David Bellerive

Who’s Going to Say No to CDPQ?

July 2, 2025 · 9 min read

What’s the difference between a cancelled tram and one that moves? In Québec, apparently: a crown corp with a spreadsheet.

If there is one (or two) sagas I have been following quite closely over the last decade (yes, we are getting there.), it is both the Quebec City Tramway project and High Frequency Rail (HFR, now known as ALTO and more HSR than HFR).

But something has changed. And it’s not just political will or public support: it’s who’s in charge. More and more, it’s not elected officials pushing these projects across the finish line. It’s institutional investors. Infrastructure arms. Pension-backed and private builders don’t wait for consensus.

To be clear, this piece is not meant to be seen as admiration of CDPQ Infra, but rather as a critique of inertia, of why they can build, and not the rest of us.

When Delivery Becomes the Mandate

Like it or not, CDPQ Infra has become a powerhouse in infrastructure delivery. Sure, their flagship project, the Montreal REM, is faced with delays, operational issues, a lack of transparency and an ever slipping timeline. But let’s be honest: it’s still the only major passenger rail project in Québec in the last 20 years that’s actually gone from idea to reality. You can (sometimes) ride (parts of) it. And, somehow, in the current Canadian infrastructure landscape, that’s an achievement in itself.

What CDPQ Infra brings to the table isn’t just capital as the pension plan of an entire province. Instead, they bring a delivery machine: one that operates just far enough from politics to be stable, and just close enough to influence decisions when it matters. Their decisions aren’t driven by polling, headlines, or shifting moods. They’re driven by financial logic, strategic feasibility, and long-term returns.

But the calculation isn’t purely monetary. It’s also ideological, in the quiet way that defines many Québec institutions. CDPQ Infra builds with a mandate to grow Québec’s economy, strengthen its global competitiveness, and reinforce its institutional heft. It’s capitalism, yes, but with a civil service accent. And when that logic locks onto a project, like the tramway or ALTO, it becomes very hard to stop.

To be clear, this is not something unique to CDPQ. While they operate at the intersection of politics and public mandate, the reality is investment firms are doing the exact same with their own infrastructure branches — Brookfield, Fengate, OTPP, CPP Investments. They use their capital leverage to get things done.

Québec City: From Debate to Delivery

Can you recall a time where the Quebec City Tramway project wasn’t in jeopardy? Neither can I. We are in its sixth iteration in 22 years! Impressively sad.

It’s been reimagined, resized, rebranded, shelved, revived and politicized, sometimes all in the same year. Every administration has had its version, and everyone found something to complain about. Every round of consultation or procurement has reset the clock rather than moved the project forward.

In many ways, the tram became the perfect symbol of how public infrastructure in Canada dies: not from lack of need, but from too many chances to say no.

Once CDPQ Infra entered the scene as a delivery partner, the tone shifted, and fast. Opposition didn’t vanish, but it stopped mattering as much. The project stopped being a political football and started becoming an asset. There’ll always be noise, but it’s in the background now. The delivery machine has taken over.

In less than a year since presenting TramCité, we’ve seen a Notice to the Market, Requests for Expressions of Interest, the qualification of two major contracts of six consortiums, awarded contracts for preparatory work, upstream training and launched the request for proposals to select the development partners in 2026. This pace is not normal, at least not in Québec, and certainly not in Canada. This is what institutional leverage looks like — when the goal isn’t to debate if something should be built, but to ensure that it will be.

ALTO: A High-Speed Test of Intent

If the Québec City tram is a project CDPQ Infra rescued, ALTO is one they’re shaping from the ground up.

When High Frequency Rail (HFR) was first announced, I didn’t expect it to survive the planning phase. It had all the hallmarks of a megaproject that would fail to launch: vague scope, siloed leadership, a somehow different, yet identical delivery model, and an allergy to risk. For a while, every update felt like it came from a locked conference room, designed more to dampen expectations than to spark momentum.

Then came a shift.

On October 30, 2022, the federal government published an update to the Request for Expressions of Interest. Nestled in Appendix C, page 46, was a list of respondents that told a very different story.

The point is this: investment firms, infrastructure giants, pension plans, and national rail operators don’t respond to RFEoIs for fun. They show up when a project is real, when the money is on the table, and the delivery model is serious.

Here they were: Siemens. Atkins-Réalis. Deutsche Bahn. Parsons. Fengate Capital Management. Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board. CDPQ Infra.

This is when it became real. The project has way more appetite from private finance, institutions, operations, civil and engineering than from the government. Appetite from capital, engineering and operations: all the ones who actually build. This is no accident — it happens when the people who know how these projects work sense that, this time, it’s going to get built.

Like the REM, and now TramCité, ALTO isn’t just a transit project. It’s a financial instrument, a political calculation, and a test of a new delivery model, one built on the idea that doing things efficiently requires doing them at all. And that means insulating key decisions from the kind of political volatility that’s kept similar projects stalled for decades.

So far, the signs are familiar: the federal government fades quietly into the background. VIA Rail recedes. Public engagement is replaced with industry briefings. Technical studies are released with little fanfare. And yet, behind the scenes, the ALTO project team is moving, hiring and expanding to work closely with Cadence, the delivery partner led by CDPQ Infra. It’s quiet, yes, but it’s doing the one thing we rarely manage in Canadian infrastructure: acting, not thinking about it.

There are still no shovels in the ground, and no final investment decision from the Government of Canada. But let me ask you this: who’s going to say no to CDPQ?

The Cost of Getting Things Done

There’s a certain relief in watching a project move. In watching timelines shorten, RFPs drop, and shovels enter the ground without a decade of political whiplash. CDPQ Infra, for all its flaws, shows what happens when someone, anyone, is empowered to actually deliver.

But we shouldn’t confuse inevitability with public good. Projects delivered efficiently can still miss the mark. They can still cause harm. And they can still serve narrow definitions of “value” that exclude the people most affected.

ALTO and the Québec City tramway remind us that we can build, if we choose to. That’s not a small thing. In a country where big infrastructure dreams often die under the weight of indecision, it’s a hopeful signal.

But they also ask a harder question: can we build fast, fairly, and democratically, or do we have to choose?

I want things to get built. I want ambition to have outcomes. But that doesn’t mean abandoning politics: we need to recognize when it’s time to stop debating and start committing.

Sometimes, that means taking a leap of faith — a measured one.

And that question, how to build fast and fairly, without losing our democratic approach, is one I keep thinking about. It might be the most important question in Canadian infrastructure today.

In my next piece, I won’t keep this a rhetorical question: What would it take to build better? Not just efficiently, but with purpose, and with public trust baked in.