It takes 3 days to travel the 4500 km of rail from Toronto to Vancouver because the first 1500 km are through muskeg and around lakes where building straight, flat, protected 200 km/h high-speed tracks is just not an attainable option. Even if you managed 200 km/h the entire way, it's still 2 days travelling.
Planes travel about 800 km/h and can go in a relatively straight line without fear of a moose or a washout. It's 5 hours Toronto to Vancouver and 4.5 hours the other way because of tail winds.
In any case, I don't think anyone has ever seriously suggested HSR for the train out west. VIA has simply embraced that it will always be slow and impractical, and they market and price it accordingly— it's supposed to be an experience, like going on a cruise, not a practical means of getting to a destination.
In Europe passengers trains have priority over freight trains of which there are very little anyway. Freight mostly goes by road while trains are mostly used to transport passengers. It is very different from how the network is used in North America.
However, according to statistics i found, rail freight in the EU is at 17% for 2019[0], while in the US it's at 9%[1] for 2017.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
https://www.bts.gov/topics/freight-transportation/freight-sh...
And those are on twinned, dedicated passenger tracks where you never have to wait on a siding for a freight train to go by in the other direction, like you do with the Toronto -> Vancouver train that takes multiple days end to end.
Anyway, they keep studying HSR for the route, so much so that a prominent Canadian comedian made a joke video about it almost a decade ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W32klYkTxCQ
But it's definitely a chicken and egg thing; it'll never gain significant market share under current conditions, but no politician can justify the money required to properly build HSR with current ridership numbers. But of course billions [1] for a new toll highway directly through protected greenbelt farmland (Hwy 413)? Ram it all through! Will it lose money and eventually be sold off to a foreign interest for pennies on the dollar similar to how Hwy 407 was twenty years ago? Probably!
[1]: Even without accounting for a likely sell-off, the gov't of Ontario has been super cagey about the planned costs of 413: https://www.thestar.com/business/2021/10/08/the-hugely-contr...