Canada’s Ventures to Value Chains: Transportation is part of a Foresight initiative leveraging data from technology companies and other key stakeholders to map, categorize, and analyze strategically important industry value chains for Canada in the clean economy.
Challenges and Opportunities in Decarbonizing Canada's Transportation Sector
Canada’s transportation sector is a critical and dynamic component of the economy, facilitating the daily movement of passengers across the country and enabling the flow of goods to and from international markets. In economic terms, the transportation and warehousing sector directly contributed 4% to Canada’s GDP in 2023, equivalent to $88.5B. It’s also a major contributor to climate change, accounting for 22% of the country’s total emissions. The importance of the transportation sector as an economic driver, its significance to national emissions, and the vulnerabilities it faces, such as recent labour disputes and extreme weather that have caused significant disruption, have highlighted vulnerabilities in Canada’s transportation sector, underscoring the need for a more resilient transportation system.
Mapping technology innovators in the transportation sector can help to shape a strategy for increasing resilience and sustainability by highlighting where Canadian companies are driving progress and seizing growth opportunities. This edition of Foresight’s Ventures to Value Chains (V2VC) initiative aims to provide insights to our Helix-5™ partners on areas of strength for Canada, as well as opportunities for growth, by leveraging data we have collected on Canada’s transportation technology companies.
With this report, Foresight aims to add to this existing body of knowledge by focusing on the current ecosystem of transportation technology innovation, research, and development. The report identifies regional and topical clusters of companies and potential innovation trends while referencing existing research to provide additional context. Although these findings reflect only a snapshot of the current technology ecosystem, this installment of Foresight’s V2VC initiative aims to contribute to the evolving dialogue on innovation in transportation and provide insights on possible areas where Canada can build on its strengths and potential opportunities for growth.
This report is available for download. Submit this form for access.
The Value Chain
The value chain begins with procuring and extracting raw materials and ends with consumers through two distinct pathways. It outlines a series of value chain (VC) steps, as well as the inputs and outputs at each stage. The two pathways are:
- Movement of Goods: This section highlights how goods are transported using sustainable methods, incorporating logistics and warehousing as key processing steps.
- Manufacturing of Zero-Emission Vehicles: This covers the production of vehicles across all sectors (road, rail, marine, and air), including the production of transportation fuels up to the end user.
Canada’s Transportation Technology Companies
157 companies are assigned to Canada’s transportation value chain.
- The top two VC steps with the highest number of companies assigned are charging and refuelling (46) and electric vehicles (39).
- A significant number of companies focused on fleet optimization were assigned to logistics (25).
Our data and analysis indicate and discuss trends and clustering, areas of strength, and potential opportunities for growth. Some of the key takeaways include:
- Ontario (52), British Columbia (40), and Quebec (37) are the most represented provinces.
- British Columbia is strongest in hydrogen-powered transportation.
- The VC step of charging and refuelling is the most well-represented across Canada.
- Ontario has the highest total number of companies in electric vehicles (15), charging and refuelling (17), and logistics (11).
- AI is playing an increasingly influential role in the logistics sector, enhancing efficiency across supply chain management, route optimization, and predictive maintenance.
- Canada has a significant opportunity to scale its electric vehicle manufacturing sector. While only 40,000 EVs have been built in Canada to date, far below initial expectations, there is strong potential for growth.
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Why is this important?
Foresight’s venture acceleration programming emphasizes the importance of understanding your value chain.
Knowing where a company fits along the value chain, which companies or technologies come before or after it, who the competitors are, and where trends are happening geographically is critical information for ventures, industries, and investors to understand.
This information is also highly important for governments to identify areas of strength, gaps, and opportunities in the innovation landscape, pinpoint areas for targeted support and where targeted R&D and project funding will deliver the greatest return on investment for Canada’s communities and environment.
The Canada’s Ventures to Value Chains: Transportation Technology web map and analysis report are invaluable tools intended to provide the Helix-5™ ecosystem with unique insights into the landscape of Canadian innovation in this space.
Interested in learning more about Canada’s transportation value chain? Download the full report below.
