En 2005, la Nation de Carcross/Tagish a fait un choix politique majeur : elle a tourné le dos au système colonial de conseil de bande imposé par Ottawa.

Au Yukon, grâce à sa sortie de la Loi sur les Indiens, la Nation Carcross/Tagish mise sur l’autonomie et le tourisme pour développer son économie.

Cette nation a aboli son conseil de bande, a une autonomie fiscale et a défini sa propre citoyenneté.

An adopted citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation’s Deisheetaan clan, Stuart helped pioneer restorative justice practices in the territory and was also at the forefront of the Yukon's pivotal land cl...

_A big thank you to the 32 readers who’ve become Founding Members or Railpass Holders! Two weeks ago,_ I asked for your help_in my goal to ride every passenger train in Canada for my book on the past, present, and future of passenger rail (to be published by House of Anansi). My advance only goes so far, so I’m counting on readers to fund my push to the end of steel._ _My goal is 100 new paid members by the end of November: 68 to go! If you sign up, you’ll get the full version of every dispatch in your inbox each week, plus the archives. (And every Founding Member will be thanked for making the project possible in the book’s acknowledgements.)_ Sign up here_._ // So far, I've been fulfilling my mission without too much difficulty. That said, some railheads are harder to get to than others! One example is Via Rail's Budd car that runs from Sudbury to White River, Ontario. (I'll be sharing my experiences about that magical little run in a later post.) It's an isolated line, not connected to the rest of Canada's passenger rail network, but you can get to Sudbury Junction by riding _The Canadian_ north of Toronto. There's still a gap between Sudbury Junction and Sudbury's Via Rail station, and once you're in White River, there's not much else to do but de-train, and wait for the return trip. One of Canada's most isolated trains is the White Pass & Yukon, which connects Carcross, in the Yukon, to Skagway, in Alaska. I knew I had to experience this storied line. Though construction began on American territory, and the company that runs it is now American, its history has deep roots in Canada. The giveaway is in the original name: the "White Pass & Yukon Railway," rather than "Railroad," the former being the British and Canadian term, the latter being distinctly American. (For the record, I prefer the Canadian way—using "road" as a synonym for the iron way has created a lot of unnecessary confusion for students of transportation history. "Railway" removes all ambiguity about which kind of road, paved, or tracked, you're referring to.) The current operator gets around the issue by referring to the line as the White Pass & Yukon _Route_. 0:00 /0:21 1× I had compunctions about riding the train, though. We Canadians are in the midst of a trade war with the U.S., and patriotic Canucks are being enjoined not to spend money south of the border (or west of the border, in the case of Yukon and Alaska). Research is research, though, and the WP&Y—whose story elucidates an emblematic period in Canadian history—is just too important a line to bypass. Instead of taking a Holland America cruise ship up the Inside Passage to Skagway, and riding the line as a day-trip, I decided to go by an all-Canadian route. Last month, I flew to Vancouver, where I hopped on an Air North flight bound for Whitehorse. (A great little airline, by the way: while its 737s aren't anything to write home about, ticket prices are surprisingly fair for a northern service, and the flight attendants, most of whom on my flights were Indigenous, are super-friendly—and they hand out free sandwiches and warm chocolate chip cookies.) The WP&Y used to run all the way to Whitehorse, and there's still a heritage train station, next to idled tramway tracks, on the banks of the Yukon River. The morning after my arrival, I went to the station to board a bus that took me, partly by way of the Alaska Highway, to the endearing little village of Carcross. There I had a three-hour wait for what would turn out to be the season's last southbound train out of the Yukon. In other circumstances, that might have been tedious, but Carcross turned out to be a fascinating little place. (Its original name was "Caribou Crossing," but had to be changed because the mail kept on going to another settlement of the same name.) It boasted a haunted hotel; a pocket desert with thirty-metre high dunes to climb; a tiny wooden church unlocked with a key loaned out by the visitors' centre; several coffee shops; the impressive ruins of a paddle-steamer; and a sprawling, and very welcoming, cultural centre run by the Tagish First Nation. There was also a mother grizzly bear wandering the village—the stationmaster loaned me a canister of bear spray—which gave my wanderings a bracing edge of danger. ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

Read the full active Meteorological Service of Canada alerts for Whitehorse, Yukon.

Read the full active Meteorological Service of Canada alerts for Whitehorse, Yukon.

