Peter Black, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

Quebec City’s tramway plan is at a crossroads. That’s the consensus after last week’s announcement by Mayor Bruno Marchand of the revised cost of the system and the city’s decision to manage construction itself.

As the city put it in a press release, the ball is now in the court of the federal and provincial governments. The federal government, via MP and minister Jean-Yves Duclos, is “all in” according to Marchand, but the support of the Coalition Avenir Québec government is less certain.

Premier François Legault, asked about the new cost shortly after Marchand’s announcement, said, “That’s a lot of money. It’s worrying. It’s expensive, very expensive.”

According to Marchand, the Quebec government has known about “Plan B” and its $8.4-billion estimate since July. Legault said he and his relevant ministers, notably Transport Minister Geneviève Guilbault and Infrastructure and National Capital Minister Jonatan Julien, need to meet with the city to discuss the way forward.

As for the potential future federal government, Charlesbourg MP and Quebec lieutenant Pierre Paul-Hus repeated Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre’s vow to not put any extra funding into the tramway. “Pierre Poilievre was clear that we would not pay any cost overruns.”

At the Conservative convention in Quebec City in September, Poilievre said he would not spend “billions on projects mismanaged by incompetent politicians” if he became prime minister.

At city hall itself, the revised plan earned the support of Claude Villeneuve, leader of the Official Opposition party, Québec D’Abord, the successor to the party of former mayor Régis Labeaume that first proposed the current plan six years ago.

Villeneuve told reporters there didn’t seem to be much communication between the city and the Quebec government. “You’re adults. Talk to each other.” He said if the project does die, the mayor needs to reconsider his political future.

For Patrick Paquette, interim leader of Équipe Priorité Québec, which has always opposed the tramway, Marchand has already failed and should resign. Paquette said the project should be halted immediately to “stop the bleeding.” In an open letter, Paquette said his party favours an improved system of electric buses.

Transition Québec Leader and Limoilou Coun. Jackie Smith said she would have preferred Plan B to Plan A to begin with. “At some point we have to move forward, have a vision and continue with a project that is already too late,” she said.

Donald Charette, spokesperson for the Québec Merite Mieux group opposed to the tramway, told Radio-Canada, “If consortia withdraw because they are not capable of delivering at a reasonable price, I don’t see how the city can do it. The CAQ must draw the right conclusions.”

Christian Savard of Vivre en Ville said in a statement, “Finally, we have the facts on how we can succeed with the tramway project in Quebec. The route that had been taken through the call for tenders was not the right one. We see that the prices would have been much higher.”

For François Bourque, veteran city hall columnist for Le Soleil, the wavering of the CAQ government’s support for the tramway, “makes the question unavoidable: Is this the end of the tramway?”

He wrote in a Nov. 3 analysis of the status of the project: “For a government that has often felt uncomfortable with the tramway project in recent years, the excuses to get out of it are piling up … explosion of costs, insufficient social acceptability, decline in public transit ridership since the pandemic, withdrawal of the only consortium still in the running for the major tram infrastructure contract, complexity of management if the city becomes project manager instead of a consortium.”

Bourque asks, however, if it kills the current tramway plan, “Will the Legault government have anything else to offer? A more unifying, less expensive project, achievable within a reasonable time frame and with financial support from the federal government?”

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Premier François Legault’s immediate reaction to Mayor Bruno Marchand’s revised tramway cost estimate of $8.4 million was, “That’s a lot of money.”

Photo from National Assembly website