Transport Action: Air Canada involvement raises concerns about High Frequency Rail procurement

OTTAWA, ON, Aug. 7, 2024 /CNW/ - The Cadence consortium, led by CDPQInfra, revealed that Air Canada had joined their HFR bid, along with French government-owned SNCF Voyageurs, on the bid deadline of July 24. If successful, Air Canada and its partners would receive a multi-decade operating concession for all VIA Rail's Quebec-Windsor train services.

Transport Action Canada, as advocates for passengers and sustainable transport, encourages seamless travel and notes Air Canada's rail-air partnerships in Europe. But for an airline to bid on HFR raises questions about conflict of interest, competition, and the transparency of the process.

Transport Action contacted Public Services and Procurement Canada asking what steps had been taken to address the following concerns:

1. Rail-air codeshares should be available equally to all airlines flying into Canada's international airports. If one airline owns part of the rail service, safeguards would be needed to ensure fairness.
   
   
2. The government may have given Air Canada access to HFR project data that provides competitive advantages over other airlines and VIA Rail.
   
   
3. Allowing one of three shortlisted consortia to reveal major changes in its composition only when it was too late for the others to respond was unfair.
   
   
4. Various requests for information about High Frequency Rail – including taxpayer-funded studies that would have enabled well-informed public discussion – were rebuffed or heavily redacted over the past decade on the grounds of commercial sensitivity. Either the previous redactions were spurious, or sensitive information has now been made available to a current competitor.

The response we received only partially addressed our concerns about future competition and didn't address our concerns about lack of transparency nor about access to competitive information. Air Canada and Cadence were unable to offer further clarification, citing procurement rules.

It is crucial that PSPC ensure that the process is fully transparent and fair, especially for a project of this scale that is vitally important to Canada's future productivity and sustainable prosperity.

Transport Action Canada regrets that we can no longer be entirely confident that is the case, and calls upon the government to release the maximum amount of information possible for public scrutiny; and accelerate the construction of HFR while reducing the risk premiums and management fees payable to the selected consortium by keeping future operations in the hands of VIA Rail Canada – not another country's railway, let alone an airline.

Editorial photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/194907616@N03/53907417850/

SOURCE Transport Action Canada

Terry Johnson, President, [phone], [email protected]