Canada’s high-speed rail line project is in the works, and political tensions around the issue are high. 

The Mark Carney government launched the ambitious project in February 2025. The proposed train line, which would connect Toronto and Quebec City, is expected to cut travel time between the cities by nearly half and increase Canada’s gross domestic product by 1.1%, per the estimates of the Crown corporation Alto, which is developing the project in partnership with a private consortium. 

But the government expects the network will cost up to $90 billion, cross over 1,700 properties in Ontario and Quebec, including 500 agricultural holdings, and require land expropriations.

Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon has described it as a “generational project” and “a project that makes Canadians dream.” Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has called it a “$90 billion boondoggle” and a “ridiculous pie-in-the-sky Liberal spending initiative.”

I spoke with editorial fellow Yusur Al-Sharqi, who wrote in The Walrus exactly what is at stake and what it could mean for Canadians. You can read her full story here. 

“It’s obviously a very contentious topic right now, and there’s just a lot of confusing information out there,” she told me. “So the goal was just to organize that and make it clear what exactly this project is, who it’s going to impact, and how.”

While much ink has already been spilled over the project, she said, it seems that “a lot of people don’t have the full picture.”

She pointed out that Canada is the only G7 country without a high-speed rail network, an aspect she feels is missing from conversations with those who are opposed to the project. At the same time, she said, “I think it’s also important for people who are pro-project to understand that it is very costly and that there are a lot of homes that will be expropriated.”

Al-Sharqi also told me she wanted to explore in her piece the political divide around the issue and what it could mean for elections to come.

It remains to be seen how the high-speed rail issue will play out in the upcoming Quebec provincial election. Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, the leader of the Parti Québécois, who currently leads the polls by a thin margin, has promised to pull out of the project if elected. But a recent survey has shown a majority of Quebec voters support building the train line. More on that here. 

Meanwhile, in Eastern Ontario, Al-Sharqi explained, “a lot of the ridings were quite close in the last election and a lot of them are kind of toss-ups for the next election as well, and so we can imagine that, if there’s an issue like this that’s so contentious, it could be one that puts people on one side rather than the other.”

You can read Al-Sharqi’s full breakdown of the high-speed train line project and its political implications here.