QUEBEC CITY—The federal government should get on board with a high-speed rail line linking Ontario and Quebec or risk being left in the dust by the Obama administration in the United States, the premiers of both provinces said Wednesday.

Emerging from a joint cabinet meeting, Dalton McGuinty and Jean Charest warned Canada could miss a golden opportunity on fast trains as the U.S. pushes to create 13 high-speed corridors, including Boston to Montreal and New York City to Buffalo.

“Let’s take a moment to appreciate the situation here,” said Charest, a former leader of the federal Progressive Conservatives.

“It would, after all, be ironic if we actually did more with the federal government of the United States than we did with the federal government of Canada on developing a fast train.”

Ontario, Quebec and the federal government have partnered on $3-million feasibility study of high-speed rail due this fall. The effort is meant to update at least 16 previous studies or attempts to study a Quebec City to Windsor rail link since 1973.

So far, both premiers have noted the Harper government in Ottawa appears cool to the idea because of cost concerns, with industry observers saying the price tag of a high-speed rail corridor linking populous southern Ontario and Quebec is $24 billion if the estimates in a 1995 study are adjusted for inflation.

The benefits would include less crowded highways, less pollution, fewer greenhouse gases, more jobs and quicker travel times, proponents say, noting Europe and Japan have proven high-speed rail is economical with trains approaching speeds of 300 km/h between major cities, triple the speeds of most inter-city Canadian trains.

“If we build this line here, it’s more than just connecting 16 million Canadians together, strengthening our regional economy and better protecting our regional environment. It’s going to plug us in to a North American network of high-speed rail,” said McGuinty.

“That’s the exciting dimension to this.”

However, government insiders note that it would take at least five to eight years of environmental assessments before shovels could go in the ground to create a rail corridor for fast trains, and there are the challenges of expropriating properties, particularly in urban areas.

The Obama administration, which has a renewed push to ease dependence on fossil fuels following the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, has earmarked $8 billion to get rolling on high-speed rail corridors—which President Obama himself has acknowledged will take decades longer and hundreds of billions of dollars to create.

Charest and McGuinty also used their meeting to push the federal Conservative government on another climate-related initiative: setting up a cap-and-trade system to limit harmful greenhouse gas emissions by major polluting industries.

The two premiers said they hope to have their own regional systems ready by January 2012, a deadline set by the Western Climate Initiative including other provinces and states such as British Columbia, Manitoba, California and Utah. The group represents 82 million people.

“We’re staying on that schedule. Whatever needs to be done,” said Charest, with McGuinty adding the federal government should keep an “open mind” about a cap-and-trade system.

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The joint cabinet meeting was the third since 2008 between the country’s two most powerful provincial governments. McGuinty and Charest banded together that year to push the interests of central Canada amid concerns the Harper government was “missing in action” on environmental and economic issues for the region, which is home to two-thirds of the Canadian population.

The next meeting is set for a year from now in Toronto.

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