micheal_can
Senior Member
The ship was unfit to sail, but was pushed to sail. This was during the Harper era, Feb 2014 when he was doing everything to balance the budget. During that time PP was the Minister for Democratic Reform.
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Lack of meaningful Passenger Rail service outside the Quebec-Windsor Corridor
- Thread starter Urban Sky
- Start date
crs1026
Superstar
Sure, but your definition of "possible" diverges from what's worth discussing.
No once-daily train route is economically reasonable except for remote services. A single daily train doesn't generate enough revenue to cover its overhead costs. If there is no corridor, there is no economic basis. A bus will be cheaper, provided there is a road. There is no market in Canada where a once-daily service offering will fill a long train, because it does not give travellers flexibility in timing.
A train that is needed once daily is by definition a remote service, and even there economics will force it to 3x weekly.
Please explain where the ridership will come to fill this service. The entire population of Saskatchewan isn't sufficient. And a provincial transport network with appropriate feeder routes would be largely bus dependent, so having a rail backbone is not worthwhile.
Again, forget "daily". A bus every x hours far exceeds the value of a once daily train, and is far cheaper to build and operate.
You assume investment on an enormous scale. Sure, some trains on some routes might cover their above-the-rail expense, but only after a massive capital spend whose financing costs will never be recovered. Which is why other Ministers can make better cases for the available funds. As for private money, if you can't offer ROI on investment, breaking even on operations is not good enough to find investors.
What other routes ?Again, you are imagining funding streams that the country doesn't have, public or private.
My second cup of coffee is kicking in, so I will stop here. Your ideas make sense only to you - because your grasp of the fundamentals is so weak.
- Paul
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Admiral Beez
Superstar
Harper never tried to balance the budget. He's Canada's second highest spending PM of all time, see below adjusted to 2022 dollars.
Prime Ministers and Government Spending: 2023 Edition
Poilievre will likely exceed Trudeau non-pandemic budgets above. But likely not to any benefit of VIA rail or intercity passenger rail. PP is going to rip that apart.
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Urban Sky
Senior Member
Friendly reminder that trolls win every time that the effort they impose on other people by provoking them into reacting to them exceeds their own effort to write their own comments, which is why they are best either ignored or shot down as fast as possible without much bother to disect their “arguments”.
I still have to see any somewhat relevant evidence (e.g., more recent than a 2012 interview, when VIA’s commercial and fiscal performance was far worse than today and nobody would have dared to dream about something as ambitious as HFR) that PP has any intentions to defund VIA and/or kill off HFR. The people insisting on this theory seem to be so convinced that they don’t even bother to explain it…
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rbt
Senior Member
Harper never tried to balance the budget. He's Canada's second highest spending PM of all time, see below adjusted to 2022 dollars.
Prime Ministers and Government Spending: 2023 Edition
www.fraserinstitute.org
Poilievre will likely exceed Trudeau non-pandemic budgets above. But likely not to any benefit of VIA rail or intercity passenger rail. PP is going to rip that apart.
While your point is generally correct this chart is spending, not deficit, and as such doesn't really serve as evidence Harper did not try to balance the budget.
A balanced budget has spending and revenue at the same level; and there are ways of doing that without reducing spending.
Admiral Beez
Superstar
Admiral Beez
Superstar
Who are these trolls you frequently mention? I don't see any troll-like baiting above.
Search results for query: troll
Instead of given attention to whomever has wronged your POV, I suggest we leave it up to the Mods to regulate behaviour.
micheal_can
Senior Member
Harper never tried to balance the budget. He's Canada's second highest spending PM of all time, see below adjusted to 2022 dollars.
Prime Ministers and Government Spending: 2023 Edition
Poilievre will likely exceed Trudeau non-pandemic budgets above. But likely not to any benefit of VIA rail or intercity passenger rail. PP is going to rip that apart.
A simple Google search gives you the real answer.
micheal_can
Senior Member
Notice the name of this forum. Talking about bringing something more meaningful than 2-3x week,if anything is what I do, but as I say, I look for what is within the realm of possibility and not just fantasy. Sure, HSR to all cities in Canada would be nice, but there is abetter chance of me becoming PM that that happening. So,when a topic elsewhere has me think of something that could realistically be done,and it would apply to none Corridor routes, I put it here.
A once daily Ocean or Canadian, especially during peak periods would likely be profitable, considering that the Canadian is already profitable..
I got an idea. Show me how to get from Regina to Saskatoon without a car.
They are close enough that even a singular train bouncing back and forth a few times a day would be plenty.
Buses are held up by traffic, and weather. Some of it is actual dollars and cents, but some of the value comes from things like not having to sit in traffic or being able to travel during the blizzard.
