Reece Martin has a Vision for Canada’s High Speed Rail Future

Either we build high speed rail or we high speed fail!

Meredith Martin

Mike Moffatt

, and

Sabrina Maddeaux

Mar 05, 2025

In this episode of The Missing Middle, conservative pundit Sabrina Maddeaux and economist Mike Moffatt discuss the recent announcement of a high-speed rail project in Canada with transit expert Reece Martin. They explore the details of the proposed rail line, the political motivations behind it, and the challenges Canada faces in implementing effective transit solutions compared to other countries. The conversation highlights the need for a shift in approach to infrastructure projects, emphasizing the importance of political will, investment, and learning from international best practices.

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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast which has been lightly edited.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Hi Reece and welcome back to the show. The federal government recently announced a multi-billion dollar plan to build high-speed rail from Quebec City to Toronto. Could you outline for us a few of the details and what your reaction was to this news?

Reece Martin: Sure. So essentially what the federal government, or Justin Trudeau, kind of on his way out the door announced, on paper, a plan for a line going from Toronto to Peterborough, Ottawa, Montreal, Laval, Trois-Rivières, and then Quebec City, and, sort of, the idea of moving forward with high-speed rail. I want to just clarify that he talked about plan for high-speed rail but it is a plan to study high-speed rail for about five more years. There's a cost going forward of $3.9 billion, at least today, that's what's been announced. And so this would be a service supposedly that would reach up to 300 kilometers per hour, would be all electric, and it would provide connections between Toronto and Montreal in approximately three hours, maybe a little less than that. So kind of the expectation of what a high-speed rail line would be. That's what got announced.

Mike Moffatt: So hi Reese. As most of our listeners know, I'm from London, Ontario. I'm wearing my London, Ontario sweatshirt today. And as a Londoner, I have a question for the federal government. How dare you!?

No, in all seriousness, like what gives? Why is the route not going through Southwestern Ontario?

Reece Martin: Well, I think that if any reasonable person looked at what is the most valuable route, it's Toronto-Montreal, right? Ottawa is in between the two. So hitting Ottawa is not a huge diversion, right? I think the bigger question here is why is it going to Quebec City and Trois-Rivières, which, you know, are not non-existent - Trois-Rivières is not big, but Quebec City is fairly large. But in the case to go there as opposed to like Kitchener Waterloo and London and further southwest is maybe not as strong. I think what's happening here is ultimately it's all political. It's an attempt to balance the amount of trackage, so to speak, in Quebec and in Ontario. And it's irrational because to do that, you're taking the really valuable stuff in Ontario, which is Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto is almost all in Ontario, and you're adding this leg in Quebec that is probably still more valuable than going a little bit southwest of Toronto because you would expect Quebec is really passionate about high-speed rail. The French have the TGV. A lot of people from Quebec have ridden the TGV - the high-speed trains in France - so they're into the idea. So maybe it will be really well used, but it does feel like it's a political thing. I mean, I think it is kind of explicitly a political thing.

Mike Moffatt: And I'll get past my disappointment about the route. Actually, I probably won't, but I'll just cram it inside - suppress it for the time being.

But it was in my lifetime, there have been dozens of studies and plans and concepts of a plan and government promises for high speed rail. I think in fact, if we printed them out, they would probably stretch the entire length of the route. And I actually mean that quite literally. The website High Speed Rail Canada has over two dozen plans and reports for the Ottawa-Québec route alone. So why did absolutely none of those ever get built and why will this one be any different?

Reece Martin: Well, I don't think it will necessarily be any different, but I think that when you look at it ultimately and you look at the political calculus of it, studying high-speed rail is a pretty low-risk thing. It's relatively low cost, though that seems to be changing. And you get to say we're moving forward, and you can just keep saying we're moving forward every couple of years, forever. And I guess get some political points for doing that. So I think that it's all down to that. There's very little risk in printing some paper and writing some words, but there is much more risk in actually building a real thing (and cost,) right? And there's also a lot of benefit, but the risk is much higher when you do something as opposed to not doing anything and [simply] making more reports. And unfortunately, I think that what's happening here.

Ultimately they're talking about studying it for five more years. They're talking about studying it, which costs like $4 billion. That's how much the first high-speed rail line in France. [It] cost less and took less time to study and to build than we are spending studying it. They built a physical thing for less money than we are making reports, right? They're using this term co-development, that is planning, that is designing something.