Read the full active Meteorological Service of Canada alerts for Whitehorse, Yukon.

Read the full active Meteorological Service of Canada alerts for Whitehorse, Yukon.

Read the full active Meteorological Service of Canada alerts for Whitehorse, Yukon.

_This year, I've pledged to ride every passenger train in Canada, from the White Pass & Yukon out of Carcross to _The Ocean,_calling at Halifax, for a book to be published by House of Anansi, tentatively subtitled "Twelve Trains that Explain Canada." I'm about 60 percent of the way there, with the Tshiuetin to Schefferville, the train to Churchill, the Algoma Central, and a few others still left to ride. The trouble is, my advance covered about two months of living expenses, and this is an awfully big country. If you're a free subscriber,_ please consider upgrading_: as a Railpass Holder ($7 a month, or $70 a year), you'll get every dispatch in full, the run of the archives, and a seat in the comments; as a Founding Member ($10 a month, or $100 a year), you'll also see your name—along with my eternal gratitude—in the book's acknowledgements. If just 100 of you upgrade, I can reach the end of steel. (Curious?_ Click here for the whole story_.) All aboard—_ en voiture! **To all those who upgraded in the last week, my sincere thanks. It's a huge morale boost! And it's helping me complete this project. Next week I head to Sault Ste. Marie, where I'll be riding the legendary Algoma Central Railway, which helped Group of Seven painters the stunning Canadian Shield landscape of northern Ontario. For updates, check out my posts on** Instagram**and** Bluesky**.** // It's been a long time coming, but North America is set to get its first purpose-built high-speed rail line. I'm referring, of course, to the Alto High Speed Rail project, currently in the planning phases in Canada. (I've covered the developing Alto story in posts here and here.) The only high-speed train in the United States is the Acela, but it runs on an existing corridor; as for the Brightline in Florida, which I rode last year, it also follows an existing, and unsecure d, corridor, and definitely doesn't meet any definition of high-speed. Alto is something new: it's what the French call an LGV, or _ligne à grande vitesse_ , in reference to the corridor and its tracks, as opposed to a TGV, or _train à grande vitesse,_ which describes the train itself _._ In the year 2026, we still don't have any LGVs on this side of the Atlantic. This is good news for a whole bunch of reasons. Electric-powered trains are a fantastically energy-efficient mode of long-distance travel, reducing emissions, compared to planes and cars, by a factor of ten. (Though there are plenty of exceptions to the rule, as I discovered while writing last week's post.) Fifty percent of Canada's population lives within 50 kilometers of the proposed corridor, which connects Montreal and Toronto, metro areas with a combined population of 11.7 million. With up to 72 trains a day, Alto is talking about carrying 25 million passengers a year. The 300 km/h trains would take a huge bite out of the highway traffic, and cut down on the highly-polluting short-haul flights—up to 94 a day—that currently connect Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City, and Toronto. The service is almost certain to be profitable, with, according to some analysts, benefits of $27 billion for the national economy. 💡 Via Rail, Canada's national rail operator, receives no money from provincial governments. This is in stark contrast to the United States, where 19 states—including California, Illinois, and Virginia—work with federally-owned Amtrak to improve and expand U.S. regional service. Alto also has widespread public support, across party lines, across the nation, and among people of all ages. Countrywide, an Abacus poll puts support at close to two-thirds, with even 58 percent of Conservative voters expressing a favorable opinion. Among Quebecers, support stood at 65%. (That said, the poll was conducted early in 2026, before anti-train protests by farmers in the Mirabel area made the news.) Then why, you may well ask, did the Parti Québécois—who will form Quebec's next government after the October 5th provincial election—come out against the project during their campaign? ## Sign up for High Speed Travel, Transit, Bicycles, Urbanism, and Dispatches from the Global Passenger Rail Renaissance, by Taras Grescoe Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. This may be puzzling to people outside _la belle province_. Wouldn't a fast new train benefit the people of Quebec most of all? If anything, Alto has been criticized by people in other parts of Canada (especially in Alberta and Ontario) of being _too_ French: its corporate offices are located in Montreal, it is staffed by francophones, and tens of billions of dollars in federal infrastructure money will be showered on Montreal, Quebec's largest city, and Quebec City, the provincial capital. If you happen to live in B.C. or Newfoundland, this looks like another case of central Canada feathering its own nest. Alto trains might not make it to Québec—thanks to the