By Jon Peirce
On Wednesday, June 11, I will board VIA Rail’s “Ocean” train in Halifax for the 22-hour trip to Montreal.
It’s a trip I have made dozens of times since my arrival in Canada in 1970. I love everything about the train, from the relaxed pace of travel to the freedom from my usual routine and the opportunity to meet all sorts of fascinating people in the dining and lounge cars.
As a writer, I find the freedom from daily routine exhilarating, and a strong stimulus to reflection and creative thought. Much of my best work over the years has been done while I was riding back and forth between Halifax and Montreal. As a grad student in English, I did much of my course reading on those marvelous, long train rides. More recently, three of my published newspaper pieces had their genesis on the train.
I also appreciate not having to put up with anything connected with flying, which over the years has degenerated from a glorious adventure to a form of torture. (Globe & Mail writer Konrad Yakabuski recently said flying makes the Book of Job look like a fairy tale). The problems include, among other things, cramped seating, narrow aisles with low ceilings, appalling washroom facilities, terrible or non-existent food, long lines at security counters, lost and damaged luggage, and marathon-length treks between departure gates, not to mention costly and time-consuming trips to and from airports.
When I booked my train ticket several months ago, I thought I might be preparing to make my last trip on the “Ocean.” Until early May, there was a very real chance that the train would be discontinued, which would, quite unbelievably, have left the entire Atlantic region without any passenger train service whatsoever.
Fortunately, this isn’t going to happen. On May 12, Atlantic Canadians received some excellent news with the announcement that VIA Rail had agreed to spend $10.2 million to repair tracks in northern New Brunswick used for passenger rail service to the Maritimes.
The deal, announced by federal Transport Minister Lisa Raitt, provides for repairs to a 70-kilometer stretch of track between Miramichi and Bathurst. Previously, CN Rail, which owns the line, had said it would abandon it, while for its part, VIA Rail had said it couldn’t afford to buy or maintain the Miramichi-Bathurst track. Without this track, the Montreal-Halifax passenger service could not have continued to operate.
According to Dartmouth-Cole Harbour MP Robert Chisholm, one of those most heavily involved in attempting to save the train, the deal followed a lengthy and intensive lobbying campaign by the local municipalities that would have been affected by the loss of the train, as well as groups like Transport Action Canada, the union Unifor, and the federal New Democratic Party. In addition, thousands of individuals signed petitions and wrote letters to their MPs, and in March three Halifax-area MPs rode the train from Halifax to Ottawa in a bid to raise awareness of the need to retain the service.
Although passenger train service to Atlantic Canada has been saved, that service is far from healthy or robust. The “Ocean,” the only train still serving the region, runs just three times a week in each direction. As recently as two years ago, it was making six weekly round-trips. (The reduction from six trips a week to three appears to have cost the train significant ridership, as many people couldn’t spare the time to wait over in Montreal for the return leg of the trip).
Worse still, a large part of Atlantic Canada has been unserved by passenger train service for many years. In Nova Scotia, this includes all of Cape Breton Island, everywhere in the province northeast of Truro, the South Shore, and the Annapolis Valley. In New Brunswick, unserved areas include the cities of Saint John and Fredericton, as well as the entire southern part of the province west of Moncton.
Today’s skeletal service is a far cry from the service available to Atlantic Canadians when I arrived in Halifax as a student in 1970. There were two daily round-trips between Halifax and Montreal, both of which offered connections to and from northeastern Nova Scotia and Sydney. A third train ran daily between Montreal and Saint John. There was also dayliner service between Moncton and Saint John and between Halifax and Yarmouth. More than once I took that dayliner to Yarmouth to connect with the Bluenose ferry headed to Maine.
Why has Canada’s passenger rail service been allowed to deteriorate as it has? The reasons are too numerous and too complex to explore in detail here. But one of them, surely, as Ted Bartlett notes in an excellent article in the May 5 Chronicle-Herald, has been a strong anti-rail bias within Transport Canada throughout the past half-century. As Bartlett says, “Of the 24 transport ministers of various political persuasions who have held office since 1964, only three are known to have been openly pro-rail.” One of the results of this anti-rail bias within Transport Canada has been successive waves of cutbacks to VIA Rail passenger service under governments of both parties, the worst cuts coming in 1981, in 1990, in 2004-5, and now under the present government.
The effect of all these cutbacks has been brutal. Canada has been left, in Bartlett’s words, with a passenger rail network that’s “clearly the worst in the entire G7, even lagging behind that of many developing nations.”
There are many reasons why Canada should rebuild its sagging passenger rail network. At a time of mounting concern about climate change, with greenhouse gases from transportation singled out as being among the leading ‘culprits,’ passenger train service offers an environmentally friend alternative to road and air travel.
Long-distance trains like the “Ocean” are also a great tourist attraction. Many of the people I have met over meals in the dining car have been visitors from other countries. And rebuilding and maintaining the rail system is a good way to create steady, relatively well-paying jobs.
It’s particularly important for boomers to have passenger rail service available. Many boomers can’t or shouldn’t drive long distances. As for flying, it’s an understatement to say it is not a boomer-friendly form of travel. If adequate train service were available throughout the Atlantic region, I’m sure many more boomers would avail themselves of it.
Granted, getting Canada’s rail network back up to speed will require a significant infusion of money. Coming up with that money would be a big but not insurmountable problem. One possibility would be to allocate a certain percentage of gas tax revenues to rebuilding the rails. Another would be federal-provincial partnerships, along the lines of the federal-state partnerships that have become such an important element of Amtrak, the U.S.’s passenger rail network. These partnerships help support passenger rail service in 15 U.S. states, including some of the biggest, such as New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and California. They have been key to the 55-percent increase in passenger train ridership the U.S. has experienced since 1997.[1]
At a time when many other countries, including the U.S., are improving their passenger rail services, Canada cannot afford to let its rail service deteriorate any further. As Ted Bartlett concludes, fixing that service is, quite simply, “the right thing to do.”
This article is the first in a series by Jon Peirce, a retired professor, union representative and long-time freelance journalist who writes about subjects of interest to boomers. Some of Jon’s previous work has appeared in The Globe & Mail, the Christian Science Monitor, the Ottawa Citizen, Books in Canada, the Toronto Star, the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, and the Kingston Whig-Standard. Jon currently writes, teaches writing courses at the Nova Scotia Seniors’ College, and serves on the Advisory Committee of the Silver Economy Engagement Network, all while doing an M.A. in history at Dalhousie. He is a professional member of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia. His interests include tennis, swimming, improvisational dance, and cooking, and he has recently returned to the stage after a 46-year intermission, playing Judge Omar Gaffney in a Dartmouth Players production of Harvey. His second book, Social Studies; Collected Essays, 1974-2013, is forthcoming from Friesen’s Press in Victoria; his first book, Canadian Industrial Relations, originally published in 1999, is now in its third edition with Pearson Education Canada.
[1] Source: Robert Puentes, “New Partnerships for American Rail,” in Brookings Institute Up Front series, March 1, 2013, No. 44 of 89.
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