The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - What's Happening to Passenger Rail in Ontario?

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

How well is Ontario's transportation network working for the people who rely on it? Karen Cross and Eric Miller examine VIA Rail's upcoming service changes and what they could mean for communities along the Toronto-Ottawa corridor. Then, John Michael McGrath looks at whether congestion pricing could help address the TTC's financial and service challenges. Plus, Rundown segment host Charlie Buckley hits the streets to find out how many people are actually using Toronto's contested bike lanes.Donate Today : https://tvo.me/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What a difference a year can make. When you support TVO, you're helping bring trusted stories, inspiring ideas, and lifelong learning to people across Ontario. And as a thank you, you can receive the 2027 TVO calendar. Filled with beautiful photography from the documentaries and programs your support helps make possible. It's a year-long reminder of the learning, beauty, and discovery your generosity supports. Donate $40 or more to claim yours today at TVO.com slash calendar 2027 and make every month a little more inspiring. Getting around Ontario without a car isn't always easy. Depending on where you live, taking a train or bus might mean a longer trip, fewer options or no service at all. And for some communities, those options are about to get even trickier.

Via Rail announced earlier this month that it's making service cuts between Toronto. and Ottawa and eliminating stops at one GTA station. Will that actually make the system better? Or will some communities just have fewer options? And then there's Ontario's capital city, where the TTC is facing financial pressures, and the province announced this month it will begin tearing out bike lanes on some city streets.

So whether you're traveling across the province or just trying to get across the city, how easy is it to leave the car at home? I'm Jay and Jaganovin. Welcome to the rundown. Okay, let's start with those Via rail changes. As of October 25th, trains will no longer stop at Malton Station, and it will be cutting around one train a day between Ottawa and Toronto.

Now, Via says the new setup will support more reliable service. But is that how it looks to commuters in Ontario's communities? Eric Miller, Karen Cross, great to have you on the rundown. I want to get your initial reactions to ViaRail's latest announcements. Eric? Well, it's very disappointing, Jan, but not unexpected. It's very consistent, I think, with both the lack of government support over many decades for Via Rail, but also how Via Rail tends to cope not very well with the challenges they have.

Service cuts are a slippery slope. They're on a vicious cycle of cut service, cut ridership goes down, more service. cuts, it's very kind of scary, actually. Karen, your thoughts. I echo what Eric is saying. It is extremely disappointing, particularly for our community and Eastern Ontario as a whole. We are a very dependent on the rail system. It is just not a transportation issue here.

It's an economic connectivity issue of moving folks between Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. It is a competitive edge for us to be able to move around our community and to move through this sector is very difficult now that we have less availability to us. More stops have been removed. And we understand that VIA has its challenges when it comes to its network and its serviceability, but we really do need to make sure that we have our frequency in place. Otherwise, it's just a service that our community is not going to be able to continue to use at any level. Now, we do have a statement from ViaRail, Canada, about the changes.

It reads, the adjustments via rail is making to the schedule in the Toronto Auto Corridor will better align service with passenger demand, strengthen network resilience, and support more reliable and predictable service. Now, Karen, you are the CEO of the Greater Kingston Chamber of Commerce. So help me understand a little bit from that vantage point. What will reduce services look like for Kingston passengers? Reduced services will highly affect our business community and the fact that they will no longer be able to get into Toronto

for those morning meetings. Right now we're able to take an early train, get us into town. We can have meetings during the day. We're in before nine. At this point, we will no longer be able to do that. As well as from our employer's perspective, who are moving employees around the community as well. They won't be able to do that effectively.

We have students in our area where we have universities and colleges here. we have CFB Kingston here as well, a major hospital network, that moves in and out of this community, and they do not have that reliability that they need to be able to support our business community here and that economic growth, that instability that we need in this community. Now, Karen, one of the things that VIA had mentioned in that statement was passenger demand. How often are people actually going from Kingston to Toronto for these meetings that you're mentioning, or vice versa? Well, there are regular commuters on that train that come.

And I think we need to remember, too, that Kingston is the fourth busiest stop in the country. So it's hard to imagine that we don't have the service ability that they need. Eric, how common is it for via rail to discontinue service to certain stations? Well, I really haven't kept track of what VIA's been doing across the country. But it's a very unusual and a ill-considered decision. I mean, they're claiming that this will help them reduce travel time. So, yeah, it takes a minute or two to stop a train and start it again and dwell. But that's not their travel.

