When Transport Minister Omar Alghabra appeared before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities on January 12, he said he wasn\u2019t hiding from the multiple meltdowns of Canada\u2019s airlines and VIA Rail over the Christmas holidays.\u00a0 But he was.<\/p>\n
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Alghabra and his government are hiding from an inevitable confrontation with more than a century of political and corporate blunders that are now cumulatively causing Canada\u2019s transportation \u201cchickens\u201d to come home to roost.\u00a0 The storms that hit B.C. and eastern Canada at Christmas revealed we have a disjointed, ineffective and subsidy-soaked system that lacks resiliency and reliability.<\/p>\n
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Decades of indiscriminate public funding, self-destructive competition between the modes and little accountability are just a few of the reasons for a series of transportation failures affecting Canada economically, socially and environmentally.<\/p>\n
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It started at the dawn of the railway era in the mid-19th century.\u00a0 Promoters required public assistance to build costly railways in a far-flung, sparsely populated and physically punishing country.\u00a0 Pliant governments provided land grants, cash subsidies, loans and bond guarantees for these capital-intensive lines, often because they saw votes in railway building.\u00a0 Their quid pro quo for this public assistance included route changes to serve certain ridings and freight rate reductions to buy voter favour.<\/p>\n
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If politicians couldn\u2019t get private railways to take on politically expedient railways, they created government corporations to do it, usually with dire financial, patronage and operational consequences.\u00a0 Two examples were the poorly located Intercolonial Railway from Quebec to Halifax and the recklessly optimistic National Transcontinental Railway from Moncton to Winnipeg on a route through traffic-thin northern Quebec and Ontario.<\/p>\n
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When all but the Canadian Pacific (CP) strands of this overbuilt web of rails collapsed between 1917 and 1923, Ottawa created Canadian National (CN) to fuse and fix the bankrupt railways and the government lines \u2026 and then encouraged further network growth.<\/p>\n
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As the 1933 Royal Commission on Transportation observed, CP responded \u201cin the ways habitual to all competitive railways\u201d by expanding, often with public assistance.<\/p>\n
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By the time this second overinflated railway scheme deflated in the depression of the 1930s, the automobile was well on its way to a position of mass popularity.\u00a0 Provincial politicians rushed to fund highways to ensure votes by breaking what they invariably described as the railway monopoly.\u00a0 Trucking went along on this taxpayer-funded ride, gobbling up more and more railway freight revenue as the highway system grew at public expense.<\/p>\n
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Soon after the subsidized highway steamroller was born, the feds began to generously fund airports and air services.\u00a0 Transport Minister C.D. Howe quashed a CP\/CN plan to launch a jointly-owned airline coordinated with their trains, steamships and hotels.\u00a0 Instead, he compelled CN to help establish a government-owned airline, Trans-Canada Airlines (TCA), which competed with the struggling passenger trains of both railways.<\/p>\n
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To keep this predecessor of Air Canada financially aloft, Howe ordered much of the mail shifted from the trains to his loss-making airline at a high cost to the post office, starting with the high revenue first class mail, even on routes where TCA\u2019s planes couldn\u2019t get it to its destination any faster than the network of overnight trains then being operated by CP and CN.\u00a0 This infuriated the postmaster general, who had to explain the high costs and low revenues of this \u201call-up\u201d first-class mail program when he was grilled by the unenlightened members of various parliamentary committees.<\/p>\n
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The political rush to fund aviation and highways not only drove transportation spending skyward before and after the Second World War, but it also made a mockery of the concept of reasonable cost recovery from public investment and destabilized the railways.<\/p>\n
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This toxic transportation brew has been repeated many times since.\u00a0 It continues today.\u00a0 Billions in non-recoverable funding went to so-called pandemic relief support for some portions \u2013 but not all \u2013 of the transportation system.\u00a0 This has been accompanied by announcements of public-private partnership mega projects, such as VIA\u2019s high-frequency rail proposal for the Quebec-Windsor Corridor.\u00a0 This dream scheme has received nearly $1 billion in federal advances and commitments without even producing a plan.\u00a0 If built, it would require an amount the transport minister refuses to even estimate.<\/p>\n
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\u201cOne of these days, somebody will have to sit down and figure out what transportation we need, and what we can afford,\u201d a member of the Board of Transport Commissioners told a reporter in 1961.<\/p>\n
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Sixty-two years later, that overdue decision still hasn\u2019t been made.\u00a0 Instead, Transport Minister Alghabra offers platitudes and promises of dazzling future projects when corrective, non-partisan action is urgently required.\u00a0 The Christmas travel meltdowns and rising public anger prove that.<\/p>\n
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Will this long-standing national transportation dilemma ever be decisively resolved?\u00a0 Will our elected officials ever smarten up and perhaps take some rudimentary courses in transportation and public finance?\u00a0 Hiding from the truth and rearranging the deck chairs on Canada\u2019s transportation equivalent of the R.M.S. Titanic<\/em> yet another time isn\u2019t the answer.\u00a0 It never was.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Transport Minister Omar Alghabra appeared before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities on January 12, he said he wasn\u2019t hiding from the multiple meltdowns of Canada\u2019s airlines and VIA Rail over the Christmas holidays.\u00a0 But he was. Alghabra and his government are hiding from an inevitable confrontation with …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":52,"featured_media":41341,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[216],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editorials"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-21 18:55:02","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\/58923","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=58923"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58924,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58923\/revisions\/58924"}],"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=58923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}