They've had years and years where they've been talking about this already. So what have they been doing in those years and years, right? If they need to spend years more planning.. And who is co-developing it? There's no Canadian institution with any experience building serious high-speed railway. So why is it a co-development? It's not a balanced thing here. The French and the other players who are building this project have knowledge. The French especially, they know how to build high-speed rail. Why are we, why are we part of that expertise? We're not. We should ask the French what they would build and do what they say.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, that's the story of this government on not just transit, but so many files, studies, committees, studies of committees, and we'll see if we actually get there. But let's say we will for a second. Right now, if I wanted to jump in a car and drive to Quebec City from my home in Toronto, it would take about eight to nine hours. Now, high-speed rail could get that trip down to about half of that. And that sounds great. I mean, who wouldn't want that? You've spent time traveling all over the world with your YouTube channel, RM Transit. Why exactly is Europe so much better at rail than Canada?

Reece Martin: Well, you know, I think that it's down to the fact that they actually build stuff, right? Like, they don't always get it right. We talked about the Eglinton Crosstown in Toronto and other projects in Canada that have all these problems. There are lots of European projects that have similarly large problems. The thing is that they don't just stop and press the brakes. They keep working. They learn from their mistakes and they keep building. And so they really have a very mature industry around rail. And frankly, in Asia and other parts of the world, that's becoming the case as well.

I think the issue in Canada is we're afraid to invest, we're afraid to take any risk, right? The status quo, it doesn't work well, but it works. And so people sort of ask, “Why do we need to change that? Why should we take this risk?” But I think there's a huge opportunity cost to not having this.

Now it's not even an advanced technology. You know, it's been around for over 50 years. At this point we're sort of laggards in the world. So I think the reason they're better is they have more leadership and more political will and they see the benefits and not just the costs.

Mike Moffatt: We certainly see that leadership and willingness to get stuff done, but I'm kind of left wondering, is Canada's problem just that we can't implement these plans? Or is it that the plans themselves don't make sense because they're either too expensive or issues around population density or some of the other factors that you often hear from high-speed rail skeptics? Which is it and why is it that pretty much everyone else in the world can do this, but not us?

Reece Martin: I think that's what's really key to highlight is that it is everyone else in the world. You can look at democracies and autocracies and countries with less wealth than Canada, countries with more wealth, countries that are larger, countries that are smaller. Russia has high-speed rail, Morocco has high-speed rail, Sweden has high-speed rail, Korea has high-speed rail. All of these countries that have all these differences from Canada, they still manage to get it together.

You know, I don't think demographics or geography is a problem. Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, it's a pretty easy corridor to build in. If you look at some of the corridors that have been built in places like Korea and Spain, it's like building through the Rocky Mountains, right? And they do it for less money than we're suggesting it's going to cost. The last time I was on the Missing Middle, we talked about the cost of building transit in Canada. And I think that's the same problem here. We're talking about spending five to 10 times the amount of money that other countries would spend to build the same things that we're building. A big part of that is because we do things like spend 10 years studying it. And so that's all this money you're racking up and cost you're racking up before you even moved a single shovel of dirt. So I think that our problem is entirely in process. You know, when you look at Southwestern Ontario to Quebec City, you've got like 20, probably by the time anything gets built, 25, 30 million people.

That's very much a healthy number for high-speed rail. You look at Sweden…Sweden has like eight or 10 million people and they have high-speed rail across their nation. And so I think that we don't have a problem with the number of people.

We have a problem with our inability to deliver something that we want. I mean, it's similar in a sense to housing. The government's not building the housing, but the government wants something, but it can't actually deliver the thing it wants. And so I think it's the same for high-speed rail. We just can't, we currently can't and we don't seem determined to figure out how to actually solve the problems.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, speaking of the ability to deliver, I want to bring the conversation back to Toronto and the latest numbers I could find for the Eglinton Crosstown light rail system, which began construction in 2011 and is still not completed. So right now the project costs are estimated to be around 12.8 billion dollars. So not only are we not good at it, it just seems so much more expensive to build here. Why?