That's not causing their travel time problems. They have serious reliability and time problems on the main line. That's where they need to be addressing the time problem. What they don't seem to understand is those are very important access stations for their customers. The majority of people in the Toronto region don't live at Union Station. They live in Scarborough or they live in Mississauga. So these suburban stations are very important to provide the access to the train or the egress from the train. And this is a very common problem with governments and with rail planners.

They seem to think that people go point to point from Union Station to, I don't know, Central Station in Montreal. They don't. They go from their home in Scarborough to someplace else. And so these suburban stations are very critical to try to extend your market shed. And, you know, to not understand that is very disappointing. Now, Eric, help me understand. What's the alternative here? You're adding significantly, I mean, really significantly, to people's access time to get to via rail.

So you're not going to do that. So you're going to get in your car and drive, or you're not going to make the trip. again, it's not just the train trip itself, it's getting to and from the train. And doing much better to make that easier for people everywhere is very important in the scheme of things. Karen, help us broaden this out a little bit. You mentioned fourth busiest station here, but as Eric paints the picture, yes, we have Union Station, but really it's about getting to these stations. When we talk about Eastern Ontario in particular, when we're talking about those other communities,

how critical is rail transportation for those people? It's extremely critical. Kingston and this corridor, this 401 corridor that includes Belleville, Brockville, Cornwall, all along the 401 to Oshawa and Port Hope and through there, that connectivity into our major corridors is essential. And you think we're in the center of the hub of our economic forces here. You think we're, we are the main hub between Montreal, Toronto, and Ottawa. And it's right here in this core. And now we don't have that availability to be able to move along that corridor effectively, efficiently. And as Eric says, timely, we can't continually adding more time onto people's schedules to meet these crunches that Via has been placing on their service.

But help me understand here because Via says it's a demand issue. Is there enough people in that community to support the amount of trains? Or is the reduction appropriate? I can't say if the reduction is appropriate. What I can say is I do believe they can re-look at the schedule because at this point we know there's eight different stops have been removed from the Kingston stop specifically. So perhaps they need to revisit those stops that will affect the business travel,

the leisure traveler, has a little bit more flexibility in their day. but the business travelers certainly does not have that same flexibility when they have to make certain meetings and such. So I think there needs to be some work. We need to work with VIA. We need to understand what those numbers are so we can help support them in growing that schedule. If that is truly what the challenge is. Eric, I'll get you to pick up on some of the things that Karen just said, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So, I mean, a minute or two ago, she talked about frequency. Frequency is just so important. I mean, we have been spending a lot of time over the last year talking. about high speed and travel times, but the frequency and the convenience, the scheduling convenience of that. As Karen was saying, you know, you have to have a train that can get you to Toronto for a nine or a nine-thirty meeting and back home again for dinner. So thinking about your market, and to say the demand isn't there, you know, I talked about vicious cycles. This is a classic vicious cycle argument. Our service right now is not very good, so we don't have much demand. So we say,

the demand's not there, so we'll cut service. So that's service cut. It's going to drive the demand down further. And they say, well, yeah, no, yeah, nobody in Kingston's taking the train. I wonder why, because the service has been cut. We're not providing a convenient, not just the number of trains, but when the trains. And then travel time is helpful. And yeah, I mean, the 800-pound gorilla in all of this is the major unreliability of whatever the schedule is. You know, I'm actually going to Ottawa in a couple of weeks, and via posts, you know, expect a delay of 15 to 50 minutes. You know, so maybe I'm a sucker. I'm still taking the train. But not many people will. So, you know, until Via and Ontario and the federal government come to grips with the very

serious technical issues in this lakeshore corridor that are causing, you know, the conflicts, frankly, between via and the freight trains, until we resolve that. You know, cutting service is just a recipe for driving, you know, via out of business. Eric, help me understand here a little bit about the changes. Does the changes that we're seeing here have any reflection of the transportation habits that we're seeing in the province? Well, you know, I think in Ontario we're a very auto-oriented society, right? and certainly our provincial government likes to promote auto usage, and they're worried, very, very worried about congestion.

