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VIA Rail

innsertnamehere said:
TFSAs are not tax free at deposit, only at withdrawal. investments grow tax free but the if the initial capital comes from income it is taxed before being deposited. Important distinction. It does allow for some very low tax growth in retirement savings though, and allows for very low taxable incomes in retirement.

Canada also has surprisingly few tax deductions and a relatively simple tax structure compared to many countries.

Most people will have deductions of some sort, mainly RRSPs, but otherwise there aren't a whole ton of eligible deductions.

A big difference between Canada and Europe is lower sales taxes - Germany has a 19% sales tax while Ontario is 13%. Corporate taxes are also much lower in Canada.

Canada does have relatively high income taxes compared to globally but the overall tax burden isn't anything crazy.
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Respectfully, we will disagree, as we so often do.

First off, I specifically noted TFSA is a tax shelter (income generated inside them is not taxable), not that its a deduction/credit, so there was no need to correct my accurate statement.

Second........as someone who its fair to say is 'comfortable', I pay well less as a % of income on my tax than the sticker rate.

Its not a percent or two less.........its a lot less.

If your paying more, fire your accountant.

I would strongly advocate for a zero-deduction model, where 100% of income is taxed identically; but with a higher tax-free exemption and a lower rate structure; albeit, I'd be content to see more revenue collected as well.
 
MisterF said:
The map with the Ottawa by-pass is bizarre. It shows it on the CP mainline. I can see what CP gains from giving up control of the Havelock sub, but their mainline is a different story. So we'd end up with one of two scenarios: either Via runs on the line with the same scheduling and reliability problems that plague the current CN route, or they put a lot of money into expanding the line with guarantees that freight trains never delay passenger trains. To make the latter worth it the passengers gained from a faster trip to Montreal would have to not only have to make up for the cost of expanding the line, but also the passengers lost from skipping Ottawa. Putting a lot of money into by-passing one of your biggest revenue sources to slightly improve travel times to Montreal seems like a razor thin business case to me.
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I agree the map is bizarre and I won't put a lot of faith in it until I see it from an official source. Then again, I thought the same thing about HFR using the Havelock sub when the first leaks came out. The only way the map could make any sense is if VIA plans to only run a couple trains a day on the Winchester Sub during peak periods when both both the Montreal and Ottawa could easily fill their own trains, and have all other Montreal-Toronto trains run through Ottawa. While this routing may not be any faster than running on the Lakeshore route, it might be much more reliable as most of the route would be on dedicated tracks. With only a couple trains a day, VIA likely wouldn't have dedicated tracks for the aprox. 140 km between De Beaujeu and Smiths Falls (though they might pay for a few upgrades), so the question is, would the travel time improvements from the shorter, straighter route outweigh not having dedicated track?
 
roger1818 said:
I agree the map is bizarre and I won't put a lot of faith in it until I see it from an official source. Then again, I thought the same thing about HFR using the Havelock sub when the first leaks came out. The only way the map could make any sense is if VIA plans to only run a couple trains a day on the Winchester Sub during peak periods when both both the Montreal and Ottawa could easily fill their own trains, and have all other Montreal-Toronto trains run through Ottawa. While this routing may not be any faster than running on the Lakeshore route, it might be much more reliable as most of the route would be on dedicated tracks. With only a couple trains a day, VIA likely wouldn't have dedicated tracks for the aprox. 140 km between De Beaujeu and Smiths Falls (though they might pay for a few upgrades), so the question is, would the travel time improvements from the shorter, straighter route outweigh not having dedicated track?
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I believe that the positive take-away is that all these "nice-to-haves" like 200 km/h, electrical operation, second tunnel under the Mont-Royal and a bypass south of Ottawa seem to be under study, which gives hope that governments, politicians, bureaucrats, private investors (and hopefully also the public!) will soon have realistic cost estimates, which will allow them to determine whether or not their incremental benefits outweigh their incremental costs...
 
roger1818 said:
With only a couple trains a day, VIA likely wouldn't have dedicated tracks for the aprox. 140 km between De Beaujeu and Smiths Falls (though they might pay for a few upgrades), so the question is, would the travel time improvements from the shorter, straighter route outweigh not having dedicated track?
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Murphy’s Law says that if CP needs to run a freight, it will happen just when VIA needs the track. And even if the freight ran hours ago, it will have broken down and blocked the line just when VIA show up.
I would far prefer to have VIA stick to its own dedicated tracks.
If there’s a budget to pay for upgrades to enable sharing, then why not spend that money on the existing line (where we’ve spent some money in the past) and get the biggest bang for those bucks on that line, instead of spreading the investment in VIA and the operating cost out over a greater number of freight lines, thus diffusing the impact?
- Paul
 