Reece Martin: It ultimately comes down to a ton of different factors. It's things like over-design. So we design stuff in a way that isn't optimized for making it cost less. Basically, we build things larger than they need to be in some places. We might undersize them in other places. We take this very litigation-happy approach where with P3s, et cetera, there's a ton of lawyering up. There's a ton of money spent on legal fees, et cetera, not actually building stuff.

We design projects so that they take a long time to build. And when they take a long time to build, that's a lot of people on payroll for a project for a lot longer. If you could build it in half the time, that's presumably half of the main hours people are billing out, right? And so there's a kind of myriad of factors that lead to these high prices. I think chiefly among them is that it doesn't seem to be a problem.

When you look at people talking in government, no one's saying, why does it cost this many times as much money to build in Canada? And when no one's even bringing this up outside of these kinds of wonky discussions, I don't think you can expect that there's going to be any real movement on trying to fix it.

…until budgets come due and then you say: “okay, that's how much it costs to build something? I guess we're just not going to build stuff.” And that's what you've seen in places like New York. They have the highest prices in the world. They just don't build new things. And we're going to be headed in the same direction.

And in terms of the timeline, you know, when I moved to Toronto in the mid-2010s, I thought by the time I'm done university I'll be riding the Eglinton Crosstown. It was like, maybe when I get married, I'll be riding the Eglinton Crosstown. I have kids now. I'm not riding the Eglinton Crosstown. It's the timeline is just, is shocking! But at the same time, the government doesn't seem to care very much. They only fired the Metrolinx CEO a few months ago, even though he'd been running the project essentially for seven years or so. And so it doesn't seem like we are demanding excellence or demanding even accountability.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Maybe our grandkids will see it.

Reece Martin: (Sounding dejected) Maybe.

Mike Moffatt: I'm going to give a hypothetical scenario here. So let's suppose I'm Prime Minister. I think at that point, Sabrina finally moves to the United States, but don't worry Sabrina, this is just a hypothetical. And I listened to this podcast and I'm absolutely loving what I'm hearing. I'm like, okay, this guy knows what's going on.

Trump gave us the idea of having a fentanyl czar. I'm going to make Reece or high-speed rail czar. And I'm going to give you a decent-sized budget, not an unlimited one, but I'm going to convince NATO that we can count this against our 2% defence budget. You know some creative accounting here. So I'm giving you a fair bit of power. I'm giving you a decent, but not unlimited budget. What would you do? How would you use that to get high-speed rail built in Canada?

Reece Martin: Well, I think the things you do… and I'm honoured. This is a position of a lifetime. It's really, it's great.

Mike Moffatt: It came down to you and Jason Slaughter and I just I couldn't I just couldn't

Reece Martin: He's a Dutchman now, so…

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, yeah exactly we got to keep this in Canada.

Reece Martin: You know, I think ultimately you start with something smaller, right? When you look at places like Korea - when they built high-speed rail, they also partnered with, with France - they had more of an intention of industrial policy around it where they, for example, the first couple of trains were built in France and then Korea took over the manufacturing. They had people go to France, learn how to build the stuff and then bring that knowledge back to Korea so that they could do it domestically.

A big part of the problem with a lot of these transit projects is we hire international expertise. The issue is that people who live in France and Germany and these other countries, they don't really want to move to Canada. We have a lot of problems and it's extremely expensive to move here, right? As we all know. And so you get this very small pool of people who cost a lot of money. It's much better if you can get people from Canada to go and learn how to do some of this stuff and then have minimal overseas expertise oversee things. I think that's a big element of it. Instead of this kind of, we're buying a high speed train and the French are going to come over here and build it for us. That doesn't make a lot of sense. So I think that the first thing is how you structure it.

The second is, you start small. Instead of saying we're going to do a thousand-kilometer route at the beginning, you look at what is the minimum viable product, right? You look at Ottawa-Montreal, which is also about half in Quebec, half in Ontario, but it's a couple hundred kilometers, not a thousand kilometers. And when you look at Ottawa-Montreal,

a competent builder like the French could probably build that whole project for about the price of our next five years of studies. And so you start with something like that and you increasingly get Canadians to get trained up, learn how we build the first phase, learn from our mistakes, learn what laws we might need to change to make it easier to build these things. You know, when the French built their first high-speed train lines, they changed things around laws, around land ownership and how expropriation works, et cetera. They made it so that instead of buying up land, they could often do these land swaps where a farmer - they take one part of one person's land and they give it to one farmer and another farmer gets another piece of land. And this helps save costs so that you don't have to just buy up tons of land. And so smart policy and actually learning as a nation, building a kind of high-speed rail authority. These are the ways we would actually competently deliver high-speed rail.

