An estimated $90 billion high-speed rail line has yet to see a single metre of track laid, but the Crown corporation building it has hired its own chairman's law firm on an open-ended contract.

Welcome to Alto, the Liberal-led rail project Ottawa calls "nation building." The line would connect Toronto to Montreal and shave roughly two hours off the trip, if it ever gets built.

Robert Prichard chairs Alto, the Crown corporation created to push the project forward. He also chairs Torys LLP, the Toronto law firm Alto hired as its counsel.

This is no minor side file. According to Torys' own website, the firm is handling impact assessment, regulatory review, and consultation with more than 40 Indigenous communities. That has to cost big bucks.

Alto began soliciting counsel in June 2024, then sat on a closed tender for nearly a year before quietly posting an after-the-fact notice that still reads like an open call. There was no timely public record of who was invited, who won, or on what terms.

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As reported by Blacklock's Reporter, Canadians only learned that Torys had secured this contract on open-ended terms after Opposition House Leader Andrew Scheer forced an inquiry of ministry in the Commons, demanding every contract over $100,000 tied to the rail file. Alto still won't say how much Torys has been paid.

Prichard previously chaired Metrolinx, the agency behind Toronto's Eglinton Crosstown, a project that has run years behind schedule, billions over its original budget, and still doesn’t have a concrete finish line. He knows how public rail procurement is supposed to work, and how it can go off the rails.

The pattern of fiscal recklessness and suspicious conflicts of interest doesn't stop there. Cabinet has already approved $2.7 million in bonuses for all 134 of Alto's officials, including 18 executives. Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne's wife, Anne-Marie Gaudet, was hired as Alto's vice-president of environment in July 2025, though the ethics commissioner says that isn't a blatant conflict of interest.

Alto’s track record so far seems less like railway planning and more like a good old boys' network with a train sketched on top.

Meanwhile, the people in the line's path are bracing for what will be the largest expropriation event in modern Canadian history.

To support these land grab efforts, Parliament has adopted Bill C-15 to expedite the expropriation of land as it pertains to ‘nation building projects.’ This means that land acquisition can begin almost immediately, whether landowners like it or not.

Parks Canada has also flagged protected land along the corridor, including the Rideau Canal which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And if California's high-speed rail offers any sort of warning, it began as a $33 billion project and is now coined the ‘train to nowhere.’

It should go without saying that a project that can't explain an open-ended contract to its chairman's own law firm is not exactly expropriation ready.

Paying bonuses and stacking VPs before a spike hits the ground isn't building a railway, it’s more of a slush corridor with a catchy slogan and a logo.