Trade Diversification Ambitions Face a Container Port Reality
Alberta recently submitted its West Coast pipeline proposal to Ottawa’s Major Projects Office, a major plank in the federal government’s goal to double exports to non-US markets by 2035.
For that to succeed, more of Canada’s exports will need to move by water, already the largest mode for non-U.S. trade by value. And container shipping is part of that.
So how do Canada’s container ports stack up?
The short answer: Not well. Rectifying that would help Canada meet its trade-diversification goals.
Roads were Canada’s dominant export mode over the 12 months ending in May, carrying 37 percent of export value. But those roads cross just one border. Strip out the United States and the picture flips entirely. Water carries 54 percent; air carries 41 percent. Road falls to 3 percent. Put differently, the infrastructure we’ll need to reach the 2035 target looks almost nothing like today’s.
What is the Container Port Performance Index?
The Container Port Performance Index (CPPI), produced by the World Bank, is a global scorecard for container shipping efficiency. Canada’s performance should raise alarm bells.
The Index tracks total time a container ship spends under a port’s control, from the moment it arrives in the harbour to the moment it leaves the berth. Rather than grading ports on a traditional scale of zero to 100, the index uses a statistical baseline centred on the global average and adjusts for the size of a vessel and its cargo volume. A negative score means a port is operating below that benchmark. It simply means that for the same job, a ship sits idle longer than at an average gateway anywhere else.
The Port of Vancouver, which handles fully 42 percent of Canada’s container shipments, ranks 375th out of 400 ports worldwide in the newly released 2025 ranking, with a score of minus 92. That’s actually an improvement on minus 159 in 2024: a dismal 389th. Vancouver was among the 20 most-improved ports in the world year over year. But even after climbing 67 points, a hole this deep still leaves you in the hole.
Vancouver’s CPPI score has been negative in five of the last six years, including a catastrophic collapse to minus 394 and 395 scores in 2021 and 2022, which also coincided with a historic BC flood that severed rail lines into the port for more than a week, layered on top of a pandemic-era demand surge hitting ports worldwide. Even so, strip those two years out and Vancouver’s score still never turns positive again.
Vancouver is part of a broader Canadian pattern. Prince Rupert ranks 322nd, despite handling a meaningful share of Canada’s transpacific container trade, and its year-to-year swings are significant: from minus 10 in 2020 to minus 248 in 2022 to minus 54 in 2024. Montreal sits at 338th. Saint John is slightly better at 268th.
The one major exception is Halifax, which has become a genuine success story: 29th in the world in the latest data, up from a middling performance just a few years ago, and 55th last year. Three of Canada’s busiest ports still rank in the bottom fifth of the world. Halifax proved it doesn’t have to be that way.
The World Bank isn’t the only one flagging this.
A recent Bank of Canada analysis of satellite vessel-tracking data found that Canada’s rank for total ship capacity moving through its ports fell from sixth in the world in 2016 to 23rd by 2023, a steeper drop than almost any other major trading nation. Part of the reason: the newest ultra-large container ships carry more than 20,000 containers while the largest vessels Canadian ports can handle top out around 15,000. As a result, some cargo bound for Canada comes through a US port.
Infrastructure isn’t the whole story. Labour issues also lengthen the time ships spend in Canadian ports, and addressing them matters just as much as modernizing the infrastructure itself.
After Nutrien decided to build its new billion-dollar potash export terminal in the United States rather than in Canada, Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon, made an unusually blunt admission for a sitting minister about his own file: Canada’s transportation policy and supply chain management need to be the best in the world given the country’s geography, and right now they aren’t.
Nutrien’s decision came even after the 2025 federal budget had already been tabled. That budget dedicated $5 billion, or 4 percent, of its $115-billion infrastructure plan to bolster Canada’s trade and transport infrastructure. Whether allocating more to such infrastructure would generate a bigger bang for the buck is a fair question.
Carney’s Ambitions
The PM’s ambitions depend on a clear-eyed read of where Canada’s port performance actually stands. The pattern holds across almost every major Canadian port, year after year, even as Ottawa doubles down on trade diversification. Halifax shows that the climb from a lower tier is possible. Until the rest of Canada’s ports make it too, the 2035 target will likely stay out of reach.
For the Silo, Charles Lammam -senior adviser at the C.D. Howe Institute.