A phased approach - it's just not as exciting as saying you're going to get Toronto-Quebec City. But I think it could actually happen. Whereas saying Toronto-Quebec City, it may happen, but it will happen at the price of a world war, basically, or something like that, right? It's going to cost us some ridiculous amount of money. It's going to be up to 300 kilometres per hour, that's not even world-class high-speed rail anymore.

The stuff being built in other countries goes to 320. In China, they're at 350. That's what the US is talking about for some of their new lines. So we're talking about in like 10 years building something that Spain had in the 90s. It's just, it's very disappointing and it shows a lack of vision, but also a lack of that ability to look at what other countries did, what they have and intelligently try to deliver that instead of trying to deliver promises, which is all we do right now.

Mike Moffatt: So Prime Minister Moffat loves this plan. It's good politically. I like how cautious it is. And as a unilingual Prime Minister from London, Ontario - I still don't know how I got elected. It must have been a vote split, something weird with first past the post, but we'll put that aside. I absolutely love it. You put it on my desk. My question for you is: OK, I've seen the boondoggle that's happened in California. How can we avoid this Ottawa to Montreal train from having those kinds of issues that we've seen in California?

Reece Martin: Okay, so if you're not familiar with what Mike's talking about there, essentially, California has been talking about high-speed rail since 2000. They've managed to build some very impressive bridges in the middle of nowhere California. In the sort of inland areas near Fresno and some of these other small cities. And they're talking about having high-speed rail from like a couple of cities that have tens of thousands of people to other cities with tens of thousands of people in like five or 10 years from now.

You know, I think ultimately California's problems come down to…California is extremely litigious. America is extremely litigious. There were just enormous amounts of lawsuits. California also is a small part of the United States. So their ability to change federal laws, and things like that, to help accelerate a project like high-speed rail is quite limited. They did a lot of the overbuilding and stuff that we did with the Eglinton Crosstown. You know, they designed an entirely new system to electrify the trains so that these California condors - which I guess other places don't have special birds that need to be protected - so that they couldn't electrocute themselves on the wires. And they spent enormous amounts of money engineering new systems. We don't need to do these things. We also don't have mountains between our major cities. The California high-speed rail, it's going to have to these enormous tunnels under the mountains near San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Montreal-Ottawa is pretty flat. It's not the worst terrain in the world to build something like this in. So I think that through not being America, trying to deliver a project more competently than California, and learning from their mistakes - like we should learn from the things that they've screwed up. We should look at it very closely and say, like, why is it expensive?

It's taken so long and that's a big element of it. When you're talking about running a project for like 20 years, a lot of people have made their entire careers on that project, right? So I think it comes down to those things and the fact that they did the same thing where they hired a ton of consultants and they don't seem to be interested in really bringing that knowledge into some public agency that can deliver the project at far lower costs instead of trying to outsource it to a million different engineering consultancies and overseas companies. So I think it's all of that.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Okay, so I'm going to play devil's advocate for a minute because someone needs to fill the role of opposition to Mike Moffat's spend-happy government. Suppose I'm a car person and I don't see what the benefit of spending money on a high-speed rail project is to me personally, or maybe someone who lives in another part of the country and doesn't see the benefit of spending all this money provinces away. What would you say to convince me?

Reece Martin: It's a project that does improve the entire country, even if it doesn't touch the whole country. I mean, when you look at it, if we had a public agency that could deliver high-speed rail, you'd want more projects for them down the road. And I actually suggest, before going to London, Ontario - I'm not sure if I get kicked out of my job for suggesting this - but why haven't we built something between Calgary and Edmonton? It's also a very easy corridor, right? Like it's quite flat. There's a ton of space.