crs1026 said:
Murphy’s Law says that if CP needs to run a freight, it will happen just when VIA needs the track. And even if the freight ran hours ago, it will have broken down and blocked the line just when VIA show up.
I would far prefer to have VIA stick to its own dedicated tracks.
If there’s a budget to pay for upgrades to enable sharing, then why not spend that money on the existing line (where we’ve spent some money in the past) and get the biggest bang for those bucks on that line, instead of spreading the investment in VIA and the operating cost out over a greater number of freight lines, thus diffusing the impact?
- Paul
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I tend to agree, though it ends up being a pay me now or pay me later situation. VIA could have a contract with CP that would require priority for a few, high yielding trains a day. Having a similar contract for almost 10 times as many trains on the same track becomes significantly more expensive and building dedicated tracks is likely the cheaper option.

In the case of a breakdown or derailment, VIA could detour the express train to follow the dedicated track through Ottawa. Even with dedicated tracks, certain segments of the track will still be used by the freight railways, so it doesn't completely eliminate the risk. The key is to have redundancy, so that if one route is blocked, they can use another.

What will actually happen is still very uncertain, but as @Urban Sky said, it is good that VIA is looking at all of these options.
 
innsertnamehere said:
The Toronto-Montreal travel time continues to be disappointing, but it is still a not insignificant improvement over today.
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On paper, not a significant improvement. But in reality will be much better than today.

Ive taken the 4H 40 minute train from Toronto to Montreal about 12 times. Only once was it actually on time. 6 of those times it was around 1.5 hours late. Once it was 8 hours.

If they can make the reliability 95% with HFR, its a MASSIVE improvement.
 
roger1818 said:
In a perfect world, yes. However, given that the Dundas Sub is CN's mainline, I don't know how feasible it is for VIA to have dedicated tracks or any sort of HFR along it.
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and skipping the Kitchener/Waterloo area and Pearson Airport would never ever happen. It would be like skipping Ottawa in the east. Its GEXR line or nothing IMO.
 
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robmausser said:
The same place where they twice said the majority of Quebecors want to separate from Canada.
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Neither constructive, nor accurate.

Urban Sky said:
I have no idea what business such unconstructive political discussions have in this forum, but I would assume that a 1.16 percentage-point gap (to compare, the Scottish Independence referendum was lost by a margin of 10.6% in 2015, whereas the Brexit referendum was won by a margin of 3.8% the following year) with a turnout of more than 90% is well within the margin of error of any poll which predicted that there might be a majority:
View attachment 333446
en.wikipedia.org

1995 Quebec referendum - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

In fact, these were the final polls before the referendum, of which many showed a relative majority for independence, even though none indicated an absolute majority for either side:
View attachment 333450

And whereas the vast majority of Quebeckers have accepted their fate that they will one day die as Canadian citizens and be buried on Canadian soil, many have not forgotten the many controversies (such as rejection rates of up to 12% in some districts) around the referendum...
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I'm not sure why the answer to an off-topic and inaccurate post is another off topic post which concludes with needlessly inflammatory language.

Perhaps both comments could be removed.

But before they are.........

What the pro-sovereignty portions of the Quebec press wrote back then was that the majority of Francophone Quebecers voted to separate, which was true. That strong no votes by the anglophone and immigrant communities led to the that outcome. That said, those sentiments made many Quebecers feel unwelcome and second-class and were ill-considered.
 
The Ottawa - Peterborough corridor isn't 100% existing... some pieces are now missing. I'm wondering if the Montreal to Toronto trains will bypass Ottawa on the CP line from Montreal to Perth. To all of a sudden not have a contention with CN freight on the Kingston route and achieve time reductions wouldn't make sense.
 
Imo the most interesting potential use of the CP row is the installation of VIA owned rails along it to enable a shorter route from Vaudreuil to casselman/maxville or debeaujeu with a potential 200kph speed. However, this benefit seems like it would likely be less significant removing bottlenecks at the flat junctions been dorval and gare centrale.
 
kEiThZ said:
If HFR is supposedly getting Ottawa-Montreal to between 1:30 and 1:45, that would imply that Ottawa-Dorval is 1-1:15 hrs.

Given the two transfers and 30 mins required, to get from downtown to Ottawa airport, a transfer at Tremblay station and then at Dorval in 1 hr starts to look attractive if the air fare is competitive, which given Ottawa's situation as an Air Canada fortress hub is far too common.
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I always found heading to YUL for a flight was much straightforward when I lived in DT Ottawa. My English is bad (so is my French, but the latter is still better) and I enjoyed the services in French at YUL thus I preferred to head there instead. Where I live it's just a 30 minutes train ride to YUL.
 
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