Why VIA Passenger Rail Waits for Freight!
Anyone who has taken a VIA train more than twice knows the feeling: the train slows, eases onto a siding, and stops.
Then you wait, sometimes for an hour, while a freight train grinds past in the other direction.
It is the single most visible symptom of a structural problem in Canadian passenger rail, and the question of passenger rail priority in Canada comes down to a fact most travellers never hear stated plainly.
VIA Rail owns roughly three per cent of the track it runs on.
The rest belongs to somebody else... overwhelmingly to Canadian National.
On the tracks VIA controls, its trains arrive on time about 90 per cent of the time.
On tracks it does not control, that figure has historically hovered around 60 percent, and the Auditor General's recent review found stretches where on-time performance fell as low as 30 percent!
So: can Parliament simply pass a law making passenger trains go first?
Yes. The constitutional question is not close... interprovincial railways are federal jurisdiction, and Ottawa can legislate here whenever it chooses.
The obstacles are political and operational, not legal.
There are four distinct routes available, and they are not equally promising.
The ownership problem in one paragraph
When CN was privatized in 1995, the tracks went with it. VIA, a Crown corporation, became a tenant on infrastructure owned by a publicly traded freight company whose shareholders have no particular interest in whether the 6:40 to Toronto arrives on schedule.
VIA's access is governed by a commercial contract... a Track Service Agreement... negotiated between a captive customer and a near-monopoly landlord.
The current agreement dates from 2009, has been extended by a standstill arrangement since June 2023, and contains no meaningful guarantees about trip times!
CN's position is defensible on its own terms: It says it complies fully with the agreement it signed, that the agreement contains no speed commitments, and that the real answer is dedicated passenger infrastructure rather than squeezing more passenger trains onto a freight network built for a different purpose.
Route one: amend the Canada Transportation Act!
The most direct fix. In December 2023, NDP transport critic Taylor Bachrach tabled Bill C-371, the Rail Passenger Priority Act, which would have amended the Canada Transportation Act to require railway companies to give priority to passenger service over freight, backed by administrative monetary penalties for non-compliance!
The penalty provision is the interesting part. A declaration of priority without a consequence is a press release.
C-371 never advanced past first reading and died with the 44th Parliament... private members' bills rarely survive... but nothing prevents a government from adopting the same text in a government bill, where it would actually get floor time.
This is not a new idea. A previous attempt, Bill C-640, the VIA Rail Canada Act, was brought forward by NDP MP Philip Toone and defeated in 2015.
Route two: use the mechanism that already exists!
Here is the part almost nobody discusses, and it is the most immediately actionable.
Section 152.1 of the Canada Transportation Act already lets a public passenger service provider that cannot reach agreement with a host railway apply to the Canadian Transportation Agency to decide the matter.
And a transitional provision from the 2007 amendments goes further: Where VIA has an agreement predating those amendments, VIA may apply to the Agency to decide any matter respecting the priority to be given to the trains of either party, with the Agency directed to weigh the public interest alongside both parties' operational requirements.
In other words, Canada has had a passenger-priority adjudication mechanism on the books for nearly two decades!!!!!!!
VIA invoked it. In June 2023 it applied to the Agency after failing to negotiate a new Track Service Agreement with CN.
As of the Auditor General's review, the case remained unresolved more than a year later.
Separately, VIA went to Federal Court over CN-imposed speed restrictions affecting its new Siemens Venture trainsets at grade crossings... restrictions CN defends on safety grounds and VIA says are degrading corridor performance for thousands of passengers a day!
A statutory power that takes three years to produce nothing is not much of a power.
Before Parliament writes a new priority rule, it is worth asking why the existing one has produced no decision... and whether the fix is a deadline on the Agency rather than a new section in the Act!
Route three: give VIA an enabling statute!
VIA Rail is a non-agent Crown corporation incorporated under the Canada Business Corporations Act.
It has no enabling legislation of its own... no VIA Rail Act.
For a national passenger carrier that has operated since 1977, this is genuinely strange, and it leaves VIA's mandate, its service obligations, and its rights against host railways resting on order-in-council and contract rather than statute!
