1.7K 
A $248 billion CAD Quebec pension firm has announced plans for a 67-kilometre LRT line in Montreal, which could be built as early as 2020.
The west of Montreal, which is more wealthy and Anglophone than the rest of the city and relatively under served, stands to gain the most from the building of this service, which will also connect the city's airport to the city by rail for the first time.
CDPQ Infra is proposing to put $3 billion towards the project, in the hope that the remaining cost of the $5.5 billion project would be borne by the federal, Quebec, and/or Montreal governments. Politicians at all levels have been lining up to back the project, at least initially. Justin Trudeau told a Liberal conference on April 30th, "these are exactly the kind of projects we’re excited about" funding through the federal government's $120 billion infrastructure fund.
There are a number of ways this would not be be a traditional public private partnership: the CDPQ is a crown corporation not a private one, and it has said that it would put the work itself up to open tender, though CDPQ Infra owns 30% of Bombardier Transportation.
The CDPQ says that its decision to invest is strictly a commercial one and must deliver a good return. In addition to income from fares, it hopes to profit from real estate investments along the route. However, Matti Siemiatycki, a professor at the University of Toronto's Department of Geography and Planning, is skeptical that the CDPQ can make its figures add up. Public transit is rarely profitable from farebox revenues alone, he said, and revenues from real estate value uplift tend to be in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars not billions. "In the future they may also look for some subsidy for operating costs."
The CFPQ's promotional presentation
The cost of building the line is reduced because most of the stations will be overground and because some of the infrastructure is already there. According to Quebec's Transportation Minister Jacques Daoust, only 20 kilometres of the 67-kilometre route will be newly built rails.
It is not the only major transit project that is awaiting funding. The extension of the Blue Line subway to the East of Montreal, delayed since the 1980s, is also awaiting confirmation of funding. During the last provincial election campaign, the Liberals promised that it would be built, but a report from the Agence métropolitaine de transport in December raised the estimated cost of the 5.5-kilometre extension from $1.8 billion to $3 billion. Daoust had promised an announcement on the extension from St-Michel to St-Leonard and Anjou in June, and he is now saying there will be an answer "this year." He reassured reporters that the extension remains a priority — "we have priorities everywhere" — and the new RER plan "doesn’t harm the other projects.”
The head of Via Rail has also been looking for pension fund investment to fund a higher speed, more reliable rail link between Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa.
This would be the first major project of an infrastructure funding subsidiary, CDPQ Infra, though CDPQ has backed a number of prior transit projects including Vancouver's Canada Line, and invested in rail links between London, UK and Gatwick and Heathrow airports.
Toronto's Mayor John Tory may look with interest at this new initiative. He said in November that the city should be more open to public-private partnerships like the one building the Eglinton Crosstown line as, "managing major construction projects is not [the city's] core business. Government doesn't have the full range of skills.”
Join the discussion of this project on our forum.
