Carney’s Next Priorities: Reinvigorate Transport Policy

Take Advantage Of Our Patriotic Surge

(Carney’s Next Priorities will be a summer series across this site, detailing the various issues that Carney will need to show movement on in the summer months and into the Fall that aren’t handling the Trump question. We know about Trump, but there’s also a whole country to run, and there’s a lot to do.)

One of the big rhetorical pushes of Mark Carney’s time in office has been for people to vacation east-west, instead of flying south to America. The not flying to America part is happening, with studies consistently showing flights down year over year significantly, but it is an absolute joke trying to get anywhere in this country for less than an arm and a leg. We have a train network that’s too expensive and too slow, our airlines suck, and Pearson’s consistently a disaster. So, if we’re going to make it easier for people to spend their money here, it’s on the government to make substantial improvements to intra-Canada transport, and fast.

The first step has to be making high frequency rail along the Toronto to Quebec City corridor happen immediately, not start construction in 6 years once we go through 12000 rounds of environmental review. Yes, Trudeau’s big announcement was a 6 year design and development phase before a single track is laid. Get that shit down to 2 years, use the Projects of National Significance or whatever crap title we gave them in C-5 to get the environmental reviews done at the same time, and get construction underway before the next election.

Yes, this is selfish of me - the prospect of having to book VIA for the OLP AGM is giving me hives, because it’s just a fundamentally shitty service. And yes, I say this as someone who is lucky enough to have a fundamentally shitty service actually available to me, but it’s not just this line that we need to enhance. We need to strengthen rail across the country. Why there isn’t high frequency rail between Calgary and Edmonton baffles me, and the east coast should be rife with it. There is no way that we are going to solve problems without significantly better rail in this country.

The economic case for it in a context of wanting more travel between cities is clear, but there’s also a benefit in terms of our humanity. At a time when we’re more than ever digitally siloed off, making it easier for people to move around will be a crucial step to keeping us sane and happy. It is one of the great displeasures of my life that some of my closest friends are GTA people, but it would be a lot easier to see them if there was a transit option that didn’t make me want to slit my eyeballs out, and that is absolutely true of many others too.

It’s also the case that the airlines are a joke. The Competition Bureau just dropped a report with 10 recommendations in three areas on how to make the flying process less fucking terrible, including a big focus on competition and ending our nativism, and Carney should take those recommendations seriously. If you want a Central Canadian to choose Vancouver for their next vacation, making air travel cheaper and easier is a key step.

(Honestly, one of the best things Carney can do in general is strengthen the Competition Bureau and agree to implement all recommendations from its reports as a matter of course. We’ve seen God knows how many investigations of price gouging or anti-consumer business practices ignored over the years because they died on the vine. Maybe if that wasn’t par for the course we’d be able to tap into some fucking economic populism and we wouldn’t have lost Windsor Tecumseh, but I digress.)

But more than the specifics of any asks, this government needs to see transport policy as a mechanism to unlock a lot of their broader agenda. Carney’s time in office so far has been good - by no means perfect, and the criticisms will definitely come (probably later this week, if Gregor Robertson doesn’t find a fucking pair soon) - but it’s been disjointed. This feels like a few Ministers getting their agendas implemented and the PM doing a handful of good things but no coherence. We have big announcements on defence spending levels and plenty of talk about manufacturing capacity and the Minister for Shady Art Deals also being an AI Minister who is talking a big game but at least in theory those three things probably should be aligned and intertwined and they’re not.

In the same way, we have the political conditions for transport policy being a genuinely transformative angle for this government, and one that enables our moment of peak Canadiana becoming a more consistent and sustainable part of our vacationing ethos. If we want to boost the Canadian economy so that when Donald Trump is gone, or even once someone convinces him to tell Customs to fucking cool it with the interrogations, people don’t immediately start flying back to Florida and Arizona, then we need to make travelling inside this country less fucking horrible.

We need Carney to speed up crucial approvals on the Quebec City to Toronto corridor, we need him to seriously look at the Competition Bureau’s report on flying in this country, and we need him to actually task Chrystia Freeland with undertaking a serious whole of government look at the way we fund and deliver infrastructure. We need to take the opportunity that Trump has handed us and genuinely change our country for the better. We have an opportunity to make the investments that will help our country for years after the one off spending is done - the kind of country building projects Mark Carney keeps telling us he wants to be his legacy. We need to see proof, and that starts by making our national transport policy just slightly less dogshit.