Countless horror stories have been told about the Via Rail passenger train that runs between Montreal and Halifax, christened The Ocean. On March 7, the train left the capital of Nova Scotia and took two days to arrive. Passengers were stuck for hours in Miramichi, then in Rimouski, then again in Sainte-Foy. It finally arrived in Montreal some 24 hours late.
Elderly people, children, and employees were taken hostage, confined to their seats and cabins by a system that has nothing but contempt for citizens of the periphery, this second-class region.
A helpless crew, exhausted and pestered, who must be counted among the victims of this mismanagement, had to manage their best to organize the mass of passengers, and convey bit-by-bit what little information arrived from afar, such as, “Another train is coming; it will arrive in eight hours.”
One often discovers that the Ocean’s departures are cancelled as soon as one arrives at the station. Its engines can no longer manage even slight inclines. They rely on the cooperation of passengers, who are called on to move in groups to different cars so that the train can generate enough momentum to make it uphill. Trains are often limited to 30 km per hour for hundreds of kilometres at a stretch because the rails are worn down. Exceeding that speed risks making the wheels slip on the tracks. The theoretical lifespan of these cars has been extended several times, as they have been patched up over decades. (When they are finally finished, we happily take the leftovers of foreign rail companies to test their limits here.)
It is utterly shameful.
No one in this region has any right to mock the old Soviet regime. Nor should anyone claim we are better than a “banana republic,” since the West, which created and continues to exploit those de jure or de facto colonies, now resembles them more and more.
Mario Péloquin, CEO of Via Rail, admitted as much publicly, and asked for more investment in rail infrastructure from federal authorities. He lamented that Canada had lost sovereignty over its railways, and announced the eventual replacement of Via’s antique rolling stock. Nothing would be done, however, to deal more effectively with the many emergencies that inevitably arise due to their unreliable and outdated equipment.
Still nothing has been announced regarding the poor condition of the railways, which explains why this public service finds itself in such a calamitous state.
Taking the train in this region is more like travelling back in time than travelling through space.
A sad history
In the second half of the 20th century, Canada went in the opposite direction from Europe, completely neglecting rail transport, giving in to pressure from automakers, oil companies and real estate developers to plan development around the growth of automobile and air travel. These policies were devastating for the climate (air pollution) and biodiversity (urban sprawl and deforestation), effectively a violent backlash of the natural world.
If passenger transport today falls under the auspices of the government, and therefore a public service, it is only as the poor cousin of the rail industry. Under the Liberals, the federal government privatized freight transport in 1995, and sold off CN. Freight transport could have subsidized passenger transport, but again the choice was made to privatize gains and socialize losses. If some people complain that the private sector works better than the public sector, it is because business people take over the easy part, keeping for themselves the profitable sectors of social activity, while dropping the rest. Even at the risk of neglecting important safety concerns, as the residents of Lac-Mégantic learned the hard way. We act as if the transportation of people had no public value at all, simply because our capitalist system of accounting cannot extract value from it. (The privatization of health services is proceeding according to the same logic.)
Canada’s public figures have been calling for national unity, assuring us that they wake up every morning thinking of “all Canadians” and citing bad history books that make the railway the symbol of a great democratic (and not colonial or imperial) project in British North America. But their grandstanding is not impervious to facts. The reality is one of utter contempt. The same figures boast of Bombardier and SNC-Lavalin as great paragons of business and industry, without mentioning that the trains, streetcars and subways credited to these firms are mostly ordered by countries that have the courage to stand up to the auto and oil lobbies by ensuring that interregional public transportation is a viable option.
In his swan song, the recently resigned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau trotted out the announcement of a high-speed train along the Quebec-Windsor corridor, the great construction project that has been promised to us for fifty years. He only made the announcement once his word was worthless and he lacked the means to achieve his ambitions.
People were expecting such announcements back in 2015, following the signing of the Paris Climate Accords. It only served to remind us that the current Liberal government wasted a decade, no doubt the last decade remaining before we start to feel the violent impacts of the climate crisis and the loss of biodiversity, phenomena inextricably linked to our way of life. If the Prime Minister’s authority had the least significance, he would have put an end to the filthy and environmentally devastating practice of extracting oil from the tar sands (according to the journal Nature), and launched a massive project of cross-Canada railway renewal and maintenance. In addition to connecting communities, this would have integrated rail transport into the Windsor-Quebec corridor, eased the burden on the road network travelled by so many trucks, and extended rail transport to various communities that are otherwise auto-dependent. History demanded it.
As good Liberals often do, they acted like Conservatives, but with a smile. The government nationalized a pipeline (unprofitable, of course) and handed it over to Alberta’s oil companies. Recently, while he was still (perversely) Minister of the Environment, Steven Guilbeault promoted the idea of Canada as a petrostate. Nothing can shake our total dependence on the automobile.
How many more electoral campaigns, how many whitened smiles, false debates, empty promises and badly framed issues before we take stock of the time we have wasted and the urgency of the task before us?
Alain Deneault is a professor of philosophy on the Shippagan campus of Université de Moncton.
A French version of this article originally appeared in Acadie Nouvelle on March 10, 2025.
Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this translation stated that The Ocean runs between Montreal and Vancouver. In fact, it runs between Montreal and Halifax. The article was updated on March 27, 2025 at 2:20 p.m.
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