It's shocking to me personally that Via Rail hasn't already done anything just to show…As someone who grew up in BC Via Rail is essentially non-existent. You know, they could really show the West at least exists by building something between Calgary and Edmonton. You know, even just a bus that says Via Rail on it would be better than what we have now. So I think that talking about how this could help build future rail projects in the country, but also just the economic benefits. Being able to allow people to travel between these cities would really improve the efficiency of the labor markets, et cetera, right? It would allow people to study and to do business in places that they can't today. It would allow for an enormous amount of tourism. You could go for a Leafs game or a Canadians game and be back before you need to go to bed, (depending on how late you go to bed.) And so I think it opens up so many opportunities there.

It could be a real nation-building project in the sense that people from Quebec and Ontario could be intermingling a lot more. People could be doing a lot more studying and cross-cultural stuff. And so I think all of that's great.

And then, if you're a driver, the 401 is the lifeblood of the country in the East. By providing this alternative, you really massively open up the capacity for people who need to drive for some reason or another. Maybe they have a bunch of stuff they're moving or something and so they need to drive. Or for trucks that need to transport goods and they can't necessarily be on rail for one reason or another. So you open up all of that. That means that you don't have to spend money expanding the 401, which is in and of itself a very expensive proposition. And you don't need to expand the airports as much, which is tens of billions of dollars as well.

And so it really shifts where we're investing in our infrastructure and it takes a proven technology that's been deployed in like almost 20 different countries and it takes that proven technology and deploys it in Canada and boosts the national economy. And so I think it's a win all around.

Mike Moffatt: I gotta say that the Mike-Sabrina exchanges in question period would be absolutely epic. And now we have Reece saying that the West wants in. This is all giving me very, sort of, 1993 vibes and I'm here for it as a Gen Xer. But let's go to the actual politicians, not the hypothetical ones.

There's gonna be a federal election this year and I want you to wear not just your high-speed rail train hat, but your young adult hat. Young being defined as anyone younger than me. What do you want to hear from the various parties and are there any politicians, right now, that are giving you hope in Canada?

Reece Martin: Hmmmm…give me hope? At the moment, not really. But I think there's a lot of potential, right? The Liberals have so clearly just done terribly on this file, right? They've been in power since 2015. They've basically been talking about rail in some form or another since 2015. This Via HFR (terrible name) plan was around in 2015. They've had so much time. If the Liberals had started with a competent plan kind of on day one, they could have delivered a high-speed train by now, right? They haven't, they haven't delivered anything. There's not a single foot of rail that has been laid for Via Rail anywhere in the country. We have some new trains, but I don't think that’s… I don't wanna pat them on the back for replacing the 50-year-old trains that existed beforehand. It was that or: Hundreds Die in Via Rail Accident as Trains Implode or something. And so, you know, I think the Liberals have really screwed it up.

What the Conservatives could do is they could say: “Hey, look at this Liberal mismanagement. We're going to look at best practices from other parts of the world, and we're going to adopt them and we’re actually going to deliver something.” You know, if you look at the government in Ontario - I know it's all doom and gloom on the housing front - but I think for them, for all of their failures - and they have failed on transit in a number of ways - they haven't failed to be ambitious. They've announced a ton of projects and they're actually moving forward. Like shovels-in-the-ground on a ton of projects. The Conservatives federally could do something similar. They could build this big project and they could commit a lot of funding. And they can learn from Doug Ford's failures to build projects quickly and cost-effectively. And so I think that there's a real way out for them here if they're interested in delivering a project that can be a real legacy project. And that they'd certainly be remembered for in the long term.

In terms of other political parties, you know, it's a lot of noise. I don't hear anything that seriously is going to push us in the right direction. Like the NDP have talked about: Hey, don't have these private companies involved. And it's like, OK, well, the French have high-speed rail and they've delivered it in, you know, more countries than you have. I think that we should probably not listen to that.

I think that it's a real opportunity to break from the Liberals policy of talking about it, but not actually delivering anything and starting to deliver stuff. So yeah.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, it'll be interesting to see if this becomes a bigger topic in an upcoming federal campaign and if whoever does win that campaign actually manages to get some rail on the ground. But thank you, Reece, again, for joining us today. And thank you, everyone, for watching and listening and to our wonderful producer, Meredith Martin.

Mike Moffatt: And thank you, Reese. And when I am Prime Minister, you will be my Transit Czar. Sorry, Jason. And for our audience, if you have any thoughts or questions about high-speed rail or the political grievances of southwestern Ontario, please send us an email to [email protected].

Sabrina Maddeaux: And we'll see you next time.