{"id":40198,"date":"2020-12-16T16:07:37","date_gmt":"2020-12-16T21:07:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/?p=40198"},"modified":"2021-01-12T11:35:49","modified_gmt":"2021-01-12T16:35:49","slug":"a-via-rail-death-rattle-can-be-heard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/2020\/12\/16\/a-via-rail-death-rattle-can-be-heard\/","title":{"rendered":"A VIA Rail death rattle can be heard…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A sure sign Canada\u2019s rail passenger service is near death slunk into Winnipeg on Monday, December 14 \u2013 15 hours late. \u00a0For the first time since March 12, VIA Rail\u2019s Canadian arrived from Vancouver.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It was really only a half-Canadian.\u00a0 It short-turned and went back west the next evening rather than continuing to Toronto.\u00a0 The Canadian will do this once weekly until further notice, although the Winnipeg-Toronto run may return in the spring as a twice-weekly train.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The once-grand Canadian has been problematic for years: overpriced, worn, unreliable, and slow.\u00a0 When it ran daily before the Mulroney government hacked off half of VIA in January 1990, it took the scenic and populous CP route around the Lake Superior North Shore, across the southern prairies, and through Banff.\u00a0 But it has been eroded by the government-ordered change to the less scenic and populous CN route in 1990, several frequency reductions, and the post-privatization asset stripping by CN, which shed track, trains, and employees to boost dividends.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

CN can no longer get VIA\u2019s Canadian over its transcontinental line reliably because of its own snarl of slow-moving, over-length freight trains.\u00a0 These monsters won\u2019t fit into most of the sidings, so they often block the Canadian \u2013 as one did before its departure from Vancouver on March 11.\u00a0 They often run so late their crews run out of hours and the trains die in their tracks, tying up the main line.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ottawa does nothing.\u00a0 Ask for an explanation and you\u2019ll receive a boilerplate response from Minister of Transport Marc Garneau: \u00a0\u201cVIA is an arms-length Crown corporation that makes its decisions based on the needs of modern travelers and the funding provided by Parliament.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But more deadly than these visible signs of VIA\u2019s imminent death was an action taken in Ottawa on November 30.\u00a0 It was an aviation industry bailout package of $788 million (with more to follow) that was unfurled by Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland.\u00a0 It landed, she said, because \u201cCanada is a vast country, and we rely more on air travel than others. Carriers have cut routes during the pandemic, leaving Canadians in certain communities with limited mobility and limited access to essential goods and services.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Those prop-up funds will hasten the death of competitor VIA, which serves far more towns than the entire for-profit air system.\u00a0 In Freeland\u2019s budget, there was $188 million to slightly paper over the damage the pandemic has done to the more expansive VIA system, which is currently just an infrequent shadow of its pre-pandemic self.\u00a0 Even a railway that has largely been mothballed will burn up that Ottawa Band-Aid in a few weeks.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

One wonders how this sits with Canadians in Longlac, Ontario, Biggar, Saskatchewan, and Ashcroft, B.C. \u2013 all without air service.\u00a0 At their expense (and that of every other Canadian on or off the air grid), the airlines just got another free meal ladled out from the same trough first filled in 1935 by Liberal Minister of Transport C.D. Howe.\u00a0 Desperate for an aviation toy of his own to compete in a bragging contest with other nations, he quashed the CP\/CN plan to cooperatively create one airline coordinated with their far-flung rail and steamship services.\u00a0 The public cash flow started then.\u00a0 It has never stopped.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

As a result, Canadian mobility and access have been nosediving for decades, aided and abetted by unbridled provincial spending on highways.\u00a0 Both of the other modes got fed by successive streams of vote-hungry federal and provincial politicians, largely because they generate oodles of jobs that can be converted to votes come election season.\u00a0 Never mind that most of those jobs depend on public subsidies, direct and indirect, and many of the functions could have been better filled by a modernized rail system at a lower cost.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Our global competitors are boosting rail investment in their post-pandemic budgets, but Canada has missed a chance to rebalance our out-of-whack system and insert a degree of fairness.\u00a0 How many in Ottawa even know that VIA\u2019s anemic Canadian this week served 25 communities as it wended its way from Winnipeg to Vancouver for the first time in nine months.\u00a0 Resuming the run to Toronto would add 42 more communities (few of them are air or bus-served).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This devolution of a century-long national dream into a 21st-century national tragedy contains a subliminal message:\u00a0 If you don\u2019t live in the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal Triangle, Calgary or Vancouver, you don\u2019t count.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This could be easily corrected by affordably and swiftly rebuilding our rail passenger service with off-the-shelf technology, much of it Canadian-designed and \u2013 built.\u00a0 But will it?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Greg Gormick<\/em><\/strong> is a nationally-known rail analyst and policy adviser, whose clients have included VIA, CP, CN and elected officials of four political parties.\u00a0 <\/em>He is the author of the forthcoming book, A National Dream Reborn? \u2013 The Life, Near-Death and Future of Canada\u2019s Passenger Trains.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A sure sign Canada\u2019s rail passenger service is near death slunk into Winnipeg on Monday, December 14 \u2013 15 hours late. \u00a0For the first time since March 12, VIA Rail\u2019s Canadian arrived from Vancouver.   It was really only a half-Canadian.\u00a0 It short-turned and went back west the next evening rather than continuing to Toronto.\u00a0 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":40217,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[216],"tags":[2804],"class_list":["post-40198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editorials","tag-greg-gormick"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-02 20:39:13","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\/40198","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\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40198"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40198\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40219,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40198\/revisions\/40219"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}