politicians who are about to take office there The Parti Québécois calculus on this is purely political. They don't like the project because it comes from Ottawa. And they've signalled they're going to pick a fight with Mark Carney's Liberal government over the construction of the line. Incredibly, during the campaign, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, the PQ's leader, says he wanted the billions the feds were going to spend on the train to still be sent to Quebec, no strings attached, for them to use as they wanted. (Good luck with that.) The PQ, of course, are a separatist party. And they've announced that they'll hold a third referendum on whether Quebec should become its own nation. But they are smart enough to know that the timing is bad for a call to break up Canada. The most popular politician in Quebec is Mark Carney—mostly because he's defied Donald Trump for calling Canada the 51st state, and for his raving about invasion and annexation. In a nakedly strategic move, they announced that they would only hold a referendum after Trump was out of office—that's presuming the guy leaves—in January 2029. The fact is, support for sovereignty in Quebec is only about 30 percent, which mirrors the popular vote received by the Parti Québécois. While that's much higher than in Alberta (which is about to go through its own referendum on October 19), it's still not enough for nationhood. Sensing this, the PQ look like they're going to try to pick fights with Ottawa—and the Alto High-Speed project, which proposes to build a line that would link Quebec to Ontario, is the obvious place to start. If the PQ were proposing an alternative—say, working on a high-frequency rail line along the existing Via Rail corridor—I might cut them some slack. But their vision stops at the borders of Quebec. This isn't surprising: Via Rail, Canada's national rail operator, receives no money from provincial governments. This is in stark contrast to the United States, where 19 states—including California, Illinois, and Virginia—work with federally-owned Amtrak to improve and expand U.S. regional service. That simply doesn't happen in Canada. Ontario Northland is the only provincially-run inter-city train service in Canada (service on the lamented B.C. Rail ended in 2002). The provinces pour billions of dollars into highways, with only paltry sums going into urban transit and suburban commuter networks. Anything that goes beyond provincial borders is beyond their concern. The blustering of Paul St-Pierre Plamondon lines up with federal conservative Pierre Poilievre (PSPP + PP = a bunch of P's in a pod!), who has also come out against this Liberal project, announced by Justin Trudeau, as a boondoggle. If you live outside Quebec, here's what you need to know. Alto is likely to outlast the PQ government—shovels aren't scheduled to go into the ground until, at earliest, 2029. (The latest update I've got from the team: In fall 2026, "Alto will present a more refined corridor for the Ottawa-Montréal segment, reflecting the results of technical analyses, field studies and feedback received through earlier consultations. A second round of public and Indigenous consultations will then take place before further project decisions are made. A similar process will be undertaken for the remaining segments of the network in 2027 as corridor development and consultation activities continue across the broader project.") If you're into betting, bet on Alto, not the PQ. There are 127 seats in Quebec's National Assembly, and the PQ got 59 (followed by non-separatist parties: the Liberals, with 40 seats, and the Conservatives, with 19; separatist but environment- and social-justice-oriented Québec Solidaire got 9). The last time the PQ were in power, they also had a minority, and they were voted out after 18 months. If you live in Quebec, you should know that, in a dubious quest for short-term political gain, the PQ has vowed to kill off a popular project that would put the province in the vanguard of advanced, sustainable transportation in North America. Instead of a fast, electric train, you'll be getting a referendum—one inimical forces in the United States are delighted about—which the PQ has estimated will cost taxpayers $110 million. Now that's what I call a boondoggle. ## Sign up for High Speed Travel, Transit, Bicycles, Urbanism, and Dispatches from the Global Passenger Rail Renaissance, by Taras Grescoe Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. THE LATEST PASSENGER RAIL NEWS: **Zone 3: The Americas** Amtrak's Borealis, running daily between St. Paul and Chicago, has become so popular they have to make the trains longer: a fourth passenger car will be added to trains starting this week. Further proof that the demand is there. If you build it, they will ride. (Here's the link.) On Sep. 30, Amtrak launched new Siemens-built Airo trainsets running on its Cascades line, between Vancouver, B.C., and Eugene, OR. The trains aren't electric, but they do have a top speed of 125 mph (201 km/h), and feature panoramic windows and carry more passengers (up to 317 per railcar). (Here's the link.)

