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As a native Montrealer, this is an incredibly exciting project. After 50+ years of studies, this is by far the furthest an actual project has come along.
A consortium, Cadence, has finally been selected to plan and build a High Speed Rail option, rather than just High Frequency Rail (which was a possibility).
The announcement has come with ~$4 billion CAD allocated for the planning and design of the route.
Politics is what will decide if this project ever sees construction though. This project was announced by the Liberal Party of Canada (under PM Trudeau) but Canada will soon be holding a federal election. The LPC has a new leader in Mark Carney who will be principally running against Pierre Poilievre of the Conservative Party of Canada. It is not clear what the CPC’s official position is regarding the project, but they have publicly expressed skepticism.
Interesting times ahead to say the least.
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CityMoose’s good video about Canada’s HSR project:
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To provide some recent context for this project (aiming to be politically neutral here as always):
The Liberal party of Canada, under Mark Carney who had assumed leadership after PM Trudeau had resigned, unexpectedly won the April 2025 election.
One of this government first major piece of legislation is Bill C-5, which (among other things) aims to streamline and accelerate the regulatory process for major nation-building projects that are deemed to be in the ‘national interest’. The Alto-HSR project was rumoured to be one of the first projects to be nominated to be in the national interest.
Alto-HSR was not named as one of the first five projects, however was separately named among six other projects that ‘require further work before approval’. That is to say, the project is still ongoing, but requires further work before it can be officially be marked as fast-tracked project.
There has also been news reports that the government is trying to expedite the design phase of the project irrespective of whether it ever gets officially flagged as a ‘national interest’ project.
In any case, this is by far the furthest a HSR project has ever progressed in Canadian history, despite the idea having been the subject of at least a dozen studies over that last 30-40 years.
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