No climate emergency for Quebec and Ottawa!

The many reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reconfirm it: red alert for humanity! At home, southern Quebec is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Yet the decisions of our governments do not reflect this urgency.

Michel Archambault
Professor Emeritus in Tourism, Founder of the Transat Tourism Chair, University of Quebec in Montreal

1. Quebec budget, 2022: increased road investments and reduced incentives for the electrification of motor vehicles. In the nearly $8 billion plan, money talks : more than two thirds of the sums are intended for the construction and maintenance of roads. However, more roads equal more traffic and pollution.
2. Ottawa reiterates the choice of the TGF (high-frequency train) over that of the TGV (high-speed train): the Minister of Transport, Omar Alghabra, announced at the beginning of March that the private sector would be in the driver’s seat for the construction of the Quebec-Windsor train. Unknown invoice, nine months after the announcement with great fanfare in Quebec, the planned investment of 6 to 12 billion no longer holds water, according to the minister. Question: how much will the subsidies rise to fill the annual deficits of the TGF if the clientele is not there?
3. Ottawa and the 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan for Transportation, March 29, 2022: the proposed plan claims to be ambitious and recognizes the importance of public transit in reaching the targets. However, in the most populous corridor in Canada (Quebec City-Windsor), the TGV, and not the TGF, is the best choice to optimize modal transfer and reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs) quickly.

Target the self

The fight against climate change means promoting sustainable mobility by prioritizing the electrification of collective, private and public transport! It is also betting on the modal shift from plane and car to train. In 2019, transportation accounted for 43% of all GHGs in Quebec: road transportation represents 80%, cars and SUVs accounting for 63% of these emissions. The best way to reduce GHGs is to target the car!

With the TGF, it is not gains of 30 minutes that will change passenger behavior on the Montreal-Quebec section or 45 minutes on the Montreal-Toronto section (more than 80 million cars/year on the Quebec section -Windsor and 4.5 million air passengers with a population of 20 million, the third largest corridor in North America). To advance, the choice of the TGV is essential (1 hour for Montreal-Quebec and 2 hours, Montreal-Toronto). The time saving in favor of the TGV is irrefutable: for the London-Paris link with Eurostar, the journey time is less than 3 hours 24 min; Brussels-Paris saves 2 hours 39 min. Studies show that with a two-hour rail link, the plane’s share plummets! Stéphane Rapebach, from Ouiigo (SNCF), confirms this: “On the Paris-Bordeaux line, 90% of journeys are made by TGV. Our driving force is also to make the transfer between the polluting road and the train. » Research (Dobruszkes, Dehon and Givoni, 2016) on the connections between 161 European cities confirms that the faster the high-speed line between two cities, the lower the air traffic and the more motorists abandon the car.

A report (2016) from the Government of Ontario, signed David Collenette, former federal Minister of Transport, confirmed that more than 10 million passengers per year would use the TGV between Windsor and Toronto in the medium and long term (currently, this is is less than a million with VIA).

Each ton of CO₂ that the TGV network would create to meet its power supply needs, it would eliminate more than 20 tonnes of CO emissions₂ of the road network. On the Quebec-Windsor section, with a TGV, it is estimated that more than 12 million cars will be withdrawn. On the Paris-Bordeaux line, the modal shift from car and plane to TGV resulted in savings of 9,000 and 79,000 tonnes of CO respectively₂ per year (“Rail facing the climate emergency”, Left Hemisphere, 2021). A two-lane TGV carries 13% more passengers per hour than a six-lane highway, requires 40% less land with less maintenance and degradation.

The American economist Nordhaus, Nobel Prize 2018 for his work on climate change and its impacts on the economy, establishes a social cost of GHGs of around $275 per ton of CO₂. On this basis, the Montreal-Toronto air link costs the planet approximately $275 million per year! With the modal shift from plane to TGV, this would be equivalent to an annual gain for the planet of some 140 million dollars.

I invite Prime Ministers François Legault and Doug Ford to seize the structuring project of the TGV, to counter the choice of the TGF in order to accelerate the ecological transition for “clean air and a strong economy”. The TGV is the best option for air and road transport and more efficient than the TGF in optimizing modal shift. It is 20 times less polluting than the plane and 10 times less than the car!