Western Standard - April 13, 2026


CORY MORGAN： Canada's high-speed rail dream is just a Liberal slush fund in disguise

Mentioned
Danielle Smith Mark Carney
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Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

182.61

Word count

943

Sentence count

45

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Canadian government is planning a $100 billion high-speed rail line between Montreal and Toronto, but there's a catch: it's in the Laurentian Corridor, a rural area with a population of over 20 million people along an 800-kilometre stretch of track.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hang on to your pocketbooks. This is the latest big liberal project. So while the Canadian
00:00:13.480 economy is on the rocks, you know, we've got the ongoing tariff war racking the manufacturing
00:00:18.640 sector while Canada's soft embargo on expanding the ability to export oil and gas products
00:00:24.180 prevents the energy sector from filling the economic void. We've got subsidies for everything
00:00:29.340 from battery plants to edible cricket farms, and they produce nothing more than a list of business
00:00:33.140 failures and our national debt's exploding. Yeah, nice picture. So to address all of this,
00:00:37.220 the economic wizard of Prime Minister Mark Carney has decided what the nation must do is sink
00:00:41.740 around $100 billion into a publicly owned high-speed rail project to service the
00:00:47.420 Laurentian Corridor in eastern Canada. The insanity of this notion beggars belief,
00:00:52.260 yet the Liberal Party, along with its stalwart supporters and legacy media, have circled the
00:00:56.300 wagons and are now in full campaign mode, pushing the alleged merits of a high-speed rail line.
00:01:02.120 Proponents of the line can't pretend there isn't a model of a North American high-speed project to
00:01:06.180 examine before diving into this one. California began its high-speed rail odyssey in 2008.
00:01:11.820 It was supposed to run between Los Angeles and San Francisco and cost about 35 billion US dollars
00:01:16.680 to build. They anticipated it to be operational by 2020. Yeah, six years ago. And with over 20
00:01:22.240 million people along an 800-kilometer corridor, surely it could be a viable route for high-speed
00:01:27.380 rail, right? Well, after 20 years and billions spent, not a single mile of track is operational
00:01:34.820 on the California line. The budget's exploded over $126 billion for phase one, and they hope
00:01:41.300 it might be operational by 2040. In short, it's been a catastrophe, and due to the government
00:01:46.640 clinging to the sunk cost fallacy, we'll be able to watch this slow-motion train wreck for decades
00:01:51.560 to come. The Canadian plan now is even more ambitious than the California one. They want
00:01:55.640 to build a thousand kilometers of high-speed rail for regions with far less population density than
00:02:00.600 California. They're going to have to try and get it built in adverse Canadian weather, and they
00:02:05.160 think it could be done for 23% lower than the current California line projections, and they
00:02:09.560 think it's going to be finished by the 2040s as well. Now look at the modest, relatively modest
00:02:15.000 light rail transit expansion of the Ontario line. These are the same geniuses who are going to build
00:02:19.240 this high-speed one, right? A mere 15.5 kilometers of line was supposed to be built with a projected
00:02:24.100 cost of $10.9 billion in 2019, and it was going to be ready to go by 2027, next year. Well, the cost
00:02:30.140 over seven years is tripled, and the completion date's been pushed into the 2030s. Just think of
00:02:34.960 what they're going to be able to do with a high-speed rail megaproject. Proponents of high-speed rail
00:02:39.040 like to point to European and Asian models as examples to follow, but it isn't an apples-to-apples
00:02:44.000 comparison by any measure. First of all, the population densities aren't even comparable.
00:02:47.380 I mean, Japan's in an area smaller than Newfoundland, and it's got 120 million people.
00:02:53.840 European and Asian cities are massive and close together, which creates a demand and feasibility. 0.69
00:02:58.180 Even in the Laurentian Corridor, the precious Laurentian Corridor, Canada comes over close to the densities of Europe and Asia.
00:03:04.420 Then there's the vehicle culture.
00:03:05.820 In Canada, over 80% of citizens have a private vehicle.
00:03:08.460 In Europe, it's only 56%, and the number's even lower in most of Asia.
00:03:12.040 People in Canada aren't going to give up their vehicles in the millions
00:03:14.580 just because they have access to a high-speed rail option,
00:03:17.500 whatever that might come.
00:03:19.140 The ongoing subsidies, though, are going to be massive
00:03:21.380 if this project even becomes complete.
00:03:23.840 If the cost of the line and its maintenance are going to be recovered,
00:03:25.880 the tickets will have to cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars each.
00:03:28.680 It'll take over a century to pay it off if people are willing to pay that much.
00:03:32.120 I mean, somebody calculated out it would,
00:03:33.140 you could pay for the airline flights between Montreal and Toronto
00:03:36.320 for 180 years for the cost this line's going to be.
00:03:39.180 The economic benefits of such a line are negligible.
00:03:41.620 it won't be transporting freight and with modern communication methods people don't need to commute
00:03:45.380 like they used to the tourism demand between those cities service is small and the novelty of the
00:03:49.860 line itself certainly isn't going to bring people out the liberal government likes spending
00:03:53.860 announcements and likes mega projects which are going to provide contracts and jobs for their
00:03:57.220 friends for decades to come whether the projects are ever completed or not for caps canada should
00:04:02.180 just institute a direct fund with a budget of a few billion a year that liberals can legally
00:04:05.940 transfer to their cronies with it'd be abhorrent but still cheaper than going through the motions
00:04:09.860 of building a high-speed rail line and maybe more effective for economic stimulation. You don't need
00:04:14.420 to be non-stradamus to foresee the disaster this high-speed rail line is going to become.
00:04:19.780 It's just going to matter how much is going to be blown on it and how long before fiscal reality
00:04:23.700 forces the project to be formally ended. And one more word of warning, as much as I like her,
00:04:28.180 our Premier Daniel Smith has got a fixation on trains and high-speed rail as well. We could
00:04:33.300 see such a boondoggle out here if we aren't on guard. They sure love building those things.
00:04:39.860 Thank you.