Western Standard - June 15, 2026


Protesters blast Carney’s $90B high-speed rail plan

Topics
Alto High-Speed Rail project protests
Mentioned
Danaga Aalto
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Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

153.51

Word count

641

Sentence count

25


Summary

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

Protesters demonstrate against the proposed $90B high-speed rail line between Quebec City, Montreal, and Ottawa. They argue that the project is a waste of money, an environmental disaster, and a boondoggle that won t benefit the vast majority of Canadians.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 This is a complete waste of money. The Kearney government is going to spend
00:00:03.340 just up to $90 billion on this high-speed rail boondoggle, a project that the vast
00:00:09.300 majority of Canadians are going to benefit from.
00:00:22.920 I'm William Tamten with the Western Standard here in Ottawa covering a Parliament Hill
00:00:26.880 demonstration by protesters who are protesting against the Aalto project, the project that's
00:00:31.580 going to connect Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa with light rail. Of course, many people are
00:00:36.520 concerned over its costs, its ecological and environmental concerns and damages that the
00:00:42.080 project could cost down the line. And of course, I spoke to protesters and I spoke to conservative
00:00:46.880 politicians that were present at the event, who told me more about why they were there
00:00:51.340 and what exactly they're looking to fight against.
00:00:53.680 What brings you here today?
00:00:54.800 To protest the Alto High-Speed Rail project.
00:00:58.800 Why are you against the project?
00:01:00.800 Well, for a multitude of reasons, beginning with environmental concerns,
00:01:06.800 as well as agricultural concerns, expropriation of land and property.
00:01:13.800 I think it's a waste of money, it's a terrible route,
00:01:15.800 and it will hurt more people than it will help.
00:01:18.800 I don't think it's a useful use of our economy or our money.
00:01:22.800 it's just going to again serve rich people and not so much the communities it's going to impact
00:01:28.000 we want transparency for this project and all what we get so far is nothing so we don't know
00:01:33.920 what's going on we don't know you know the budget is not exactly uh well known and we have a corridor
00:01:41.600 that our property is part of and we have no clue what's going on there and we got no answers so
00:01:47.040 So we are here just to demonstrate that we are frustrated, frustrated by a consortium that seems to know exactly what they are doing, but they don't want to communicate with us.
00:01:56.560 Honestly, there's so many reasons why this just doesn't work.
00:01:59.020 There's, first of all, hundreds of people here from Hastings, Linux, Addington, Tanya, Danaga, and I'm pleasured to stand here with them in opposition to this project.
00:02:06.480 It's just it doesn't make sense from so many perspectives, whether it's the financial perspective, the environmental perspective, the expropriation perspective, the list goes on.
00:02:14.180 It needs to stop.
00:02:15.200 What's the CTF's position on the project?
00:02:17.040 this is a complete waste of money the carny government is going to spend just up to 90
00:02:21.840 billion dollars on this high-speed rail boondoggle a project that the vast majority of canadians
00:02:27.040 aren't going to benefit from even one in three ontarians say that they're going to ride this
00:02:31.600 high-speed rail line uh on a yearly basis so most ontarians aren't even going to benefit from this
00:02:37.040 90 billion dollar boondoggle and guess what it is extremely expensive it is eight thousand dollars
00:02:42.880 her family of four not just for families of four in ontario quebec but also those out in alberta
00:02:48.400 saskatchewan and bc who will probably never see this high-speed rail line a day in their lives
00:02:54.800 and high-speed rail lines they have a tendency of going way over budget just look at california's
00:02:59.200 high-speed rail line that was supposed to cost 46 billion dollars and ended up ballooning up to 174
00:03:05.840 billion dollars taxpayers in this country cannot afford another big government boondoggle that'll
00:03:10.560 that'll just pile on billions to the day.
00:03:13.320 Well, there you have it, folks.
00:03:14.380 That's some of the voices from the couple of hundreds
00:03:16.800 of people that showed up to the hill
00:03:19.860 and who made their voices heard.
00:03:21.640 And if you enjoy that kind of content,
00:03:23.180 then subscribe, like the video, share with friends.
00:03:26.960 And for $10 a month, subscribe to the Western Standard.
00:03:30.580 Use the code FEARLESS for 40% off.
00:03:33.260 I'm Willie Tamtam for the Western Standard, signing off.
00:03:40.560 Thank you.