Port capacity and global shipping connectivity

Canada's ports move less of the world's shipping capacity than they used to, and less than almost every other major trading nation. Bank of Canada analysis of satellite vessel-tracking data finds Canada's global rank for total ship capacity (deadweight tonnage) moving through its ports fell from 6th in 2016 to 23rd in 2023 — one of only two G7-scale economies, alongside the United States, where that capacity shrank at all while every other G7 peer's grew.

Ottawa's goal of doubling exports to non-US markets by 2035 depends on moving more freight by water — already the largest mode, by value, for Canada's non-US trade. That makes the physical capacity of Canadian ports a binding constraint on trade policy, not a side issue. Bank of Canada researchers tracked ship movements via satellite data from 2016 to 2023 and measured two things directly tied to capacity: how much cargo-carrying capacity (deadweight tonnage) moves through Canadian ports, and how centrally connected those ports are to the rest of the global shipping network. Both point the same way.

Only two G7 economies lost port capacity — Canada fell furthest

The Bank of Canada classifies each of the world's 20 highest-capacity trading countries as having gained or lost total ship capacity through its ports between 2016 and 2023. Canada and the United States are the only G7 economies in the "decreased" column; France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom all increased. Exact rank figures are published only for Canada and the US — the source data does not give a comparable magnitude for the other five, so the table below reports direction, not size, for those countries.

Canada's total port capacity shrank by more than a quarter

Deadweight tonnage — a vessel's total carrying capacity — is a measure of theoretical capacity, not the cargo actually moved or the share of that capacity used. On this measure, the total capacity of ships departing or arriving at Canadian ports fell by 28% in seven years. The Bank of Canada's satellite vessel-tracking analysis was built around exactly two snapshot years — 2016 and 2023 — not an annual series, so the chart below shows precisely the two data points the underlying research measured, joined by a line, rather than an interpolated year-by-year trend.

Every major Canadian port lost network centrality

Degree centrality measures how many distinct shipping destinations a port connects to directly, weighted by traffic — a proxy for how central a hub is to global trade, distinct from raw cargo volume. Canada's five most-connected ports all lost centrality between 2016 and 2023, several by more than three-quarters. As above, these are the only two years the Bank of Canada analyzed; the slope of each line shows the size of the drop, not a smooth multi-year path.

How much spare capacity is left at Canadian ports today

The national-level capacity decline does not fall evenly across Canada's ports. Comparing 2025 container throughput against each port's own rated capacity gives a rougher, Canada-only picture of where headroom actually sits.

Prince Rupert and Montreal both have genuine room to grow before hitting rated capacity, and both have expansions underway (Fairview's 2022 upgrade to 1.6M TEU; Montreal's Contrecœur project, adding 1.15M TEU/year). Vancouver — the port handling 42% of Canada's container shipments — looks to already be running at or past its nominal capacity, with its own expansion (Roberts Bank Terminal 2, +2.4M TEU/year) not expected to be operational until the mid-2030s.

Findings

Sources & methodology