I said profit, not break even. I also did not think that *snap* and it is all built out. Doing it right would be to build one the ones that need the least amount of money to build out first,or the ones that will bring the quickest ROI first.
I have posted many of them already.
Admiral Beez
Superstar
Pointing me to the library is not providing your answer. Did Harper balance the budget?
Urban Sky
Senior Member
The two I usually refer to are @micheal_can and @ssiguy2, but different people have different perceptions about what constitutes trolling and what not - and that’s okay!Who are these trolls you frequently mention? I don't see any troll-like baiting above.
Search results for query: troll
urbantoronto.ca
Well, over on Skyscraperpage, the mods have acted by permanently banning @micheal_can (known there as swimmer_spe) for exactly the same behaviour he is compulsively exhibiting here, but again: different people (even: mods) have different thresholds for what consititutes as trolling. Anyways, the sole reason for this thread’s existence is to distract him from polluting the VIA Rail thread, but I have joined those which try to help people which get triggered too much by his behaviour (like myself previously) by suggesting to them to just block him (like all of them and myself already did).
In the meanwhile, why don’t you share any of the evidence which makes you so convinced that PP hates VIA/HFR and wants to defund it? This would truly be valuable information for those people here who (unlike me) are eligible to vote in the upcoming federal election…
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rbt
Senior Member
While missing the PMs, Stats Canada have quarterly deficit as %age of GDP which seems like a good way of looking at this type of data. Negative is a surplus, positive is a deficit. There is a trend-line during Harper's rule (2008 onward) toward surpluses which Trudeau continued through to 2020. The Cretien budget changes are clearly visible and continue through Martin into Harper's first term.
Harper was 2006 through 2015.
Trudeau is 2015 to present.
The data in table format below the image:
Canadian general government deficit as a percentage of nominal gross domestic product
none
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Admiral Beez
Superstar
Time will tell if it's all bluster, but we touched on this on the main VIA thread.
VIA Rail
It was posted a few years ago - but worth reposting, as many have not seen it. Fascinating and excellent work! There's a sequel that compared 1980 to 2024, that includes the USA. https://seanmarshall.ca/2024/01/30/changing-tracks-passenger-rail-in-1980-and-2024/...
Urban Sky
Senior Member
The ACTA link to your quote is unfortunately dead (and googling some phrases yields no results from outside this forum), but YDS has not been VIA CEO since 2019 and I highly doubt that he would reply to PP’s criticisms of VIA while at the helm of Siemens Canada.Time will tell if it's all bluster, but we touched on this on the main VIA thread.
VIA Rail
It was posted a few years ago - but worth reposting, as many have not seen it. Fascinating and excellent work! There's a sequel that compared 1980 to 2024, that includes the USA. https://seanmarshall.ca/2024/01/30/changing-tracks-passenger-rail-in-1980-and-2024/...
Anyways, once PP finds himself in office he will very soon realize that VIA does not offer any subsidized service in direct competition against private airlines, as it is not subsidized in any of the (corridor) markets where it could be considered a credible alternative to the airplane. Which is even acknowledged in your own post:
Also, the subsidized (non-Corridor) routes disproportionately serve exactly the kind of remote communities where he rides on their sense of being abandoned. In short, I fail to see what he has to gain by cutting the measly funding which goes into non-Corridor VIA, let alone killing: HFR (though he might scale it down if it’s over-reliant on taxpayer funding) or anything resembling the ideological grievances he holds against, say, the CBC…
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roger1818
Senior Member
A gravity model works well to help compare transportation demand (not just rail) between markets with similar sinergies. In this case we have two cities in the same province, one of which is the provincial capital, with very little population between them. The most obvious compariale in the corridor to me would be Montreal-Quebec City. I'll also compare it to Edmonton-Calgary.
| CMA Population | Distance (km) | Gravity (million people / km^2) | |
| Montreal | 4,291,732 | 255 | 55 |
| Quebec City | 839,311 | ||
| Calgary | 1,481,806 | 300 | 23 |
| Edmonton | 1,418,118 | ||
| Saskatoon | 317,480 | 262 | 1.2 |
| Regina | 249,217 |
As you can see the demand between Calgary and Edmonton is estimated to be less than half that of Montreal-Quebec City, and Sascatoon-Regina has about 2% of the demand. So if there are 5 Montreal-Quebec City trains a day, one could see 2 (maybe 3) Calgary-Edmonton trains a day, but not even 1 train a week between Saskatoon and Regina. At that point, you would be better off looking at other tranportation options, better suted to the demand.
I didn't include Ottawa-Toronto, as about 1/4 of Ottawa's CMA population is in Quebec, nor did I include London-Toronto, as it has significant population between the two.