A VIA Rail Act could bundle several things at once: a statutory mandate, priority on host track, published on-time performance standards, and passenger compensation rights.
Advocacy groups have pushed for something along these lines under the banner of a Fair Rail for Passengers Act.
It is the tidiest solution and the one requiring the most political will!
Route four: stop sharing the track!
This is the route Ottawa actually chose. The Alto project sidesteps the priority question entirely by building publicly owned passenger-only track between Toronto and Quebec City.
The High-Speed Rail Network Act, carried within Bill C-15, received royal assent in March 2026, granting expanded expropriation powers and exempting the project from Canadian Transportation Agency line approval.
The first phase, Ottawa to Montreal, was announced in December 2025.
Two problems. First, timing: construction is not expected to begin until roughly 2029-30, with the full network well into the 2040s.
Second, coverage. Alto's routing runs Toronto-Peterborough-Ottawa-Montreal-Trois-Rivières-Quebec City. Southwestern Ontario — the whole Toronto-to-Windsor leg — stays on CN track under existing conditions, as does every regional and transcontinental service in the country.
Alto solves the priority problem for one corridor and leaves it untouched everywhere else. (I've written previously on high-speed rail routing and the trade-offs in corridor selection.)
What the American comparison actually shows!
Advocates for legislated priority reliably point to the United States, where Amtrak has enjoyed a statutory preference over freight for decades.
It is a fair comparison, but not the one advocates think it is!
Transport Canada's own briefing material makes the point bluntly: Despite that legislated preference, Amtrak's on-time performance is broadly comparable to VIA's, particularly on shared track.
The American statute declared a priority without, for many years, giving anyone a practical way to enforce it.
Enforcement came slowly, through regulatory metrics and adjudication, not through the declaration itself!
The lesson for Canada is specific: The enforcement mechanism matters more than the principle.
A priority clause with real penalties, a short statutory decision deadline, and published performance data would do more than a grand statement of passenger primacy.
The freight case, stated fairly:
The counterargument deserves better than dismissal.
Canada's rail network moves a very large share of the country's exports, and much of the CN mainline is single-tracked with limited siding capacity.
Freight interests argue that prioritizing passenger service on a constrained network means holding freight instead... that you have not eliminated delay, only moved it onto grain, potash, containers and lumber.
Given how central rail is to Canada's trade and economic strategy, that is not a trivial objection!
The honest response is that priority without capacity investment is a zero-sum reshuffle.
Sidings, double-tracking and signalling upgrades cost money, and somebody has to pay... the federal government, most likely, since CN has no commercial reason to build capacity for a tenant!
Where this leaves us:
The most sensible sequence is probably the reverse of the current one.
Fix the adjudication mechanism first: Impose a statutory deadline on the Canadian Transportation Agency, require publication of on-time performance by subdivision, and attach penalties to non-compliance with whatever the Agency decides.
Then legislate priority with teeth, inside a proper VIA Rail Act.
Then build Alto!
Ottawa has done the fourth thing first, at a cost somewhere between $60 and $90 billion, while the two-decade-old legal tool for passenger rail priority in Canada sits unused in a file at the Agency! That is a choice, and it is worth asking why it was made.
Frequently asked questions:
Does VIA Rail own the tracks it runs on?
Only about three per cent of them. The overwhelming majority of the network VIA operates over is owned by Canadian National, with smaller portions belonging to CPKC and Metrolinx.
Do freight trains legally have priority over VIA trains in Canada?
No statute grants freight priority. Priority is determined by commercial Track Service Agreements between VIA and the host railway, and by the host railway's dispatchers, who control train movements on their own network!
Can Parliament give passenger trains priority by law?
Yes. Interprovincial railways fall under federal jurisdiction, so Parliament can amend the Canada Transportation Act to require it.
Bill C-371 proposed exactly that in 2023 but did not become law.
Will Alto fix VIA Rail's delays?
Only between Toronto and Quebec City, and not before the 2030s.
Services outside that corridor, including Toronto-Windsor and all regional and transcontinental routes, would continue to operate on freight-owned track under existing arrangements!
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