Pierre Poilievre hates Mark Carney’s high-speed rail plan. Is his attack a 'political loser'?

But a combination of optimism and realism is how Canada will shake off its economic malaise and become the most autonomous place on Earth, the Conservative leader said in Toronto on Thursday, as he delivered a speech on the state of the country’s economy.

“We bring forward optimism for what our country can be, and realism about where we are today,” Poilievre said. 

That realism demands the complete rejection of the Liberals’ high-speed rail plan, the Conservative leader said, branding the proposal the “worst example” of a “money-losing project.”

That’s not the way Alto, the Crown corporation behind the project, views it.

“High-speed rail is not a leap of faith. It’s a measured response to growing mobility needs and economic pressures,” Alto CEO Martin Imbleau wrote in an op-ed published in the Star Friday.

“Canadians need to decide what kind of future we want to create for generations to come — one that’s cleaner, more connected and more prosperous, or one that causes us to look back and wonder why we didn’t take the opportunity when we had it.”

Both Alto and Mark Carney’s Liberals see the electric rail line, which would span Toronto to Quebec City, as a project that will create tens of thousands of jobs, yield billions in economic gains, and serve the most densely-populated corridor in the country. The project is currently undergoing public consultations and field studies, with construction for the Ottawa to Montreal leg set to begin as early as 2029.

But for Poilievre, who campaigned on a promise to rapidly unlock Canada’s economic potential, some question what the leader’s stance means for his political future — which now includes challenging a Liberal majority.

“I don’t get the politics of it,” said Peterborough Mayor Jeff Leal, whose city is one of rail line’s seven stops. “The nation, the province and my city should never have a deficit of ambition.”

Poilievre’s position was confounding for Leal, who said he was “absolutely shocked” to see the Conservative leader first announce his opposition to the project in Peterborough alongside Michelle Ferreri, the Conservative MP who lost the city’s federal seat to the Liberals last spring.

“I think it’s a big risk for him. I see it from his perspective. But I think it’s a political loser. You can’t spend all the time he did on the campaign trail talking about pipelines and transmission lines for electricity, and not say that this is a similar nation-building project that we need to get done.”

Leal is not the only mayor along the rail line’s proposed routes to have conflicting thoughts about Poilievre’s position.

“I guess he’s painted himself into a corner to a great extent,” said Smiths Falls Mayor Shawn Pankow, whose town has not been promised a stop, but is studying whether there’s a strong business case for one.

Pankow understands the opposition to the project: rural landowners fear expropriations and worry their communities will be carved up and exposed to environmental impacts, all without the benefits of a stop of their own.

It’s partly why Pankow doesn’t have harsh words for his Conservative MP, Scott Reid, who is one of the loudest Tory voices raising alarm bells about the project.

“At the same time, we’re looking for access to the federal transport minister. We’re trying to gain any advocacy method we can,” said Pankow, who believes that this time, Canada’s high-speed rail ambitions will become a reality.

Poilievre’s stance is also somewhat delicate for Bryan Paterson, the mayor of Kingston, who is pushing for a stop as long as a route along the Highway 401 corridor is considered.

Paterson ran in Kingston and the Islands under Poilievre in 2025, losing to Liberal incumbent Mark Gerretsen.

“Rather than saying no to it, what we’ve said is that we would support it, but there needs to be changes to it,” Paterson told the Star. “I think we’re very much aligned with the Ontario government, with Premier Ford. His comments have basically said exactly the same thing.”

In Imbleau’s op-ed, the Alto CEO cites polling that found the project has broad support in the cities set to receive stops. 

While the Conservatives represent ridings located between the planned stops, the party holds no seats in any of the stop cities aside from Quebec City. Several of those stops are in urban areas where the Tories hope to gain ground.

Separate polling conducted by Abacus Data for Altno, an advocacy group that opposes the rail proposal, also paints a generally positive picture of the project.

The survey found that while the project may not be a top ballot box issue, 62 per cent of Canadians support the project, while only 18 per cent oppose it. The provinces that support the Alto proposal the most were the ones directly affected by it — Ontario and Quebec — but respondents in British Columbia and Alberta also backed the project to a similar degree.

Seventy-three per cent of young Canadians — voters Poilievre needs to keep onside — are in favour of the project, while 72 per cent of current Liberal voters — a group with which he must make inroads — support it.

Poilievre is also the lone federal leader to oppose the project outright. The NDP’s Avi Lewis backs it, but wants the project to be publicly owned. Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet is supportive of high-speed rail, though opposes the Liberals’ attempts to fast track the project. And the Liberals have thrown their full weight behind the proposal, even as they rebuff Conservative efforts to mire their finance minister, François-Philippe Champagne, in a conflict of interest scandal due to his partner’s senior role at Alto. 

Mitch Heimpel, a former Conservative staffer and vice-president of government relations at Texture Communications, said there’s a “communications risk” associated with Poilievre’s position.

“You don’t want to be seen opposing a technology because of its newness. Government infrastructure projects generally are fairly popular because one of the few things that people absolutely…expect the government to do is deliver infrastructure projects. So you can’t appear sort of Luddite about the whole thing,” Heimpel said.

That doesn’t mean Alto’s current proposal automatically has merit, said Heimpel, arguing that the project will draw users of high-traffic, profitable routes away from Via Rail and larger air hubs, which will make it harder for the national passenger rail service and air carriers to offset losses in lesser-travelled regions. 

On the question of whether Conservatives are alienating the urban voters they need to form government, Michael Barrett, one of the Conservative MPs leading the charge against the project, says his party’s focus is on projects that “unite all Canadians.” He said that includes expanding operations at Toronto’s Billy Bishop airport, a proposal that is not endorsed by all Toronto residents.

The Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands—Rideau Lakes MP says he’s received more than 1,100 responses to a survey he sent out to his constituents about the project.

The vast majority, Barrett told the Star, oppose it.

But David Jones, a senior fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute who published an economic analysis of the project last year, found that the economic benefits of the Alto proposal range from $11 billion to $27 billion over 60 years depending on ridership levels. Those benefits are largely separate from Alto’s estimate that the project will increase the annual GDP by $24.5 billion; instead, they measure estimated gains from metrics like shaving down travel times and lowering greenhouse gas emissions.

Jones said that where Poilievre gets it right is questioning whether high-speed rail gets the most value for money, and highlighting Canada’s track record on cost overruns and delays for some infrastructure projects. 

Nevertheless, he takes issue with Poilievre’s emphasis on taxpayers bearing the brunt of the project’s costs, arguing that the rail line would ultimately buoy productivity and spur economic growth.

In Poilievre’s speech on Thursday, the Conservative leader repeatedly referenced Canada’s standing among its G7 allies, lamenting Canada’s failure to invest in its workers, boost productivity and improve unemployment levels. 

“I mean, Canada is the only G7 country that doesn’t have high-speed rail,” Jones noted. “It’s catching up, rather than gold-plating government expenditure.”