Alto High Speed Rail

[Mikeed]

Just want to say:
1) Alto is not a private corporation, it is a Crown Corp answerable to the Minister of Transport and Cabinet. It was originally a subsidiary of VIA rail.

2) The private sector is the build consortium. This is how we have always done mega projects like the CANDU builds or dams.

3) I think old Union station is clearly in play because we can do what we couldn't do in the 60s and run a TBM under Ottawa. I see essentially 0 good ROWs in Ottawa outside the airport. Look at California and HS2 in the UK. Massive TBM. We can do a lot of rural surface running and invest more in urban TBM routing.

4) I think a new Mount Royal tunnel is very likely.

There is no half assing HSR. It's a forever project. And Ontario has been dominated by half assed transit projects so I don't think there will be appetite to do anything but TBM most of the urban sections.

The grand strategy of Alto "why now" is the calculus that's been between the lines since the 90s HSR studies:
- the engineering has to be perfect
- costs can not be deminished
- the last time we did something like this was the seaway where we fairly seriously designed a 100% Canadian route that meant building a whole new river for ourselves, **that's how important it was precived to the political economy of the future** we seriously designed a copy of the Saint Lawrence for ourselves.
- Alto is the same political economy scale engineering program and it's all about **sectorial carbon budgets under Paris Treaty**.
- just as the French model of HSR TGV (which ours is based on) and the Japanese it's all about lacking oil and electrification of air travel. The French TGV was designed during the energy crisis to basically run intercity business/elite class air travel via nuclear reactors. Japan has never had the raw flow of domestic oil straight into domestic jet fuel like Canada has. Every HSR study has basically pushed it till we "had to" based on one thing: our domestic integrated jet fuel supply

Now that sectorial carbon budgets are a big thing. Our entire economy runs on diesel. More then most urban Canadians understand. Freight railroads, mining, energy, forestry, construction (condos), commercial fishery (diesel not bunker fuel for freighters) - this is the real Canadian economy. This is very hard to electrify. The whip hand is going to come for the easy stuff first.

If you think of Canada as an archipelago nation and we are. We can electrify air travel in the core island, but we still need jet fuel & carbon to get from the core island to the western, pacific, atlantic and nothern islands.


So all engineering decision are really about how do we crush this sectorial carbon budget so we can have a large primary diesel budget for our real economy.

And construction has to happen now before sectorial carbon budgets get tighter. Cause building this is going to be a massive amount of carbon and diesel.

Under Paris each state gets to chose which sectors to crush and which to protect. It's why if we clean up the upstream oil sands it doesn't matter that we export carbon as that is budgeted by the state importing in for where they need it.

This is just a type of analysis I don't think is expressed much but is truly driving the decision making. I think it's very likely we see a return to the old train station with a mined station under ground. I think it's logical to connect to Rideau Station LRT and the NAC, War Memorial Plaza via a lot of mining and tunneling.

Some of this will be not be news. Not I think it means for the first time in a long time we really are prepared to spare no expense.

The HFR plan was killed primarily by the sectorial carbon budget world of post 2050, which is just starting to arrive now. **It did nothing for this core political economy issue.**

I hope we see the "Northern route" near the transmission line through the hard rock in the Peterborough to Ottawa section. Let's make some money creating good jobs and do it right. None of this post 90s "cheap and clever" that has back fired over and over and over. Cough Otrain.