I’ve embarked on a mad, wonderful adventure, but to see it through, I’m going to need your help. Over the course of this year, I’ve pledged to ride every passenger train in Canada. That’s right—all of them, from the White Pass & Yukon out of Carcross, to The Ocean, calling at Halifax. It’s not just a lark: I’m working on a book, to be published by the House of Anansi, tentatively subtitled: “Twelve Trains that Explain Canada.” I figure I’m about 60 percent of the way through my mission. I’ve still got to ride the Tshiuetin to Schefferville, the Via Rail train from Winnipeg to Churchill, the Algoma Central out of Sault Ste. Marie, and other crucial lines, without which this would be a lesser book. The problem is, I’m about to run out of funds to keep the research going! Book advances in Canada aren’t what they used to be: what I received to fund the work is the equivalent of about two months in living expenses. And this is an awfully big country… I really want to make this happen! The more I travel, the more I discover how railways have been responsible for determining the character of this country. They kept invaders and annexers at bay, drove the settlement of the west, and helped the Group of Seven paint the beauty of the north country. And while they were the harbingers of colonialists responsible for undermining traditional Indigenous cultures, they have lately been adopted by First Nations in Manitoba and Labrador as a lifeline to keep remote communities alive. Canada’s railways clearly have a lot to answer for. But—as I’m discovering as my travels progress—they have even more to explain to us. So—will you help this steel-rider complete his mission? If you’re a free subscriber to this newsletter, I’m hoping you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber. Upgrading to paid (at $7 a month, or $70 a year) will mean you'll get the full version of every newsletter in your inbox, every week, the run of the archives, as well as the ability to join the conversation in the comments. And if you become a Founding Member ($10 a month, or $100 a year), your name will appear, along with my sincere thanks, in the acknowledgments of the book. All paid members will be the first to hear about when my articles on riding trains (in _National Geographic_ , _The Times of London_ , _The Globe and Mail_ , _Travel + Leisure_ , _Canadian Geographic_) appear, and you’ll get behind-the-scenes peeks at the research, writing, and—in the not-too-distant future—news on when my whistle-stop book tour might be bringing me to your neck of the woods. If just 100 of you upgrade to paid, I can finish this journey. As they say on the Canadian rails, “All Aboard— _En Voiture!_ ” Help Me Finish the Ride

