The idea that financing for this megaproject is not yet assured was a recurring theme of this demonstration, where several leaders accused Quebec City of cutting down trees prematurely. So, let’s see…
The facts
Technically, Ms. Blanchette Vézina is not really wrong. As colleague Simon Carmichael wrote about the last provincial budget, the government officially considers that the tramway project is still in its “planning” phase. It will require the approval of the Council of Ministers to move it to the list of projects “in progress”.
Likewise, the federal government’s intention to co-finance the tramway is known, but there has not yet been a final agreement reached in this regard with Ottawa.
From this point of view, therefore, we can in principle affirm like Ms. Blanchette Vezina that “the financial arrangement is not formalized”. But to suggest that everything is still too uncertain to begin preparatory work, there is still a good margin.
The project has an overall budget ($7.6 billion) on which the three levels of government agree, and they have all said they have the desire to achieve it – and even acted in this direction.
The federal government has clearly stated that it has money available for this type of project. The deputy and minister of the region Joël Lightbound recently said that “the agreements are in the process of being concluded”. Quebec and Ottawa have still not agreed, according to the latest news, but as early as last year, sums had been announced.
On the provincial side, the tramway project is explicitly in the latest Quebec Infrastructure Program (2026-36), even if it still appears in the list of projects “in planning”, as we saw above. This same document also indicates (see p. A17) that the government brought forward the payment of $300 million to Quebec City this spring for preparatory work related to the tramway.
It remains theoretically always possible, of course, that the provincial will end up going backwards. But in the absence of clear signals in this regard, we must conclude that the fact of having committed such sums indicates that the project is clearly being carried out.
Last week’s announcement of the award of two major contracts by CDPQ-Infra, which is piloting the tramway project, goes in the same direction. The selected firms will work on the very detailed design of the site. It is difficult to obtain a truly final budget before the completion of this planning work, which will take 14 months, and one might think that the project will not move into the “official completion” phase before that, but it would be surprising if contracts of this scale were signed without there being a reasonable certainty of completing the project.
At CDPQ-Infra, we also say that until now, “the proposals respect the financial parameters of the project which were given by the government of Quebec.”
Verdict
Not entirely true. From a technical or purely legal point of view, Ms. Blanchette Vézina is not wrong: the Quebec tramway is not yet officially 100% funded. From a more practical point of view, however, there are still signs that very strongly suggest that this is a very theoretical point.
