The worst-case scenario for the ALTO high-speed rail line is not, as most people imagine, that hundreds of properties will be expropriated, and that a rail line will then be built through our communities. The worst-case scenario is that the expropriations will happen, and then the project will be abandoned, with billions spent and literally nothing to show for it—except the damage done to the communities where the expropriations have taken place.
This sounds outrageous, until you learn that expropriation in the service of poorly-conceived infrastructure programs that are subsequently abandoned has happened multiple times in Canada. Here are some examples.
In 1962, the federal government expropriated an entire Ottawa neighbourhood, Lebreton Flats. It was considered unsightly to have an industrial, working-class neighbourhood within walking distance from Parliament Hill, and plans were developed to install a new National Defence Headquarters on the land—ideally in time for the Centennial in 1967. Every building in the neighbourhood was demolished, and nearly 3,000 families lost their homes. Then it turned out that the new headquarters would cost too much. A few more redevelopment ideas were proposed and then abandoned; over sixty years later, most of Lebreton Flats remains an empty field.
In 1963, Toronto’s municipal government began the task of expropriating houses along the proposed route for the Spadina Expressway—a highway running south from Highway 401. The route took it directly through a number of high-income neighbourhoods like Forest Hill. The residents fought back and made the project so politically costly that in 1971 the provincial government stepped in and halted the partially-completed expressway. But not before three hundred homes had been expropriated. Some were demolished, and in other cases the residents were allowed to stay on—as rent-paying tenants—in the homes they had once owned. It took a further two decades before the government began the process of selling some of these houses back to their former owners (at current market prices).
In 1969 the federal government began the process of assembling lands to create the land-base for Mirabel Airport. This project bears a strong resemblance to ALTO in that it was undertaken because of wildly optimistic projections about future passenger numbers. Annual air passenger numbers at Mirabel was projected by the airport’s promoters to eventually rise to around 50 million. In practice, the numbers capped out at three million per year in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
A total of 97,000 acres were expropriated at Mirabel, based on the erroneous assumption that supersonic jets like the Concorde—which require enormously long runways—were the wave of the future. This kind of technological guesswork bears an uncomfortable resemblance to ALTO’s unproven assumption that the high-speed trains used in France will work in Canadian weather conditions.
Eventually, the airport was shut down, and some (but not all) of the property was returned to its owners.
Finally, there is Pickering Airport, just east of Toronto. Expropriations started in 1972, but plans to construct the airport came to an abrupt halt in 1975 when it became clear that the costs would be much higher than initially projected. Nonetheless, the expropriated property was never returned to its owners.
With so many parallel examples, there is reason to worry that after the expropriations have been completed, ALTO too will be aborted. Like Mirabel, the rail project is based on utopian ridership numbers and gee-whiz technology. Like Pickering, the costs remain vague and seem likely to spiral out of control. And like Lebreton Flats, the plans remain astonishingly vague. All of the symptoms of a public policy catastrophe are present—and everyone can see it, except the planners.
The views expressed in the News from the Hill column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Hometown News or its editorial staff.
