Traveling in Canada is like traveling back in time. Not in a good way

Union Station in Toronto - The CN Tower in the background (photo Flickr - MSPdude)

The day trip to Toronto I have taken this week left me with a deep sense of fatigue and disappointment. The fatigue is probably coming from the 10 hours I had to spend on trains in less than 16 hours, and the disappointment stems from the feeling that these grueling experiences were supposed to be a thing of the past.

Embed from Getty Images

The distance between Toronto and Montreal is roughly 550 km, more or less the same as between Rome and Milan. However the fastest of the seven daily trains between the two cities takes approximately 5 hours, almost twice as long as the one of the almost 100 that run between the two biggest cities in Italy. This makes day trips a very challenging task, because alternatives are not really an option. There are buses, but they are at least 1.5-2 hours slower. And of course you can fly, but that will set you back at least 300 Canadian dollars, easily double the price of what you would pay for a round trip flight between Milan Linate and Rome Fiumicino.

Canada considers transportation a low priority. The second-biggest country in the world is not interested in providing its inhabitants with fast, efficient and affordable transportation. And this is overly frustrating. Canada is supposed to be a developed country, but going from one place to the other is painful and expensive, either in terms of time or money, sometimes both.
And weather is only partly the reason for this.

Yes, airports are big and flashy, but they are among the most expensive in the world, rivaled only by the Japanese ones built on reclaimed land in a country that has almost four times the inhabitants of Canada crammed in an area almost 25 times smaller. Trains are mainly considered as a mean to move goods and not people, and are therefore slow, infrequent and relatively expensive for the service they provide.

The Quebec City-Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto-Windsor corridor seems designed for high speed trains. A stretch of 1150 km where almost half of Canadian population lives and works (18.5 million people), with no significant natural obstacles (no mountains, no big rivers, since crossing the St Lawrence can easily be avoided or mastered). It should be possible to go from Montreal to Quebec City in less than 2 hours (it takes 3 at best), Montreal-Ottawa should be commutable, Montreal-Toronto should be comfortably under the 3 hours and Toronto-Windsor should be a comfortable 2 hour ride (as proposed in the preliminary business case for High-Speed Rail on the line).
Trains would be the perfect solution for this area: it is safe, efficient and sustainable (electric power in Quebec is among the cheapest in the world and is almost entirely produced from water, so it is clean and renewable). Instead, there are millions of people shuttling back and forth from one city and another on cars, buses and planes, more polluting and, in case of road transport, considerably more dangerous, especially considering the weather conditions at these latitudes during several months of the year.

But high-speed lines are expensive to build and even more expensive to maintain. The project would have to be shared by two provinces (Ontario and Quebec) that barely tolerate each other on the best of days and this would make the project a political minefield.

For the time being, VIA Rail, the Canadian passenger operator, is marketing its services as the relaxing alternative to driving or flying. No traffic stress, no security hassles, a comfortable ride with free WiFi, free videos and food and drinks cart service. Passenger settle into their comfortable seats, use the in-seat plug points to power up their laptops or charge their phones, and spend the travel time going about their business.

It would be good to see Canada join the rest of developed countries with a proper transportation system. Not sure it's going to happen in my lifetime, but one can always hope.