We should connect, in terms of public transit, to Quebec.
Remember the initial project of the REM de l’Est. Remember the outcry. All that Quebec had of experts warned us against this announced urban disaster. Horrible Soviet pylons would disfigure the city center. The light rail would cannibalize the customers of the green line. Residents of the East would have to endure the noise, vibrations and concrete horror in their own backyards.
No, really, it wasn’t. The culprit had been identified: money. The Caisse de depot et placement du Québec (CDPQ Infra) had developed the project with one idea in mind: it had to be profitable for its shareholders. It was ugly, it was poorly integrated into the urban fabric, but it was cheap: “only” ten billion dollars. A boon !
Faced with the wind of opposition, the Quebec government had no choice: in 2022, it asked a committee of experts to return to the drawing board. Without CDPQ Infra, this time. Without this idea of making the project profitable at all costs. Rather with the revolutionary idea of serving the population, by offering them the best possible project.
The result is this new version, presented this week by the Regional Metropolitan Transport Authority (ARTM). A light rail metro, entirely underground, which would stretch over 34 kilometers and have 21 stations, towards Rivière-des-Prairies, Laval and Charlemagne.
A concrete, socially acceptable project, approved by senior officials from the Ministère des Transports, the City of Montreal and the Société de transport de Montréal. This time, the local elected officials are happy. Residents too. In short, everyone thinks it’s great… except for the bill.
This light rail would cost, get this, $36 billion. Scandal!
We found that the first project too cheap, we find the second exorbitant…
True, the ARTM proposal seems disproportionately expensive. Some commentators have even wondered, reading the headline of The Press of saturday1if someone, somewhere, hadn’t deliberately wanted to nip the project in the bud…
François Legault, in any case, maintains that he was as surprised as you and me by this pharaonic figure. “I swallowed my sip of coffee badly when I read that,” he said Wednesday. “Definitely, Quebecers do not have the capacity to pay for a 36 billion project. »
The government has never asked the ARTM to offer an entirely underground train, the Prime Minister said. “We had asked that there might be a small part that was underground. »
That said, the ARTM ensures that burying the rails would only lead to a 6% increase in costs. In fact, if the public company arrives at such a high figure, it is mainly because it takes into account inflation, tax losses and risk coverage, such as an earthquake or an overheating of the real estate market. These forecasts, which the CDPQ Infra had not been required to make in its own budget, more than doubled the initial bill, causing it to jump from 17 to 36 billion.
Seems prudent to me as a way to proceed. May be too much. As the Mayor of Montreal, Valérie Plante, explained, “when we make forecasts, we put on the belt, the suspenders and the parachute. There’s everything in there.” In the end, it can only give a figure that strikes the imagination.
Over the next decade, Ontario will invest $70.5 billion to rejuvenate and expand its public transit system. The Toronto region will notably be entitled to “the largest subway expansion in Canadian history”.
And Quebec, meanwhile? Quebec finds that it has no damn common sense, that it costs far too much…
It was the same thing with the Montreal metro, mind you. Many citizens and elected officials considered such a project too costly. But when Torontonians got a subway in 1949, Montrealers began to change their minds. Gradually, they began to consider “that the presence of a metro in their city [était] essential to safeguarding its status as a major Canadian city,” reads the Canadian Encyclopedia2.
Perhaps we will come to the same conclusion. Let’s hope that this time it won’t take years…
Because one thing is certain: the longer we wait, the more the costs will explode. For decades, Quebec has had this annoying habit of postponing major public transit projects until later. When we compare ourselves to Toronto, to the big European cities, we are sorry…
“All over the world, public transport projects are ongoing; we are used to planning new stations”, explained to The Press Catherine Morency3, holder of the Mobility Chair at Polytechnique Montréal. In Quebec, we don’t do that. So we present titanic projects, in the hope of making up for lost time. “That’s a big bite to take when you’re not doing anything for a long time. »
In short, our immobility is costing us billions. And will cost us even more, if we continue to procrastinate. Because we won’t get out of it: we will have to open up eastern Montreal to allow it to breathe – and, no doubt, to grow.
Maybe take smaller bites. Carry out the project in phases. But we cannot afford to reject it altogether on the pretext that it is too costly or not profitable enough.
Profitability is not only measured in dollars.
How many millions of hours wasted in traffic jams, how many millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere before we finally decided to give the 600,000 residents of the eastern part of the city public transit worthy of the name ?