Port of Vancouver and Prince Rupert: Canada’s Pacific Gateway Under Strain

Canada’s answer to American tariffs runs through two ports on the British Columbia coast, and both are already close to full. The Port of Vancouver is the largest port in Canada and the most diversified in North America, with 29 terminals handling roughly C$305 billion of goods a year; the Port of Prince Rupert, 750 kilometres to the north, is the closest North American port to Asia by sailing time and the deepest natural harbour on the continent. Together with Nanaimo they handled C$409 billion of trade and more than 200 million tonnes of cargo in 2025, supporting 150,000 jobs. This article explains how the two ports work, what the 2025 and 2026 numbers show, why the labour disputes of 2023 and 2024 matter, where Roberts Bank Terminal 2 stands, how DP World and GCT compete for the container business, and whether the Pacific gateway can carry the weight of Ottawa’s export diversification strategy. It is part of the Canadian Company Stories hub.

Why do two BC ports carry so much of Canada’s trade?

Because geography and railways put them there. Vancouver sits at the Pacific end of both national railways, CN and CPKC, with the Fraser River delta providing flat land for bulk and container terminals and Burrard Inlet a sheltered deep-water harbour. Prince Rupert, built as the terminus of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway in 1914, is a day and a half closer to Shanghai than Los Angeles is and sits at the end of CN’s northern mainline with no urban congestion. Between them they are the only practical route for Prairie grain, Alberta crude and BC coal and potash to reach Asian buyers, and for Asian consumer goods to reach Canadian shelves.

The Port of Vancouver’s own figures put its economic footprint at 115,300 jobs, C$7 billion in wages and C$11.9 billion in GDP, with trade reaching 140 to 170 countries a year. It handles roughly one in three dollars of Canada’s goods trade outside North America, and Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon said in July 2026 that it accounts for about 40% of goods trade beyond the continent. Prince Rupert is smaller but growing faster: 26.3 million tonnes in 2025, up 14%, C$8.1 billion of Canadian exports, 7,940 full-time jobs and C$1.5 billion of GDP, making it the third-largest port in Canada.

The two are governed by federal port authorities, the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority under chief executive Peter Xotta and the Prince Rupert Port Authority under Kurt Slocombe, who succeeded Shaun Stevenson in 2026, with former CN chief executive Jean-Jacques Ruest appointed chair from 1 July 2026. The port authorities own the land and set strategy; private operators such as DP World and GCT run the terminals; and the railways profiled in the CN and CPKC story carry the cargo inland.

What did the 2025 record year look like?

The Port of Vancouver handled 170.4 million tonnes in 2025, nearly 8% above the previous record set in 2024, and 3.8 million TEUs across its four container terminals, 9% above 2024 and 3% above the 2021 peak, according to the port authority’s statistics released in March 2026. Auto imports reached almost 480,000 units, a record; nearly every Asian-built vehicle sold in Canada arrives through Vancouver. Containerised imports also set a record, a reflection of Canadian consumer demand that held up better than many expected during the tariff year.

The first half of 2026 extended the run: 88.1 million tonnes, up 3%, a record for the period. Crude oil exports rose 3% to a mid-year record of 12 million tonnes, with about 80% going to Indo-Pacific buyers led by China and South Korea and the US share falling from roughly a third to a fifth, the direct result of the Trans Mountain expansion’s Westridge terminal. Bulk grain exports rose 14% to a record 17.4 million tonnes on canola seed, specialty crops and barley, and containerised grain rose by more than a fifth to 2.0 million tonnes across nearly 40 markets. Containers reached 1.90 million TEUs, up 1%, with exports up 4% and imports up 2%, still 2% below the 2021 half-year record. Xotta described containerised trade as showing the same strength and resilience as the Canadian economy despite an uncertain geopolitical environment.

Prince Rupert’s 2025 growth of 14% to 26.3 million tonnes was driven by the Fairview container terminal, Trigon’s bulk terminal and the Ridley Island complex, and the port’s 2026 momentum came from new facilities rather than volume on existing ones. The combined West Coast ports study released on 26 August 2026 put the three BC ports’ trade at C$409 billion, or C$1.1 billion a day.

How did the 2023 strike and 2024 lockout disrupt the gateway?

The 2023 strike was the longest stoppage in the ports’ modern history. More than 7,400 members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Canada walked out on 1 July 2023 after their contract with the BC Maritime Employers Association expired in March, with wages, automation and contracting-out the core issues. Some 30 terminals and sites in Vancouver and Prince Rupert stopped for 13 days. Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters estimated the cost at about C$500 million a day, business groups put total trade disrupted at roughly C$9 billion and some 63,000 containers were waiting to be unloaded by mid-July. A tentative deal on 13 July collapsed when the union caucus rejected it, a renewed strike on 18 July was ruled unlawful by the Canada Industrial Relations Board for lack of 72 hours’ notice, and members finally ratified an agreement on 4 August with 74% support.

