Ezra Levant opened Tuesday's Ezra Levant Show with a clip from The Simpsons — the Monorail episode, specifically, in which a fast-talking salesman goes from town to town selling useless transit infrastructure to people who don't need it. "I think that is how train salesmen sort of are," was his point. 

Trains were a critical part of the industrial revolution, but that was 150 years ago. The idea of a high-speed passenger train making economic sense in North America, he said, "just doesn't make sense." California — the most populous state in the U.S., and comparable in population size to Canada. It has spent tens of billions of dollars and built only a handful of kilometres of rail.

"I don't think it will ever be built. But that's not really the point of the Monorail now, is it? It's to pad the pockets of everyone involved."

Enter Canada's newest railway boondoggle, the Alto project. It's the Carney government's proposed high-speed rail line connecting Toronto and Montreal, conveniently running through several politically important Liberal cities, and carries a preliminary cost estimate of nearly $100 billion.

Ezra's assessment: "Do we need that? Of course not," Ezra remarked. "Will it improve transit between those cities? Unlikely," he continued, adding the project is "unlikely to be built at all."

Joining him to discuss the farmer backlash against the project was Rebel News Quebec bureau chief Alexa Lavoie, who was recently at a protest that generated roughly three million views online.

She laid out the stakes on the ground for those Canadians affected by the plan's development. "We are talking about 1,700 properties that will be impacted between Ottawa and Montreal," she said, "and on those properties we have 500 agricultural lands."

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Some farmers face full expropriation; others face partial. But even that doesn't capture the full picture: the Alto corridor will function as a physical wall through the landscape, with crossing points potentially kilometres apart. "There are some farmers who will have literally their land being split in the middle where they cannot really reach the other side really easily."

And under Bill C-15, farmers who have already received expropriation notices cannot do anything to improve or develop their property, nothing that might raise its assessed value.

"They cannot build anything. They cannot even plant some flowers or anything. They cannot do nothing on their own property," she said.

This is happening, Alexa noted, before a final route has been locked in. Drones have been sent to photograph the land. Notices have gone out to more properties than will ultimately be needed. Families are frozen, not knowing if their particular parcel will be taken, unable to act on land they still legally own.

Some of those farmers have been through this before. The Alto corridor runs into the Montreal area through land that was previously expropriated for the Mirabel airport. For those families, this is the second time facing this challenge.

The protest Alexa attended was held at a property that will be among the most heavily impacted by the project. Hundreds of people attended, including many children. Éric Duhaime of the Conservative Party of Quebec delivered a speech; a Parti Québécois candidate was also present.

"We had also a Marxist-Leninist agitator who were screaming about Palestine in the middle of the protest," Alexa also noted. Rebel News was effectively the only major media outlet there for the protest itself, while a cadre of other journalists had arrived in Duhaime's campaign entourage.

The farmers, Alexa said, were warm and welcoming. "A lot of people were fans of Rebel News — and you know, it's not only conservatives. We had people who vote PQ or Bloc Québécois. They really love our work because it's truthful and we are following the facts."