But much of that has to do with, in general, we don't have options. So, you know, the 401, either eastbound from Toronto or westbound from Toronto is a nightmare, largely because we don't have, people have to get to where they're going, and they don't have the options. and if we had a much better, just reliable, regular train service that was traveling about the same speed as cars even, it would provide an opportunity for people not to have to drive and add to the congestion in the 401. So we have ingrained, you know, our current behavior is very autocentric. We don't think about options because we've never experienced them.

We have to give people the options and they will learn to, you know, to shift to a different way of getting. around, but if they don't have the opportunity, they can't do it. Very quickly, Eric, just a point of clarity for some viewers who may have never hopped on a via rail. You said technical sort of challenges with via rail. What do you specifically mean? Well, via rail, for much of the corridor, shares the track with the freight railways, particularly CN.

And so CNN owns the rail lines. Via has to schedule their trains around the freight trains. The freight trains take priority. Freight train schedules change, and so all of a sudden, via rail might have to stop on a siding to let a freight train go through. And there's also been, over the last year or two, Via got some new trains, and CN was claiming those trains could not go safely through intersections at speed. And so they were forcing via rail to slow down to a crawl. So there is this whole dynamic, very bad dynamic between particularly CN and Via about who has right-of-way and who gets to share this very limited track space. And this has been bedeviling us for decades.

It's the reason when, you know, we're not talking about Alto today, but why is Alto looking at a completely different corridor? It's because they want to get out of that corridor and stop fighting with the freight traits. But that solution is not going to move anywhere unless both the federal government and the provincial government seriously sit the actors down at the table and maybe knock heads together a little bit to say, you know, we can do better here, guys, if we work together. And that's never happened. Karen, does it feel like your corridor, that part of Eastern Ontario is historically ignored? You know, we bring up Alto, for example.

I know there's a proposal there to perhaps look at a, you know, stop there. in Kingston, but not part of the original plans here. Here we're seeing reductions as well. What is the general sense from community members that you represent when it comes to transportation in the area? The general sense is that we have been left behind. Kingston and Eastern Ontario region has been left behind in this whole infrastructure of rail, air, 401 connectivity.

And I think one of the big challenges that they're facing is, yes, Alto has now agreed in principle to look at Kingston as a stop, but that's long term. It's not the short term. And that's where we really need to be looking at. What is the short-term solution here? And to Eric's earlier point about options, people's options now are to get on a bus because they don't have reliable service to use the rail.

So I think the really big piece for this region, is we have been left behind. We do need reliability. We need to be able to move people through the community, whether it's workforce, whether it's leisure travel, the business traveler. It's even those people who want to invest in this area, they need to be able to know that their investment that is in an area that is prosperity, that has prosperity and has growth. Eric, Karen mentioned solutions. So I want to jump in there and get some ideas here. Whether it is short term or long term, what are we looking at in terms of addressing sort of the gaps when it comes to rail transportation for those in eastern Ontario.

Well, first of all, let me just say it's also a long-term thing. Even if we build Alto, it's decades away, and even if it's built, we still are going to need this local service, not just the long-distance Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal. So this is a problem we need to solve. Well, I think the starting point is, I think for the province of Ontario to take this seriously and say this is a very significant issue for our citizens of eastern Ontario. There's similar issues in the Western Corridor as well. And sit down, Transport Canada, the federal government, via and CN and say we need to be working

on this. I think we have to start thinking holistically about, you know, what Karen's describing is we need to be building a mega region where Toronto and Coburg and Belleville and Kingston and so are part of an integrated economic zone, an integrated land use planning zone, and rail is a very significant part of that. But again, I think at the end of the day, until we resolve this reliability problem and how we're operating both freight and passenger trains in this corridor, we're going to be continuing having this debate, and B is going to be struggling to provide the service that we'd all like to see. We will continue to follow the debate. Eric, Karen,

I want to thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. My pleasure. Thank you. If you're in Toronto and looking to avoid traffic, the TTC is the obvious answer. But it can also be tough. You've got delays, trespassers, slow zones that make you feel like your train is crawling. But the TTC has been facing serious financial issues for years.

