Federal government to expedite Alto, Canada's first high-speed rail project | Daily Hive

SNCF's TVG high-speed rail trains in Paris, France. (Markus Mainka/Shutterstock)

Construction on one of the most ambitious and expensive transportation infrastructure projects to ever be undertaken in Canadian history is now targeted to begin before the end of this decade.

Embedded within Prime Minister Mark Carney’s 2025 budget for the Government of Canada earlier this month, the federal government highlighted that Alto — the country’s first high-speed rail line project — will see its engineering, regulatory, and permitting work accelerated.

This will enable construction on Alto to begin in four years — as early as 2029 — instead of the original timeline of in eight years, towards the middle of the 2030s, as previously stated in early 2025, when the federal government announced the selection of a private consortium to lead the project and its decision to evolve the project from a high-frequency rail (HFR) standard to a far more superior high-speed rail (HSR) mode.

Alto will operate over a distance of roughly 1,000 km between Toronto and Québec City, with key stops along the route, providing much faster, more frequent, and more reliable passenger rail service than current VIA Rail operations.

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The November 2025 budget notes that the accelerated progress on Alto will be supported by the federal government’s newly created Major Projects Office (MPO), which is designed to cut red tape, prioritize, and fast-track “nation-building projects” with significant economic and/or national security value — such as natural resource projects, and energy and transportation infrastructure. When the MPO and its first projects were announced in September 2025, it mentioned Alto, but came short of including the project under the office at the time.

Moreover, the budget states that Alto will be supported by forthcoming “legislative amendments to streamline approval processes and reduce regulatory uncertainties.”

“This measure is not expected to have significant direct impacts on particular groups. Indigenous communities and other underrepresented groups are being engaged to inform the design of the Alto high-speed rail project and develop their capacity and readiness to economically participate in the project’s design and construction. A completed project would directly benefit travellers in the Québec City to Toronto corridor through the provision of faster and more reliable passenger rail service. These travellers are more likely to be students, highly educated, and middle-income households,” reads the budget document.

At this preliminary stage of planning, there is no estimated construction cost, but it will certainly be in the tens of billions of dollars. It will likely be exponentially higher than the previous preliminary estimate of $6 billion to $12 billion for the original HFR concept.

For the extensive technical design, engineering, and planning work alone required for high-speed rail, the federal government has already set aside $3.9 billion — before shovels can hit the ground.

The federal government anticipates Alto could create 51,000 jobs during construction and inject up to $35 billion into GDP.

In February 2025, following a lengthy procurement process, the federal government selected a private consortium called Cadence to plan, design, build, operate, maintain, and help finance Alto.

Cadence is a joint venture that includes SNCF Voyageurs — the French government-owned company that operates France’s high-speed rail network — and the French transportation engineering firm SYSTRA, as well as Canadian institutional investor La Caisse (formerly known as CDPQ and backed by the Québec pension fund), Canadian engineering firm AtkinsRealis (formerly SNC-Lavalin), and Air Canada.

La Caisse and AtkinsRealis are also involved in the private-public projects of Vancouver’s SkyTrain Canada Line and Montreal’s new REM metro network.

The federal government has created a new Crown corporation — also named Alto, separate from VIA Rail — to oversee the project and the activities of Cadence.

Alto’s design and precise route have yet to be defined, but in addition to the terminus stations of Toronto and Québec City, the intention is to also build stations along the way in Peterborough, Ottawa, Montreal, Laval, and Trois-Rivières.

The goal is to have Alto achieve speeds of 300 km/h or more, and cut passenger rail travel times along the corridor in half. Alto will be powered by overhead catenary electrical lines and have its own dedicated tracks, which means it will not share its tracks with freight trains and other VIA Rail services.

According to VIA Rail’s 2024 annual report, the broader corridor between Windsor and Québec City recorded about 4.2 million passengers — below the pre-pandemic 2019 figure of nearly 4.8 million passengers. The 2024 figures reflect a continued post-pandemic recovery process and some operational challenges along the corridor that significantly impacted the on-time performance of the services.

Long before the decision was made to pivot the HFR project into a true HSR standard, VIA Rail acquired a new fleet of Siemens Venture trains, which have a maximum speed of 200 km/h. These trains were intended to be used on the future HFR. As of the end of 2024, VIA Rail was operating 22 Siemens Venture trains on the Windsor-Quebec City corridor. In 2026, a modified version of the Siemens Venture trains will also be put into service on the Amtrak Cascades route linking Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland.

Siemens Venture train for VIA Rail. (VIA Rail)

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