Ottawa has already handed out $2.8 million in bonuses for the high-speed rail project even though it’s not even close to starting construction, according to government records reviewed by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

“Why do these train executives think they deserve huge taxpayer-funded bonuses when they haven’t laid a single metre of track?” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Government bureaucrats don’t deserve bonuses before they finish their work, so they definitely don’t deserve bonuses before they even start their work.”

Alto, the federal Crown corporation tasked with overseeing the government’s high-speed rail project, handed out $2.8 million in bonuses between Jan. 1 and July 16, 2025, according to government records released in response to an order paper question from member of Parliament Andrew Scheer.

All 18 Alto executives took a bonus totaling $1.2 million. That’s an average bonus of about $68,500 per executive.

All 116 non-executive employees also received a bonus. Alto paid out $1.5 million to non-executive staffers.

Alto is years away from construction on a high-speed train project between Toronto and Quebec City, according to its website. It doesn’t plan on laying track until 2029 at the earliest. In fact, Alto doesn’t even know the exact route for its train.

“We don’t have a very precise alignment to start,” Martin Imbleau, Alto’s CEO told CBC.

Nevertheless, Alto cost taxpayers $597 million in 2025-26, according to Main Estimates.

Alto expects the high-speed train project to cost up to $90 billion.

The Alto bonuses are part of a pattern within the federal government.

“Prime Minister Mark Carney needs to end Ottawa’s entitlement culture because it seems like government executives think they deserve bonuses just for showing up to work twice a week with their shoes tied,” Terrazzano said. “VIA Rail is another prime example of government executives rewarding themselves for failure.

“VIA Rail executives shouldn’t be taking six-figure bonuses when their Crown corporation is hemorrhaging money and relying on taxpayer bailouts.”

VIA Rail, the government’s other train corporation, also dished out $10.3 million in bonuses last year, according to the records.

All eight of its executives took a bonus in 2025-26. The average executive bonus was $115,293.

Of its non-executive staff, 99 per cent took a bonus costing about $9.4 million.

The bonuses keep flowing at VIA Rail even though the train company is losing hundreds of millions of dollars every year.

The government gave VIA Rail $1.8 billion over the last five years just to cover operating losses, according to the Crown corporation’s latest annual report.

Meanwhile, VIA Rail’s trains were on time just 35 per cent of the time last year, according to its annual report.

“The government is more than $1 trillion in debt so these taxpayer-funded bonuses for failure should be the first thing on the chopping block,” Terrazzano said.

Rewarding failure with taxpayer-funded bonuses isn’t the exception, it’s the rule in Ottawa.

About 98 per cent of all government executives took a bonus in 2024-25, the last year where data is available. Those executive bonuses cost taxpayers $201 million.

Meanwhile, federal departments met just 54 per cent of their performance targets that year, according to the government’s own data.