Sixteen months later the ports stopped again. On 4 November 2024 the BCMEA locked out roughly 730 members of ILWU Local 514, the ship-and-dock foremen, after a dispute over automation and scheduling; the Port of Montreal was simultaneously shut by a lockout of its own longshore workers. On 12 November, Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon used Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code to direct the CIRB to impose binding arbitration and end both stoppages, the same instrument he had used to end the August 2024 rail lockout. Operations resumed within days; the unions contested the referral in court.

The pattern matters because it is now priced in. Shippers who route through Vancouver have learned to hold inventory, and some Asian carriers divert to Seattle and Tacoma at the first sign of a strike vote. Ottawa has shown it will intervene within days, but the instrument it uses is under judicial challenge and resented by the unions, and the ILWU’s longshore contract with the BCMEA runs only to 2027. The same Section 107 mechanism and its limits were tested in aviation in August 2025, as the Air Canada and WestJet story describes.

Where does Roberts Bank Terminal 2 stand?

Approved but not yet built, more than a decade after it was proposed. RBT2 is the port authority’s plan for a three-berth container terminal on a new man-made island next to the existing Deltaport and Westshore terminals at Roberts Bank in Delta, adding 2.4 million TEUs of capacity, roughly 15% of Canada’s projected national total. A federal review panel in 2020 found the project would have numerous adverse environmental effects, particularly on western sandpipers that feed on mudflat biofilm, on Chinook salmon and on the southern resident orcas; Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault accepted those findings but issued a decision statement on 20 April 2023 that the project was justified in the circumstances. An environmental coalition challenged the approval and lost in Federal Court on 10 January 2025 on the Species at Risk Act question.

The commercial logic has strengthened since. Vancouver’s container terminals handled 3.8 million TEUs in 2025 against a nominal capacity that is being stretched by DP World’s Centerm expansion and GCT’s Deltaport improvements, and the port authority argues that without RBT2 Canada will be short of West Coast capacity by the early 2030s. MacKinnon’s July 2026 referral to the Major Projects Office came with a claim that the terminal would unlock more than C$100 billion in annual trade capacity and add more than C$3 billion to GDP a year, and Xotta has called it a nation-building project Canada needs in the current geopolitical climate.

The timeline remains long. A preferred construction partner for the landmass and wharf has been selected, construction mobilisation and early works are planned for late 2027, and terminal operations are projected for the mid-2030s. The cost has been reported at about C$3 billion for the landmass alone, with the terminal operator expected to fund the superstructure. The Major Projects Office process, which could lead to a national-interest designation under the Building Canada Act, is described in the companion story on the Canada Infrastructure Bank and MPO.

How do DP World and GCT divide the container business?

Between them they operate all of Canada’s West Coast container capacity, and they are rivals in Vancouver and partners in nothing. GCT Global Container Terminals, owned by a consortium led by Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and other institutional investors, runs Deltaport at Roberts Bank, the largest terminal in Canada, and Vanterm in Burrard Inlet. DP World, the Dubai-owned global operator, runs Centerm in Burrard Inlet, Fraser Surrey Docks on the river, Nanaimo’s Duke Point and, since buying it from Maher Terminals in 2015, the Fairview terminal at Prince Rupert.

DP World’s Centerm expansion is the biggest recent addition to capacity. Completed in stages over roughly a decade at a cost of about C$600 million, it extended the berth by 75 metres, expanded on-dock rail, automated the truck gates and introduced remote semi-automated equipment, lifting capacity 65% from 900,000 to 1.5 million TEUs on a footprint only 15% larger. A KPMG report commissioned by the BCMEA and published in October 2026 found that Centerm’s payroll hours rose 59% between 2019 and 2025 despite the automation, and that the West Coast port workforce grew 71% between 2009 and 2025 to 8,700, with C$377 million invested in training; the employers used the report to argue that modernisation and jobs can grow together, an argument the ILWU disputes. DP World Canada chief executive Doug Smith has positioned the terminal as the reliable capacity Canada needs for diversification.

GCT, for its part, proposed its own Deltaport berth four expansion as an alternative to RBT2 and fought the port authority over the plan for years before the federal approval settled the question in the authority’s favour. The competition between a terminal operator and its landlord is one of the reasons RBT2 took so long. At Prince Rupert, DP World’s Fairview terminal has capacity of about 1.8 million TEUs after successive expansions, with a phase 2B that could take it towards 2 million, and the port’s wider C$3 billion Gateway expansion programme is building out the Ridley Island side of the harbour. Pension-fund ownership of port infrastructure, through Teachers’ at GCT and others, is part of the pattern described in the Maple Eight story.

What is Prince Rupert building, and why does CANXPORT matter?

