abutment on the Pacific slope. During its early years of high costs and
limited earnings in British Columbia, the CPR concentrated on the
development of more remunerative local main- and branch-line traffic
rather than through or transcontinental traffic. For the operation of the
CPR Pacific slope line, then, Innis implies that success meant simply con-
trolling expenditure and limiting losses that were covered by returns
from more profitable sections of the line. ²⁴ For the construction and
operation of its lines in the Kootenay region in the southeastern corner
of the province, Innis elaborates the CPR's strategy. By establishing a low
tariff that encouraged mine owners to ship their ore, the CPR elicited
extensive local traffic that reduced the railway company's overhead costs
over long stretches of otherwise non-revenue-producing territory and
relieved in part the cost of settlement. ²⁵ The most recent overview of rail-
way development in British Columbia sees this ability to generate traffic
(or capture it from competitors) as the key to the success of the Canadian
Pacific and the failure of both the Canadian Northern and the Grand
Trunk Pacific. ²⁶ For Innis, however, the success of the CPR in British
Columbia as well as on the prairies also advanced 'the dominance of east-
ern Canada over western Canada.' ²⁷

The owners of the Canadian Northern, the last transcontinental to
enter British Columbia, also attempted to encourage traffic along a sec-
tion of the line requiring greater construction expenditures and offering
much less local traffic than the prairies. In his detailed study of the enter-
prise, Regehr asserts that the 'development of local traffic resources was
certainly very much a part of Mackenzie and Mann's British Columbia
plans.' To generate freight, they purchased the Dunsmuir Colliery on
Vancouver Island, built a huge sawmill at Fraser Mills near Vancouver,
and invested in numerous hardrock mining and fishing enterprises.
These activities would, one of the Canadian Northern officers claimed,
have produced enough traffic by 1920 to make the British Columbia sec-
tion pay not only its operating expenses but also its fixed charges. ²⁸

'Not following the CPR example' may embrace the causes of the
GTP failure as a unit, but it does not offer explicit measures of failure for
the different components of a large, complex organization such as a rail-
way company. Though he concentrates on success in his studies on the
evolution of the managerial structure of American corporate enterprise,
business historian Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., also suggests functional stan-
dards of failure. For senior managers who allocate the resources of the

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