_There are no ads on the HIGH SPEED newsletter, and there never will be. (No A.I. slop, either!) It's entirely supported by readers like you. I publish it on a platform called Ghost, because I don't like the way_ Substack channels reader money to Nazis, fascists, white supremacists_, and the likes of Andrew Tate. Unlike Substack, though, Ghost charges an annual fee. I want to keep HIGH SPEED going, but to pay that fee and continue doing the research, travel, and writing necessary to keep this up week in, week out, I need your support. I hope you'll consider becoming a paid member;_ you can follow the link to the sign-up portal here_. And to all those who have already helped out by becoming a Rail Pass Holder or Founding Member, thank you!_ // When you opt to take a trip by train, rather than going by plane or car, you're doing the right thing—right? Well, that's the right answer, most of the time, in most places. But not—for reasons that will soon become clear—on the continent I happen to call home. Broadly speaking, the environmental case for passenger rail is rock solid. It all comes down to the elementary friction-reducing physics of steel wheels running over steel rails: put a horse on a road, and it can pull a cart loaded with 450 kilograms; put the same horse on a simple railway, and it can haul 10,000 kilograms. A modern train can haul a tonne of cargo 1,790 kilometers—all the way from Montreal to Thunder Bay—on just ten litres of diesel, and an average-length freight train carries as much cargo as 280 trucks. (Passenger trains, which tend to be lighter than freights, require even less fuel.) According to the International Energy Agency, as a global average, trains require 4.1 tons of oil equivalent for every million passenger-kilometers, compared to 42.98 tons per million passenger-kilometers for planes. In general, by opting to go by train rather than by plane, you're responsible for consuming 10 times less energy than doing the same trip by plane. 💡 Who knows if Alto will get built? But that uncertainty shouldn't stand in the way of leaving fossil fuels behind. Electrification of passenger rail should be default policy of governments at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels. Now, I did say, _in general_. The devil, as always, is in the details, or, more precisely, in the kind of train you're riding, and where you're riding it. This year, I'm working on a book about riding trains in Canada, and, as I cross this amazing nation, it's become pretty obvious to me that—depending on where I board the train—there are huge variations in the relative efficiency of rail transport. I love Via Rail's Budd streamliners—but they're heavy, which means they require a lot of diesel to haul Most of my rail riding (apart from urban transport, on Montreal's REM, EXO trains, and the métro) is in the Corridor, as the route between Quebec City, Montreal, Toronto, and Windsor is known. Via Rail, Canada's national operator, carried 4.4 million passengers in 2025. (A laughably small number, by the way. Compare this to Morocco, which has roughly the same population as Canada, where national operator ONCF transported 55.6 million passengers in 2025. That, by coincidence, is the number of passengers Canadian railways used to transport—in the 1940s, when the country's population was just 12 million.) ## Sign up for High Speed Travel, Transit, Bicycles, Urbanism, and Dispatches from the Global Passenger Rail Renaissance, by Taras Grescoe Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Of that number, 4.2 million—95% of Via's ridership—rode Corridor trains. The remaining 200,000 or so rides occurred in the rest of Via Rail's, including its remote and essential services (for example, Trains 5 and 6 between Jasper to Prince Rupert) and its long-distance routes (the most famous being _The Canadian_ , from Toronto to Vancouver). The good news is that Corridor trains easily beat out cars and planes in terms of carbon emissions. Last week I rode a morning train from Montreal to Toronto with my youngest son; our Economy coach was close to being full, with all but a half dozen seats occupied. According to Via Rail's website, if we'd opted for a short-haul flight, each of us would have been responsible for emitting 186 kilograms of carbon; if we'd gone by car, 104 kilograms. The train trip put our emissions at 55 kilograms each. And the figure for plane travel doesn't truly reflect a flight's real impact on the atmosphere: the phenomenon of radiative forcing means that the other greenhouse gases in those contrails doubles or triples the warming impact of any given flight. If you don't want to rely on Via Rail's figures, the University of Ottawa's Ryan Katz-Rosene did his own analysis, and came up with similar figures in this paper for _Canadian Geographer_ (see chart above). Katz-Rosene's calculations bear out the international average, showing up to a tenfold reduction in carbon emissions per passenger when travelling by train. The environmental benefits of train travel in Canada fall away outside the Corridor, though. The circuitous route that _The Ocean_ , North America's oldest named train, takes between Halifax and Montreal means that the trip is far longer, in kilometers travelled, than the equivalent trip by plane. Katz-Rosene calculates that, per passenger, emissions are 1.4 to 2.7 times higher than doing the same trip flying. (Note that Gordon English, president of Ottawa-based Transys Research, questions Katz-Rosene's figures on _The Ocean_.) One of his recommendations to Via Rail is that it consider taking a shortcut across Maine. Clearly, now that many Canadians are avoiding crossing the border at all, this is a non-starter: the whole reason Intercolonial Railway was built where it was—as I explain in this post—was to avoid getting too close to the US, which, in the late-nineteenth century, as today, was a source of well-founded anxiety about invasion and annexation. Katz-Rosene is on firmer ground when he compares flying from Toronto to Vancouver with taking the same trip on _The Canadian_. The former journey covers 3,350 kilometers, and proceeds pretty much as the crow flies. The latter journey, thanks to some complicated history and geography, covers 4,466 kilometers, and takes 97 hours; no crow would fly so crookedly. (That said, this year I took the train from Vancouver to Toronto, and we arrived earlier than scheduled—if only by one hour.) Not surprisingly, spending four days on a complicated journey crossing Canadian muskeg, prairies and Rockies on a train isn't as energy efficient as doing