ADAMS: Why Erin O'Toole has it wrong on the Billy Bishop expansion, high-speed rail

I spent April Fools' Day writing a piece that satirically treated Pierre Poilievre's opposition to Alto as a masterclass in strategic genius. The bit basically argued that the smartest thing a country can do is refuse to build anything that might actually work, especially something as suspiciously useful as high-speed rail between the cities that hold half the country's population.

It was satire. It was also, in hindsight, a little too on the nose.

This morning I was half-dressed when Erin O'Toole's tweet landed on my feed. The sad irony, he said, is that “there's no business case for Alto and a strong one for the Billy Bishop airport expansion.” I respect Erin. He's one of the few people in that orbit who still bothers to show his work and argue from something other than vibes. That doesn't make the argument any less wrong.

The "no private business case" line has become the Conservative Party's favourite conversation-ender on high-speed rail. It's expensive. It doesn't pencil out like a private equity play. Therefore, it shouldn’t exist. The issue is that this is a thought-stopping technique, not an actual argument.

Europe and Asia figured this out decades ago. They didn't wait for a perfect private return before laying track. They treated connectivity as infrastructure—the same way we once treated the Trans-Canada Highway or the St. Lawrence Seaway. Demanding a private business case for a project that stitches two economic regions when the alternative is slower growth and more cars on already clogged roads is the problem with applying the market mindset to our public services.

I've sat through enough Conservative policy discussions to know this wasn't always the party line. Years back, at the 2023 convention, delegates actually voted to support high-speed rail. Hell, when I was at the 2026 convention back in Janurary, many delegates and member observers I spoke to in-person told me they in fact did support high-speed rail, which is backed up by polling that shows the majority of Conservative voters, as well as the overwhelming majority of Canadians, support this infrastructure being built.

VIA's current service is a joke by international standards. Freight owns the tracks, on-time performance is a coin flip at best, and the trip from Toronto to Montreal still takes longer than it should. High-frequency rail was the more modest option Erin preferred back in 2021, and there's a coherent case for it. Full high-speed is a bigger swing, but pretending the bigger swing is automatically illegitimate because it doesn't clear a private-sector IRR is just ideological laziness.

There's another practical problem with just cancelling it that Conservatives keeps skating past. We can't legally walk away from this cleanly right now. The project is locked into a multi-year co-development agreement; meaning by the time a hypothetical Poilievre government could actually terminate without triggering the full set of contractual obligations, the penalty and sunk costs would be enormous.

Taxpayers would be paying a small fortune for an unfinished planning process that produces nothing. At that point, the “save the money” argument starts looking more expensive than simply finishing the damn thing.

All of this is to say that opposing this project just for the sake of opposing something is a terrible substitute for a transportation policy. It's also how you end up sounding like the party that can't build anything while still complaining that nothing gets built.

Then There’s The Jets...

Erin is right that the airport has a longer operational history than people admit and that secondary capacity in the GTA has always mattered. He's wrong that the current expansion push is clean. Ontario legislated the City of Toronto out of the tripartite agreement that had governed the place for forty years.

Bill 110 let the province seize the city's lands and replace it at the table. The Ford PC's tried to undemocratically override a municipal partner because the Mayor of the Toronto was in his way.

The waterfront and the surrounding road and transit network were never designed for a five-fold jump in passengers. Noise, flight paths over planned housing, marine traffic in the harbour, and the simple fact that you're trying to run a much busier airport off a constrained island site are not minor details. Calling that a “strong business case” while dismissing public transit for lacking one is selective at best.

I don't think Erin is acting entirely in bad faith; he's been consistent on the preference for high-frequency over pure high-speed, but the party he once led made it pretty clear at the last convention that it has moved on from him. Defending the provincial land grab on the waterfront while treating high-speed rail as a fiscal original sin is baffling, and the larger Conservative posture on Alto is the best example of the approach this party now takes on important economic issues: if the Liberals or the NDP are for it, we are against it, and "it's expensive" is just an excuse.

Canadians have been watching governments of all stripes fail to deliver major projects for a generation. When the response to a serious attempt at intercity rail is to demand a private business case that no public rail system in the developed world actually meets, you aren't protecting taxpayers. You're just guaranteeing that the next generation will still be stuck with the same slow, freight-choked corridor we have now.

This piece was written by an individual contributor and reflects the editorial position of The Provincial Times. Read our Content Policy here.