James Orr is the chief product and technology officer with Arizona-based ImportGenius. He lives and works in Burlington, Ont.
This essay is part of the Prosperity’s Path series. In a time of geopolitical instability and a shifting world order, the challenges facing Canada's economy have only gotten more visible, numerous and intense. This series brings solutions.
For more than five years, Canadians have been dealing with a brutal car-theft epidemic. Last year more than 47,000 vehicles were stolen, and insurance claims totalled more than $900-million.
What’s most galling is that these vehicles stolen from our homes are passing through our own sovereign ports, right under our noses. One of the first essays in this series notes that Canada is a global top-10 exporter of stolen cars.
Yet each one of those shipping containers has a manifest attached to it that includes the name and address of its exporter, consignee (importer) and carrier, as well as its weight, value, and a description of contents. No container is loaded onto a ship without this information, which the Canada Border Services Agency collects electronically and updates on a daily basis.
An OPP officer walks between two recovered stolen vehicles during a news conference announcing the seizure in Montreal, in April, 2024.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
As criminal enterprises go, car theft leaves behind a remarkably thorough digital “paper trail.” It may be a labyrinth of shell companies, but the containers, the transactions, and the people behind them are all traceable, and the information in those digital manifests can travel far faster than the container ships transporting the stolen goods.
Those manifest records are among the raw materials that law enforcement uses – or should be using – to break the country’s car-theft rings. In the United States, manifest-level shipping data is used to uncover human trafficking, counterfeit and contaminated goods, sanctions evasion, and all other manner of nefarious activity. There, the data is updated and publicly released daily, allowing anyone to do their own investigative work. And it’s often third-party organizations, such as NGOs that combat forced labour, who uncover the wrongdoing.
If that data were publicly released in Canada, it would allow media, insurers and others to investigate vehicle theft quickly and independently, which would both assist and pressure law enforcement to act. The fact that we keep it private is one of the reasons why Canada has become the stolen-car capital of the world.
It’s not just what’s leaving the country we ought to know about; it’s what’s coming in as well. A recent Globe investigation examined public manifest-level data from India to expose the magnitude and severity of the global trade in fentanyl precursor chemicals. But without corresponding Canadian data, it’s impossible to know what role Canada plays in this heinous global syndicate.
Better law enforcement is just one of the benefits that open manifest-level shipping data provide. Last November, Prime Minister Mark Carney set a goal of doubling Canada’s non-U.S. exports from $300-billion to $600-billion by 2035. As part of those efforts, the government is investing $5-billion in domestic trade corridors to ensure Canadian goods move more efficiently to and through Canadian ports.
But the investment will be for naught, and our exports will not grow as planned, if global buyers cannot easily find Canadian exporters. Open shipping data is a catalyst for increased international trade, and for improved business productivity and efficiency, which are all things that Canada desperately needs right now.
Shipping containers are stacked at the Port of Montreal, the largest port in Eastern Canada. In an effort to double Canada’s non-U.S. exports by 2035, the government is investing $5-billion in domestic trade corridors to ensure goods move more efficiently to and through Canadian ports.Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press
During the 18th and 19th centuries, in major port cities, it was common for local newspapers to publish the manifest summaries of arriving vessels, notifying importers that their ship had come in. Today the public release of manifest-level information lives on in dozens of countries around the world, but Canada chose a different path.
Beginning in 1918, responsibility for handling manifest data was delegated to the Dominion Bureau of Statistics, now known as Statistics Canada, which is forbidden by law from releasing information that could identify any person, business, or organization without consent.
Currently, the CBSA submits its daily data updates to Statscan, which then publishes the data monthly, on a one-month delay, in heavily aggregated form: no shipper or consignee names, no vessel or port-level breakdowns. It’s useful for identifying macroeconomic trends and little else.
With U.S. data, it’s easy to delve deep into port activity anywhere in the country. Pulling 2025 data for the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, Calif. – the United States’ largest hub for global trade – provides a detailed view of a roller coaster trade year buffeted by ever-changing, helter-skelter tariff policies.
A worker operates a crane at the Port of Los Angeles. In the U.S., detailed manifest data is collected and updated daily, allowing the ports’ shippers and freight-forwarders to benefit from full transparency.MIKE BLAKE/Reuters
For each of those daily volume counts, detailed data is available on exactly who was shipping what to whom. With U.S. data it was possible throughout 2025 to see which companies were stockpiling merchandise before tariffs took effect, and which importers switched to lower-tariff jurisdictions to source their goods.