Prince Rupert is building the pieces of a bulk-and-container export complex on Ridley Island that will let it grow without waiting for RBT2. The centrepiece opened on 28 August 2026: CANXPORT, a C$750 million export logistics hub operated by Montreal-based Ray-Mont Logistics and served exclusively by CN, which has expanded the Zanardi Rapids rail bridge to feed it. The facility transloads bulk commodities arriving by rail, grain, pulses, lumber, plastics and potash, into containers that would otherwise return to Asia empty, with initial capacity of 400,000 TEUs a year and potential for 750,000. It was financed with a C$150 million loan from the Canada Infrastructure Bank, the bank’s first port investment, nearly C$50 million from Transport Canada’s National Trade Corridors Fund and C$25 million from British Columbia, and it was built by a joint venture of the Metlakatla First Nation, the Lax Kw’alaams Band, the Gitxaała Nation and IDL Projects. Dow Canada, which is building a net-zero ethylene complex in Alberta, was among the customers endorsing it.

Next to it, AltaGas and Royal Vopak have taken a final investment decision on the C$1.35 billion Ridley Energy Export Facility, the largest investment in the port’s history, to export liquefied petroleum gas and other bulk liquids to Asia. A LinX transload and logistics park operated by IntermodeX, an SSA Marine enterprise, is due in the first quarter of 2027. The port authority describes CANXPORT as the first of a C$3 billion series of Gateway expansion projects, and the Indigenous construction and drayage partnerships, including the Metlakatla and Lax Kw’alaams majority ownership of Gat Leedm Logistics, the port’s main trucking provider, are the model Ottawa now wants replicated elsewhere.

The strategic point is that Prince Rupert’s growth is export-led, whereas Vancouver’s container business is import-led. Canada’s container trade has long been unbalanced, with far more loaded boxes arriving from Asia than leaving, and shipping lines charge accordingly. Filling the backhaul with Canadian commodities improves the economics of every vessel call and is the most direct way the ports can contribute to Ottawa’s target of doubling non-US exports by 2035. The LNG side of the same diversification story is told in the LNG Canada article.

Can the gateway carry Canada’s trade diversification?

Only partly, and only with investment that will not be complete before the early 2030s. The strategy Ottawa has adopted since 2025 is explicit: MacKinnon’s July 2026 statement that Canada wants to double trade with 169 of its 170 trading partners, Carney’s repeated goal of doubling non-US exports within a decade, and the Indo-Pacific framing of nearly every port announcement. The 2026 crude numbers show it can work when the infrastructure exists: the Trans Mountain expansion moved the US share of Vancouver’s crude exports from a third to a fifth in a single year.

Containers are harder. Vancouver’s 2025 record of 3.8 million TEUs sits uncomfortably close to practical capacity, Centerm’s expansion is the last large increment until RBT2, and RBT2 will not take a box until the mid-2030s. Prince Rupert’s Fairview terminal has headroom but depends on a single rail corridor. In the interim, growth in Asian trade will have to come from better utilisation, from the transload model, and from accepting that some Canadian cargo will route through American ports.

The political economy adds a further constraint. Every expansion at Roberts Bank, from RBT2 to the Pacific Link tanker terminal, faces opposition from coastal First Nations and environmental groups concerned about the Fraser estuary and orca habitat, and the Building Canada Act’s fast-track powers will be tested in court. The broader diversification agenda, including the CETA and CPTPP trade agreements that the ports are meant to serve, is covered in the export diversification story.

What can founders and investors learn from the Pacific gateway?

The first lesson is that infrastructure lead times are measured in decades, not budget cycles. RBT2 was proposed in the early 2010s, approved in 2023, referred for fast-tracking in 2026 and will operate in the mid-2030s. Any business plan that assumes Canadian West Coast container capacity will expand to meet demand before then is wrong, and the pricing of terminal slots and rail capacity will reflect that scarcity.

The second is that the transload model, embodied by CANXPORT, is the kind of capital-light innovation that can relieve a bottleneck faster than a new terminal. Filling empty backhaul containers with bulk commodities does not require dredging or environmental review, it uses existing berths and ships, and it improves the economics of every vessel call. Founders in logistics should look for the equivalent asymmetry in their own markets.

The third concerns labour. The 2023 strike and 2024 lockout demonstrated that federal intervention is now expected within days, but the KPMG and BCMEA campaign of 2026 to show that automation and employment can grow together is a sign that the employers know the next contract round will be fought over technology. Investors in port and terminal assets should model both the stoppage risk and the cost of the eventual automation settlement.

The fourth is that Indigenous partnership is becoming the precondition for building on the coast. CANXPORT was built by three First Nations and their joint-venture partner, the port’s drayage is majority Indigenous-owned, and the Pacific Link structure reserves a 10% equity stake. Projects that arrive without such partners will not be fast-tracked. The companion story on the Major Projects Office explains the loan-guarantee machinery, and the rest of the Canadian Company Stories hub follows how the energy, mining and manufacturing exporters who depend on these ports are adapting. For the aircraft side of Canadian transport infrastructure, see the companion piece on Bombardier.

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