The Industry
Canada’s Economy Moves by Truck
About 26,000 registered trucking companies in BC move the essential ingredients of our lives 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. No other transportation mode (rail, marine, or air) can match trucking’s flexible, time-sensitive, door-to-door service.
In Canada, trucks transported over 64 million shipments in 2015, carrying 731 million tonnes of cargo. [1]
Altogether, they travelled over 39 billion kilometres in 2015.
Trucking’s Contribution to GDP in BC
Trucking plays an important role in the provincial economy, both as a business in its own right and as a business that serves others.
According to Statistics Canada [2], truck transportation was a $2.3 billion industry in BC in 2016 (and that’s just for-hire trucking, not private trucks carrying goods for their own companies).
Between 2007 and 2016, trucking grew by 30%, at an average rate of about 3.0% per year. The growth rate of all BC industries combined was an average of 2.1% per year.
Truck transportation represented 1.05% of BC’s GDP in 2015, more than that of forestry/logging and coal mining.
[1] Statistics Canada. Table 379-0030 - Gross domestic product (GDP) at basic prices, by North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), provinces and territories, annual (dollars x 1,000,000), CANSIM (database; accessed: 2017-07-16)
[2] Statistics Canada. Table 403-0004 - Trucking commodity origin and destination survey (TCOD), trucking industry, annual (number unless otherwise noted), CANSIM (database; accessed: 2017-07-12)