One of the giants of that time was Charles Melville Hays, whom Sir Wilfrid Laurier described as “the greatest railroad genius in Canada.” Hays, President of the Grand Trunk Railway, had a vision: to build a second transcontinental rail line across Canada with Prince Rupert as its western terminus, establishing a gateway to the Pacific. Hays did not live to see his vision realized.
Two explanations for this conflict between theoretical prediction and recent experience are possible. First, the preceding analysis is fundamentally flawed. Second, it is at least incomplete. I will take the second route and argue that the problem was that ceteris were not paribus in this episode. Ceteris paribus, of course, means “all other things being equal”.