Today, the Minister of Transport, Geneviève Guilbault, will announce a provisional agreement on the Quebec City tramway, which, Mayor Marchand hopes, will give the green light to the project.
• Also read: An agreement this week for the tramway, Guilbault suggests
• Also read: Agreement on the tramway: “Good news”, but still work to be done, says Mayor Bruno Marchand
Minister Guilbault will announce Wednesday afternoon the signing of a mandate letter for a provisional agreement. This follows the proposal made last June, at the request of the Legault government, by the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec Infra (CDPQi). The latter proposed a complete CITÉ Plan for serving the region with structuring transport, the backbone of which is a tramway.
Prime Minister François Legault and his Minister of Transport and Sustainable Mobility then committed to carrying out phase one of the tramway, from Le Gendre to Charlesbourg, a project estimated at $5 billion.
Operation and profitability
The agreement must specify the partners in the project, i.e. the involvement of the CDPQi. Tuesday evening, in a parliamentary committee, the minister stressed that “the Caisse will carry out the Quebec tramway project with us”. She gave an overview by specifying that the Caisse would not be the operator of the tramway. In the initial project, first carried out by the City of Quebec, it was planned that the Capital Transport Network would be responsible for this aspect, which the minister seems to confirm.
“For the REM, the Caisse does the operation. Which will not be the case in the tramway,” replied Ms. Guilbault to the question from PQ leader Joël Arseneau. On the issue of the importance that will be given to profitability in the project, the minister indicated that “we will give operation back to the transport company, probably, then the income will come back to it and it will manage the exploitation”.
Final agreement
This agreement will not be final. At the start of the week, the mayor of Quebec, Bruno Marchand, welcomed an imminent provisional agreement on the tramway, believing that this would ensure not to miss the 2025 construction season. For him, however, it is unlikely that a final agreement on the megaproject be reached by the end of the year. This final agreement would specify governance, schedule and financing.
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