>\n

\u201cDespite the waste, damage and heartbreak of more than 40 years, it\u2019s not too late to reverse Canada\u2019s admittedly depressing rail passenger track record.\u00a0 But we\u2019re on the brink of collapse, despite the \u2018sunny ways, sunny days\u2019 bafflegab we repeatedly get from Ottawa and VIA\u2019s political appointees.\u00a0They offer empty promises of new trains and the rebuilding of an abandoned line through Eastern Ontario\u2019s backwoods that would miss major markets such as Oshawa, Belleville, Kingston and Cornwall.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both All Aboard committees have commissioned Gormick to draft plans for the serious overhaul and cost-effective expansion of rail passenger service in Northeastern and Southwestern Ontario.These first two plans will draw on the SouthwestLynx plan<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/a> he produced earlier this year for Oxford County.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Lynx approach is the way to begin undoing the politically-driven damage inflicted on our publicly-funded passenger trains for far too long,\u201d says West.\u00a0 \u201cIt draws on the techniques and technologies employed on a long list of successful U.S. intercity rail routes.\u00a0 If it works there, it can work here \u2013 and at an affordable public cost that will generate impressive ridership, revenue and economic spinoff.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first plan will be NortheastLynx for the Ontario Northland\u2019s Toronto-North Bay-Cochrane route, which was cut by the provincial Liberals in 2012 and previously damaged by VIA\u2019s 1990 cuts.\u00a0This will be followed by the Lynx plan for the Toronto-Kitchener-St. Marys-London Innovation Corridor.<\/p>\n

Says Boutilier, \u201cCanada\u2019s failed rail passenger policies have reduced us to Third World status in terms of access and mobility \u2013 and at great public expense.\u00a0 We will pay an increasingly high price for this in terms of economic, social and environmental vibrancy.\u00a0 Implementing Greg\u2019s Lynx plans, we will accelerate our fight for what every globally-competitive nation already enjoys:\u00a0 a modern, affordable and truly national rail passenger service.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Forty years ago this Monday (October 29), VIA Rail Canada was born as an operating railway when it assumed the operation of The Canadian, the Super Continentaland the other remaining Western Canadian passenger trains from Canadian Pacific (CP) and Canadian National (CN). \u201cThe sad reality is the high hopes of the Canadian public and the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[1788],"class_list":["post-16437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-northern-ontario","tag-southwestlynx"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-27 16:47:13","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16437"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16440,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16437\/revisions\/16440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}