Because U.S. data is updated daily, the ports’ shippers and freight-forwarders benefited from full transparency as traffic plummeted throughout the month of May then skyrocketed again in June, helping them better manage landings and ensure smooth intermodal transitions. Meanwhile in Canada, the most detailed data available on our busiest port, The Port of Vancouver, is nothing more than an aggregate TEU (a count of standardized containers) total for the month, provided by the port itself, of precious little practical use.
Ironically, you can glean more details about the Port of Vancouver’s business from U.S. data sets than Canadian ones: for any vessels that stop in Los Angeles (or Seattle, or any other U.S. port) on their way to Vancouver, the U.S. also publishes in-depth details for all freight remaining on board.
Canada’s secrecy with its trade data stifles competition while preventing Canadian exporters and importers from being discovered by the rest of the global economy. For instance, Canada exported a total of $402-million in wood pulp to Indonesia in 2025. The public data from Statscan breaks that number down into four different product categories and provides totals by province, with B.C. the leading exporter, followed by Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, Quebec and Alberta. That’s as detailed as it gets.
A container ship docked at the Port of Vancouver. Despite being Canada's largest and busiest port, there is very little detailed data available about its operations.Jennifer Gauthier/The Globe and Mail
But public trade data from Indonesia, which provides access to all 1,111 manifest records related to Canadian pulp shipments, tells the true tale of Canada’s exports. Where Statscan provides only four product categories, Indonesia provides multiple product subcategories, and identifies the specific pulp mills producing each one.
The Indonesian data also reveal exactly what Canadian pulp is used for: not just paper and packaging but also textiles (rayon) and construction materials (fibre cement board). It even reveals fascinating details about our domestic logistics industry, as landlocked prairie pulp mills make use of both East Coast and West Coast ports to ship their goods.
This kind of detailed information, when updated regularly and dependably, is incredibly useful to any economy. Shippers can discover new potential clients and bid on new routes. Pulp mills can see how their competitors are faring and take steps to expand product offerings and improve their operations. Canadian textile and construction-materials manufacturers can unearth new business opportunities. And they can discover all of these things in real time, on their own, without the use of trade consultants.
While Statscan provides headline-style aggregate data, shipment-level data reveals the commercial reality underneath: who makes it, who buys it, exactly what it is, what it’s used for, and how it gets there. One is a summary. The other is actionable intelligence.
The Port of Qingdao in China's Shandong province, is one of the world's busiest container ports. International trade and global supply-chain management is increasingly data-driven, with detailed manifest data at the heart of operations.AFP/Getty Images
This is how international trade and global supply-chain management operate today in most of the world. They are increasingly data-driven, with decisions made faster than ever based upon verifiable information from shipping manifests, beginning with its usefulness as a kind of “digital yellow pages” for a country’s exporters.
When a business anywhere around the world needs a new supplier of wood pulp (or machine parts, or canola seed, or anything else that Canada excels at making), they don’t wait for the next Team Canada Trade Mission to roll into town. They turn to trade data, expecting to discover, in a matter of minutes, detailed trading records of Canadian exporters and their product specialties.
But the only place they can find that information is deep in the manifest records of other countries’ trade data, because Canada refuses to publish it. By keeping our manifest-level shipping data private, Canada is shielding incumbents from competition at a time when open access to information is a far more potent business accelerant.
Making public the daily electronic manifest records that CBSA transmits to Statistics Canada could push Canada’s border security and its international trade into the information age.Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press
While the private-sector complacency hampers Canada’s economy, the unchecked criminal activity substantially undermines our reputation. Our lack of transparency on issues such as vehicle theft and the fentanyl trade is what leads other countries, particularly our American neighbours, to openly question the security of our border. And the honest truth is that the criticism is not entirely misguided.
In an era of trade wars and tariffs, hot wars and sanctions, and increased border enforcement everywhere, a country’s ports of entry and exit are a focal point for public transparency and the exercise of sovereignty. Shipping manifests should not be private information. They are a public good.
The solution isn’t merely simple; it’s wildly inexpensive, and would even generate new government revenue. Just take the daily electronic manifest records that CBSA already transmits to Statistics Canada and release them to the public. Dozens of data-service companies (including, full disclosure, the one I work for) would gladly pay a fee to receive those daily data dumps, process them into a coherent, searchable database, and sell it to subscribers.
Such a move would immediately vault Canada’s border security and its international trade into the information age. It would make Canadian businesses discoverable to the world, deter illicit trade through our ports, and spur fresh private-sector efforts to improve productivity and competitiveness. It has become axiomatic to say that “Canada is a trading nation.” It’s time we walked the talk and made our manifest-level data public.