the same journey in just 5 hours in a plane. Even so, Katz-Rosene calculates per passenger emissions on _The Canadian_ as being as little as 1.6 times higher than flying. All of this would change, though, if Canadian passenger trains were powered by electricity, rather than by diesel. That switch isn't likely to happen for long-distance trains, such as _The Ocean_ and _The Canadian_ , nor for remote and essential services (the trains to Prince Rupert and Jonquière, for example). Not that electrification, even in remote contexts, is out of the question: India has completely electrified its 69,000 rail network in the last decade, including its freight operations. And all 9,289 kilometers of the Trans-Siberian, the world's longest rail line, which crosses some pretty challenging tundra and taiga, are powered by overhead wires. Canada still relies on diesel-electric locomotives for all of its inter-city rail transport. Compared to European trains, North American locomotives are massive. Particularly in the west and the north, they need all the hauling power they can muster to cross mountain chains and muscle through snowbanks. The newest of them, including the trainsets put into service by Siemens in the Corridor in the last five years, are lightweight and fuel efficient. But the smartest thing to do would be to electrify every route-kilometer, from Quebec City to Windsor (and, for good measure, to Sarnia and Niagara Falls). This is the low-hanging fruit in Canadian decarbonization: convert all passenger rail in the major population centers—including Montreal's EXO commuter rail, and Ontario's GO trains—to electricity. The proposed Alto high-speed line, intended to link Quebec City, Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto, is electric. That's just standard operating procedure when it comes to bullet trains around the world (even Amtrak's Acela draws power from catenary wires; Florida's Brightline runs diesel-electric Siemens trains, but, as I've argued, it's not high-speed at all). The thinking, I imagine, is that Canada isn't embarking on the sensible work of electrifying the line that carries 95 percent of the nation's passengers because, if all goes well, electric Alto trains will be doing all the heavy lifting. In a decade. Maybe. If we're very, very lucky. That's a big gamble, as anyone who has been following the, ahem, progress, of high-speed rail in Britain and California will know. Who knows if Alto will get built? But that uncertainty shouldn't stand in the way of leaving fossil fuels behind. Electrification of passenger rail should be default policy of governments at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels. A detail in Katz-Rosene's paper caught my attention. He writes that Canada's entire rail infrastructure is responsible for 6.6 megatonnes of carbon emissions a year. That may sound like a lot, but it's just 3.3 percent of the emissions produced by Canada's transport sector. And, after oil and gas, the transport sector is Canada's second largest emitter (between 22 and 28% of carbon emissions, depending on who you ask). That's a remarkably low figure, considering that trains handle just under three-quarters of all the freight in this country. Any way you measure it, rail transport is on the side of the angels: it's cars, trucks, planes (and ships), which account for 96.7 percent of the transport sector's emissions. (The same holds true for the rest of North America: all but a rounding's error worth of the inter-city passenger rail on this continent is hauled by diesel locomotives, the kind that began vanishing from Asia and Europe decades ago.) Promo image of the diesel-hybrid locomotives Stadler has contracted to build for Via Rail Is Canada headed in the right direction? Well, I like the fact that we're moving beyond mere studies of high-speed rail, and that we're finally putting structures in place to get those continuously-welded tracks laid. And, in a mid-distant time horizon, there's good news about changes coming to Via Rail's long-distance fleet. Part of the reason trains like The Canadian and The Ocean are so carbon-intensive is that they consist of aging locomotives, pulling, in some cases 70-year old railcars. (The Budd streamlined cars, which date back to 1954, are solid, but also very heavy.) Via has signed a contract for 313 new passenger cars, to be made by Alstom, for its long-distance fleet, and for 45 new diesel-battery locomotives, to be made by the Swiss company Stadler. The new trainsets are designed to function at temperatures as low as -50 C, and will be far more energy-efficient than what's rolling on the rails right now. It's not electrification—but it will still be a big step forward in making rail travel in Canada a truly "green choice." ## Sign up for High Speed Travel, Transit, Bicycles, Urbanism, and Dispatches from the Global Passenger Rail Renaissance, by Taras Grescoe Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. **THE LATEST PASSENGER RAIL NEWS** _Zone 3: The Americas_ I've just returned from a trip to Alberta. Passenger rail, apart from the Rocky Mountaineer and The Canadian, has been absent from that province since 1990. Alberta's current premier, Danielle Smith, is something of a railfan: she actually ran a restaurant in a retired railcar in High River with her husband (see above). When Prime Minister Carney announced that he'd be recommending Smith's plans for a high-speed rail line between Edmonton and Calgary (a natural city pair for high-speed rail, with a combined population of 3 million, and separated by 300 kms) to the Major Projects office, I welcomed the news. Then, a couple of days later, the real news broke: Carney's Liberals had approved a pipeline to the B.C. coast, which will bring a million more barrels a day of tarsands oil to the world market. That pipeline will traverse lands I just crossed by rail, where the forests have been burnt black by the wildfires caused by—burning too much oil. Backing the pipeline makes political sense against the backdrop of Alberta's coming referendum on separation. The separatists are going to have a lot more trouble claiming Carney (who grew up in Edmonton) is just another eastern bastard who never gives them what they want. But it's the wrong move for the future of the planet, and is making me second-guess the good news about investment in passenger rail. What's the right term in situation like this? Greenwashing isn't quite right. Maybe...railwashing? (Here's the link to the high-speed rail announcement; and here, the link to the Pacific Link pipeline announcement.)