A city passenger train leaves downtown Calgary, in June.Todd Korol/The Globe and Mail
Tyler Dawson is an Edmonton-based editor for The Globe and Mail’s Opinion section. He is the author of The Republic of Alberta: An Idea That Won’t Go Away.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is clearly a fan of trains. She did, after all, own a restaurant in High River that was inside an old Canadian National train car.
Doubtless, the Premier is a fan of many things. But her fondness for trains, and in particular, that of her husband, David Moretta, is having a noted effect on long-term infrastructure planning in the province. You probably can’t say that about all her passions. The Premier likes dogs, too, but there’s no universal doggie daycare strategy out there.
“He and I love rail, we talk a lot about rail,” Ms. Smith said of her husband in early June.
Back in April, 2024, Ms. Smith announced that Alberta was embarking upon an ambitious plan to study a future rail network in the province. At the time, it seemed slightly off-brand for a conservative. Conservatives, you’ve probably noticed, tend to adore the automobile, and not just for the O’Rourkian reason that cars bring freedom, or that trains are faintly, suspiciously European.
But personal interest aside, Ms. Smith was being a realist. Alberta’s population was growing (and is going to keep growing), and that meant finding new ways to move people around the province was going to be imperative.
“Expanding our roads, freeways and highways to be six or eight or 10 lanes all the way across is not always feasible, nor is it wise,” she told reporters.
The Premier’s logic is sound, and there’s not an Albertan born who, stuck in the stultifying drive between Edmonton and Calgary, hasn’t wished they could be having a cocktail in a dining car instead.
Alberta, and its conservative politicians, have tended, however, to build ever-larger highways to accommodate the motorist and throw fits when a lane of driving or parking space is ceded to cyclists. And so, yes, it does seem slightly off brand for the Alberta Premier, whose government plans to interfere with municipal bike-lane construction, in a province that’s practically synonymous with the Ram pickup, to admit that creating more space for more cars just isn’t sustainable.
And to top it off, to commit the province to an ambitious, multidecade plan to build passenger rail around the province.
The genesis of this vision, the Passenger Rail Master Plan, was Mr. Moretta’s.
“I’ll credit my husband with giving the kickoff, saying, ‘If you don’t develop a master rail plan you’re going to be in trouble,’” Ms. Smith said earlier this year.
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An odd start, perhaps, to a major government project, but no matter; if rail is going to get built in Alberta, it’s going to need not just a lofty vision, but a distant horizon. Quite probably, the population couldn’t support high-speed rail if a network were flung up tomorrow. So it’s best to plan for the future, rather than try to retroactively build infrastructure when vehicle traffic spirals out of control and modern infrastructure is needed, well, yesterday.
In order to accomplish this, the province embarked upon studying the future of rail in Alberta. Ultimately, it concluded that the best plan was to build high-speed rail between Edmonton and Calgary, commuter rail to a few bedroom communities around the two largest cities, and a line that would carry tourists from Calgary’s international airport to the tourist hotspot of Banff.
The province’s planning document anticipates spending $60-billion to plan and construct the network, plus purchase the trains themselves.
It’s possible, if there are substantial population increases and upgrades to rail infrastructure, that Alberta could rebuild the intra-provincial rail network it had five decades ago. But Alberta’s ambition has been tempered; there are no plans, at present, for the network to reach Grande Prairie or Fort McMurray or extend out toward other provinces or the United States. The population projections just don’t support that being a viable option.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith speaks in Edmonton, in April, 2024.JASON FRANSON/The Canadian Press
On the other side of the country, Ontarians and Quebeckers are watching anxiously to see if the Alto high-speed rail project between Toronto and Quebec City, which could cost up to $90-billion, actually gets built, what impacts it will have on local communities, how ghastly the cost overruns will be, and whether the partnership between Alto, a federal Crown corporation, and Cadence, a conglomerate of other companies, will produce the needed gumption to pull off such an infrastructure project in the modern era.
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But, as in all things, eyes ought to be drawn at least a little bit westward. Alberta, the fastest growing province in the country, is looking at a bold vision. And it’s being brought in by conservatives, which ought to give it a bit of staying power.
In some ways, too, it’s a first step back to what Alberta once had. For much of the 20th century, Alberta actually had passenger rail services that went around the province. It wasn’t until 1977 that a train running from Cold Lake (at the time called Grande Centre) to Edmonton over 280 kilometres was shut down, though CN had been fighting to do so since the early 1970s; in 1975 it averaged just 11 passengers a trip, and lost more than $750,000. The Dayliner, which travelled between Edmonton and Calgary, operated up until 1985. At one point, there was a train from Edmonton to Drumheller; other trains ran to Dawson Creek and Prince Rupert in B.C. and North Battleford in Saskatchewan. If the Alberta government’s full-scale ambitions are recognized sometime in the next six decades – admittedly unlikely – some of those connections could reappear. Today the only remaining regular passenger rail lines in Alberta run from Edmonton, through Jasper and on to Prince Rupert and Vancouver, operated by VIA Rail.
But pretty much ever since the discarded trains pulled into the station for the final time, there have been studies and reports looking into the question of whether the Prairie province should bring train travel back. The conclusions of the various reports – there have been at least six since the 1980s – have been mixed.
In 1985, a study concluded that passenger rail would be both “technically feasible and economically-viable,” with the added bonus of revitalizing provincial engineering and construction industries. A year later, a legislature committee concluded that high-speed rail between Edmonton and Calgary would have “high costs” and “high risks” and would require public money to stay afloat.
Other studies followed, in 2004, 2008, 2010 and, most recently, in 2014. The various reports raise several considerations that are likely to be examined by government. The 2010 report worried about the “psychological costs” to farmers, who could see their land divided by rail. The 2008 report considered that high-speed rail would require its own infrastructure, whereas slower trains could share existing tracks with freight. The 2014 report noted that high-speed rail wouldn’t be able to cross rural roads at grade level; the potential for obliterating someone moving their combine between fields is too high.
Ultimately, whatever the reports concluded, many questions remain, and the solutions to some of the issues raised by the reports aren’t straightforwardly addressed in the master plan. The financing model that Alberta will settle upon isn’t tremendously clear, even though there is private interest in (largely hypothetical) intercity transit lines already floating around.
It’s also not altogether obvious how serious those proposals are, or how they might fit into the broader government plan. Liricon Capital has proposed a hydrogen-powered train from Calgary to Banff, and has submitted documents to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Major Projects Office. The Prairie Link Rail Partnership has proposed high-speed rail between Edmonton and Calgary. TransPod proposes a “hyperloop” route between the two major cities, too. That train-like vehicle, the proponents say, would hurtle at up to 1,000 kilometres an hour through a low-friction tube, fast enough that a person could pop up to Edmonton for an after-work pint with friends and be back in time to make dinner.
In the end, though, it’s politics that make this notable. You don’t have to work that hard to imagine an NDP government in Alberta proposing the exact same, only to have conservative members of the legislature decrying it as expensive nonsense for the urban elites. In this scenario, with the idea coming from the United Conservatives, should the NDP ever again form government, they’re likely to be reluctant to kill it.
All of which is to say, Ms. Smith, a fan of trains, might just get her wish. And at this point, she can’t go wrong by laying the (eventually literal) groundwork.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly said the sole remaining passenger rail line in Alberta is operated by VIA Rail, and runs from Edmonton, through Jasper, and on to British Columbia. VIA Rail operates the only remaining regular passenger rail line in Alberta, which runs from Edmonton, through Jasper and on to Prince Rupert and Vancouver.