If you are concerned about the Alto High-Speed Rail project, I highly recommend you follow Erin Durant. Durant, a Ottawa-based lawyer and founder of Durant Barristers, has been writing extensively about what she has learned about the Alto project. She has been doing some deep-dive research into the proposed high-speed rail, using Access to Information requests.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the project is the practice of Alto to ask municipalities to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) before information is shared with them. Ottawa and Kingston, among others, have signed. (Incidentally, one of the mayoral candidates in Ottawa, Alex Lawsen, has called out our current mayor, Mark Sutcliffe, for signing the NDA on the high-speed rail. I think he is on the right track!)
Recently, Erin wrote an article stating that municipalities have more power than they think to fight Alto. This is important because 2026 is a municipal election year in Ontario.
Says Durant: “A federally-funded study admits Ottawa has no jurisdiction over land use planning. Municipalities do. So why are some municipalities signing away their ability to compare notes about it?” She goes on to explain where this jurisdiction comes from and outline what municipalities can do:
“None of this makes a municipality able to completely block a project found to be within federal jurisdiction over an interprovincial railway. But it does mean municipalities are not just powerless bystanders waiting for Ottawa to decide their fate and destroy their communities. A municipality sitting in the corridor still controls:
- Official plan and zoning conformity: any proposed Alto stations, ancillary development, construction land requirements/staging areas and transit-oriented development the corporation pursues in their communities still have to fit within, or force an amendment to, the municipality’s official plan.
- Road authority consent: grade crossing changes, road closures, and realignments run through a regulated, arm’s-length process with the Canadian Transportation Agency, not through Alto’s discretion alone. This won’t stop the railway but it could be used to force Canada to directly pay for more of the impacts rather than municipal taxpayers.
- Servicing and infrastructure agreements: water, sewer, and municipal utility tie-ins are municipal assets, and connecting to them still requires municipal agreement. This will impact development around stations and ancillary buildings required in the corridor.
- The council resolution: these are mostly symbolic, but not nothing. A hundred-plus municipalities on record opposing a project changes the political cost of ignoring them, even where it doesn’t change the legal outcome.
- Coordinated regional bodies: the Eastern Ontario Wardens’ Caucus model, where thirteen upper-tier municipalities speak for 103 communities, is exactly the kind of aggregation that converts individually weak municipal voices into something Ottawa has to answer.”
These points are something you may want to share and discuss with your municipal candidates.
Read the full article here: https://thealtofiles.substack.com/p/municipalities-have-more-power-than
Another recent and important offering from Durant is an interview that she did with Wyatt and John McWiliams. The podcast highlights the actions of just one family in rural Ottawa who have repeatedly helped others in times of crisis and, in the words of Wyatt McWilliams, can “make a positive out of a negative.” They could use the help of all Canadians today as they wish to stop this Alto project from destroying their communities. Please listen and share this with your friends, family and colleagues.
Watch the podcast here: https://thealtofiles.substack.com/p/podcast-interview-wyatt-mcwilliams