And now, this has become an issue in the Toronto mayoral race. One idea? charging people to ride more during rush hour to encourage people to spread out their travel times and help the TTC bring in more cash. But would that actually work? John Michael McGrath, great to have you back. How are you doing? Good. How are you doing? I'm doing well. All right, you have written for TBO today about peak hour pricing and this idea some floating around during the mayoral campaign. How does it help the TTC's bottom line? Right. So the TTC, like any real sort of network when you think about, including our road network,

you have most periods of the day where traffic is moving along just fine, and then at rush hour, that's when everybody's trying to use the TTC all at once, and that's when things get the most crowded. And so there's been an idea for a very long time in Toronto, and it has been implemented in other cities, is that if you charged people a little bit more to ride during peak hours, that would give people an incentive, to sort of spread out their commutes. Maybe people leave for work a little bit earlier, maybe a little bit later, and you sort of flatten the curve

to borrow a COVID phrase. And that way, you don't necessarily have to invest in huge, new, expensive transit capacity, or at least you don't have to do so right away. The peak fare does a little bit of the job of smoothing out your demand. Now, let's get some more details here. What are we talking about in terms of price?

Now, this is obviously one mayor, candidate, Chris Alexander, who's brought this up. How much, if this is something that would go through, what are we talking about here? Right. So Chris Alexander has proposed charging all adults paying the general fare on the TTC

10 cents more, and then at peak hours, they would pay an additional 10 cents more. So they would pay 20 cents more to use the TTC during rush hour relative to what they are currently paying. In exchange, he would lower rates elsewhere, particularly for seniors and people

who use the low-income pass that's available on the TTC. So an attempt there to be a bit more socially just, if I could put it that way. And that would raise millions of dollars for the TTC that Alexander says he would put towards maintenance and operations. Now very quickly, that idea has gotten some criticism. Some comparisons to sort of Uber's sort of peak surge pricing. Yes. So incumbent mayor Olivia Chow has compared. it to Uber's surge pricing and has urged voters to reject this idea.

But it is an older idea. It was proposed going as far back as 2014, then-Meral candidate David Sochnacki, who has been an advisor to Olivia Chow, proposed the idea then. It hasn't gone anywhere because there is this tension between the idea, to be honest, like a person like myself, I have a bit more flexibility about when I leave for work. And so it would benefit me, but also I could afford to pay more for the TTC. And then there are some people who really don't have that flexibility about when they need to show up for work. And it would impose a burden on them.

And so that's one of the criticisms. Should mention 2014, a different problem that TTC was having, had a lot of overcrowding versus 2026, trying to get ridership up to sort of pre-COVID levels. I am curious, would commuters pay for something like this during Rushd if it meant that perhaps service is better. This is the big question. I mean, if it could be turned quickly and visibly into service improvements, I think that is really one of the key problems facing the TTC in 2026. We talk a lot about the perception of safety. People don't love the site of visible public homelessness on the TTC. But I think the real thing that is killing the TTC in the last several years is the lack of

reliability. The whole network of subways is plagued by what they call slow zones where the trains have to slow down. And that's basically due to maintenance being deferred. So, you know, if you could, in theory, if you could address that quickly, maybe people would be willing to pay for that. My fear is that, A, you can't really do that kind of work very quickly. It's very expensive. And in 2026, riders have lots of other options, you know, just the one I've cited a few times in writing for TVO today is the bike share network, which now moves tens of thousands of people, particularly in nice warm weather months. It's become a major part of our transit network, and that's far from the only option.

We've mentioned Uber. Ridesharing is here to stay and is one of the other options people have. Now, we talked a little bit about money and what a peak hour pricing would look like. without any financial implications on consumers, commuters in the GTA seemed to notice that transit was running smoothly during the World Cup. However, that has created sort of a ripple effect, and there's some consequences for that. Help us understand what has happened since. So the TTC and to a certain extent go as well, they both put a bunch of money into getting ready

for the World Cup. And so those slow zones that I mentioned, they all sort of mysteriously disappear. during the World Cup, and then they all reappeared several weeks after the last World Cup game was over. And the explanation there is pretty straightforward, right? Leaders wanted to put the best show on possible. We had lots of global visitors, lots of very wealthy and important visitors from around the world, coming to see Toronto, so obviously we wanted to put the best foot forward, if I could put it that way. But, you know, you can't wish away the kind of work that needs to be done for the TTC.

You can, you know, maybe you can patch some things for a short period of time. But ultimately, the more permanent solution is going to be some very expensive track work that needs to be redone throughout all parts of the network. The province has its sights set on improving highways. But with increased congestion, moving beyond the downtown core, what does actually use? left for commuters. In terms of... We've got bike lanes, you know, we earlier brought up about how many people

are actually using bike lanes. I think it was equivalent to the Shepard line. Yes, the bike share network now uses 40,000 people a day, give or take in the warm weather months. And that's just one part of the cycling community in Toronto. You know, most cyclists are...

