Canada\u2019s freight railways and its publicly-owned passenger carrier, VIA Rail, have never been in worse shape, despite the frantic efforts of their flacks to tell us the opposite.\u00a0 But have no fear.\u00a0 The Trudeau government has come up with a brilliant plan to fix this mess:\u00a0 Loan $4.5 billion to Senegal to build a new double-track railway.<\/p>\n
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The economic, social, and environmental ramifications of this bizarre decision by Ottawa\u2019s Export Development Corporation (EDC) will be staggering.\u00a0 Canada can rarely get a freight or passenger train across the country on time, but we\u2019re going to ship railway investment dollars to Africa.<\/p>\n
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Lucky Senegal, which will now enjoy the fruits of a free-spending, taxpayer-funded policy that was first unfurled by Pierre Trudeau\u2019s government in the 1970s.\u00a0 Back then, a steady flow of foreign railway loans and gifts made Canada look like a Sugar Plum Fairy on the international stage \u2013 and propped up begging Canadian firms with Liberal ties, especially Bombardier.<\/p>\n
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Meanwhile, back in Canada, the Liberals are self-inflating their image by boasting about their commitment to such fantasies as building a new passenger-only line on a Canadian Pacific (CP) line abandoned a half-century ago because it was inferior to the one the same railway built as a replacement.\u00a0 The Grits call their wonky dream scheme high-frequency rail.\u00a0 It will supposedly get VIA\u2019s passenger trains off the overloaded CN lines and make them marvels of modern rail travel.\u00a0 It won\u2019t make them any faster, but pish-tosh to such nit-picking.<\/p>\n
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The idea of just expanding and upgrading those CN lines shared with vital freight trains and perhaps making some use of the lightly used parallel CP lines has been kicked wayside by the Liberal \u201cexperts\u201d \u2013 who no doubt have their eyes on vulnerable ridings such as Peterborough.\u00a0 It\u2019s pure VIA empire building and Liberal vote chasing.<\/p>\n
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If this African railway loan and the VIA fantasy aren\u2019t enough, there are the daily disasters that are VIA, CP, and our former Crown-owned railway, Canadian National, which was privatized in 1995 by Jean Chretien\u2019s Liberals following a plan constructed by Brian Mulroney\u2019s Tories.<\/p>\n
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I see the daily reports on freight and passenger train delays across the country.\u00a0 It\u2019s enough to make anyone with a multi-generational railway bloodline like mine weep.\u00a0 Once we were held up as an international model of railway efficiency, but Canada seemingly can\u2019t make the trains run on time anywhere.\u00a0 The most ridiculous situation I\u2019ve seen recently involved a CP train on CN tracks in a zone where the two share their lines in B.C.\u00a0 The CP locomotive caught fire on CN\u2019s tracks in an area where suspicions have been raised about possible railway involvement in the deadly Lytton fires.\u00a0 Traffic was snarled in both directions on both railways as a result of this little oops.<\/p>\n
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As for VIA, it is a disaster buried under an avalanche of vacuous press releases from its Liberal-appointed board (one a failed Grit office-seeker) and its CEO, whose previous transportation experience includes working for a helicopter manufacturer.<\/p>\n
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Is there a better way to run a railroad?\u00a0 You bet your caboose there is.\u00a0 Resisting the \u201cgreenie in a bottle\u201d approach of too many overly-woke Democrats, the Biden Administration\u2019s pending infrastructure bill includes $66 billion over five years to incrementally improve and expand Amtrak \u2013 the U.S. equivalent of VIA \u2013 to finally become the high-performance national passenger railway it always should be.<\/p>\n
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Some of Amtrak\u2019s trains \u2013 many with Bombardier-built rolling stock secured under generous EDC loans provided by the Mulroney and Chretien governments \u2013 operate over Warren Buffett\u2019s wholly-owned Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway.\u00a0 Not wanting the false and inflated quarterly dividend treadmill that CP, CN, and many other U.S. railways are on, Buffett told BNSF execs at the time of his purchase that he wanted steady reinvestment in the railway\u2019s physical plant to build a sustainable stream of profits.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
As I survey and assess this situation as part of the research for my upcoming book on the life, near-death, and future (if any) of Canada\u2019s passenger and freight trains, I can\u2019t help but feel that very few Liberal politicians have ever watched the 1957 Jimmy Stewart movie, Night Passage<\/em>.\u00a0 If they had, they\u2019d know one of its thought-provoking songs, as sung by Stewart:\u00a0 You Can\u2019t Get Far Without a Railroad.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n As previously wrote in the Wawa News, old Hollywood got it right with that charming song. It\u2019s time for Canadian policymakers of all-partisan stripes to learn and sing it.\u00a0 The current election campaign also provides the public with the opportunity to pick up that tune in support.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Canada\u2019s freight railways and its publicly-owned passenger carrier, VIA Rail, have never been in worse shape, despite the frantic efforts of their flacks to tell us the opposite.\u00a0 But have no fear.\u00a0 The Trudeau government has come up with a brilliant plan to fix this mess:\u00a0 Loan $4.5 billion to Senegal to build a new …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":52,"featured_media":41341,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2870],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-rroaded"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-23 08:22:14","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\/46926","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\/52"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46926"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46930,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46926\/revisions\/46930"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}