I am curious, where do they think the freight will come from? Rail is a good at moving large volume commodity products - we have very little of that left on the island. Pulp from Port Alberni is one of the few things I can think of.
Containers do not strike me as an option either. The distances on the island make no economic sense to put a container on a train. You add an extra handling of the container because you would have to unload the container from the train to a truck to get its final destination. Given that most of the people on the island live south of the Malahat, where would you even unload the containers?
If someone opens a copper mine or a much bigger coal mine than Quinsam, then there is a market for a rail service to the commodity to a harbour for shipping.
Here in Victoria we no access between the tracks and the harbour area - we have made our habour basically non functional.
Most shortline railways in Canada are there because of two reasons, they either serve a single large commodity source (iron ore in Labradour) or they are branches off of the major lines (the line to Churchill). The E and N is not connected to the rest of the North American rail network and it is not serving any major commodity. It really has no purpose and putting money into it makes no economic sense.
The $100 000 000 price tag is also a vast lowballing. The proposed work, let alone what would really be needed such as getting rid of level crossings and offering more twin tracking, is unlikely to be done for much less than $200 000 000 based on
best research into quasi public sector capital cost project over runs.