There's many more cyclists than just use the bike share network. Now, of course, bike lanes has been a particular topic in provincial politics. The government passed a law to remove bike lanes in Toronto and to forbid them throughout the rest of the province in any case where it would take away a lane of car traffic. That law was challenged in court. A lower court forbade that law from being implemented.

That was then heard at the Court of Appeals, Ontario's highest court, and then over the summer we got the decision from that. court, which allowed that law to move forward. The government of Ontario has now put out a tender for an engineering report basically saying, like, hey, we want to remove these bike lanes. How do we do it? There was an interesting poll out actually last week by, I want to say, advocates that said, like the vast majority of Ontario voters think that these kinds of decisions should be made by city councils, not by the province. But the running joke among municipal leaders that I've spoken to in Ontario is that there are some issues in provincial politics that are getting decided because

Doug Ford gets irritated by things he sees on his commute into work every day. The Premier famously has a very long record long before he came to Queens Park of being opposed to bike infrastructure. And these bike lanes are squarely in his sights. We will see what the province eventually decides to do. I have said on the on Polly podcast that I'm still not ruling out the possibility of a compromise. We know that the city of Toronto proposed a compromise to the province and the mayor, again, Mayor Olivia Chow, has said that they got no real support, no response from that. But we will see what we'll seal him. We will wait and see. John Michael McGrath, always a pleasure.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. We just heard about Toronto's bike lanes and the court cases that will lead to the removal of some of them. But there's a pretty basic question underneath all of this. How many people are actually using them? This summer, run-down segment host Charlie Buckley hit the streets to find out. Brace yourself. I'm about to talk about something a little political. Bike lanes! It's the question on everyone's mind. Do we spare some street for cyclists?

They'll let cars rule the road. Here at Queens Park back in 2024, the province tried to remove bike lanes along three of Toronto's busiest streets. That is, until a judge told them to leave those bike lanes right where they are. But the debate's far from over. Critics say that bike lanes slow down people's commutes, they hurt local businesses, and they can even get in the way of emergency vehicles. But advocates argue those claims are overblown, or just totally wrong,

and that building bike lanes is so much safer, to no-brainer. But there's an even more basic question that people can't seem to agree on either. How many people even use these things? You might have seen posts like these ones. People point out just how empty the bike lanes can get. Do you see any cyclists?

You play a road hockey game. But is a single photo or a few minutes of footage really enough to know for sure? We can do better. We've picked three spots along those embattled bike lanes. Now all we've got to do is count how many bikes pass by, let's say for an hour during the rush and another when it's not so busy. I better get comfy, I'm going to be here a while. Okay, here's what we got. 428 bikes per hour, on average, compared with 1,033 cars. But hang on, what if I missed one, or, double counted. Luckily, the city has more than a dozen of these gadgets all over town.

They count bikes as they pass each way 24 hours a day and all throughout the year. In the last six months of 2025, this one in Toronto's West End counted more than a thousand bikes per day on average. And there's another further downtown that counted close to 5,000. That's up there with counts in major cycling cities like Paris and New York. It's more cyclists than they get crossing the Brooklyn Bridge every day. People frustrated by bike lanes usually cite this statistic, only 1.2% of Trontonians bike to work. But that number's a little misleading. Why? First, it's from 2011, before a lot of these bike lanes even existed. And it includes the entire census metropolitan area, all the way from Oakville to Ajax and up to Lake Simco,

not just the city limits. Here's a survey conducted inside the city last year. In 22% of households, at least one person rode their bike to work in the past year. And when 35% did so for other reasons, like running errands or visiting friends. In fact, only about a third of respondents said that nobody in their home ever rides a bike. Plus, more and more people are using short-term bike rentals like these, breaking ridership records every year since 2020. Bike lanes may not always look busy, but the research shows they get more use than you might think, and that cycling is a growing part of how the city moves.

So, please, for everybody's safety, don't forget to look both ways. That's your reality check. Now you're in the know. What's your preferred way to get around the province? And would you be willing to pay more to ride the TTC if that meant better service? Let us know in the comments or send us an email to rundown at tbO.org. Until then, I will see you tomorrow. If you're enjoying this series, please consider supporting TVO with a donation

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