Transportation and warehousing

Mainline freight in Canada is two companies and is not a market to enter; passenger rail is a Crown corporation and commuter agencies. The only enterable thing in this code is a short line — a branch the Class I no longer wanted, bought or leased with its handful of shippers. The 277 establishments show the shape: 15 with 500 or more employees, and 78 with one to four [A], with Saskatchewan's 37 largely the farmer-owned grain branches. The attraction is real: a captive traffic base and an infrastructure asset that nobody will build a second time. The cut is what the asset demands. Track, bridges and locomotives must be maintained whether or not the cars come, and a branch was shed precisely because its traffic density did not cover that. CN spends on the order of C$3 billion a year on its capital program against C$17.3B of revenue to hold a 61.9% operating ratio [A]; a short line carries the same physics at a fraction of the density, with its revenue set as a division of a through rate the connecting Class I controls. Where short lines work as an investment, they work as a portfolio: Genesee & Wyoming's 120 railroads went to Brookfield and GIC for about $8.4B including debt [A] — infrastructure-fund capital, spreading single-shipper risk across a continent. One line, one owner, three shippers is the same capital without the diversification. The rail operations software sold here is screened separately.

Deep-sea shipping is priced on global freight indices and flagged offshore; nobody enters it from a Canadian start. What is reachable is domestic: cabotage law reserves Canadian coastal and Great Lakes trades for Canadian-flagged vessels unless none is available, so the competition is a short list, and cargoes — grain, ore, salt, aggregates, fuel — move under multi-year contracts. British Columbia (64) and Newfoundland (24) hold a large share of the 192 establishments [A], which is the tug-and-barge and coastal-ferry end. The cut is the hull. Algoma Central, the listed Great Lakes operator, earned C$761M of revenue and C$231M of EBITDA in 2025 [A] — a good business — and to keep it took delivery of five newbuilds in the year with twelve more under construction [A]. That is the steady state: a fleet is always being replaced, each unit is a purpose-built ship ordered years ahead, and the protected trade that makes the revenue dependable also means a vessel built for it has no second market if the contract is lost. Contracts are awarded to the carrier that already has the tonnage; an entrant must commit to the ship to bid for the cargo. Ferries in this code are mostly Crown or provincially contracted routes and are a buyer rather than a market. A small coastal tug, water-taxi or landing-craft service is genuinely startable, but that is a boat-and-skipper livelihood and was not sized here. Maritime software is screened separately.

Inland water transport is a real industry where there is a river system to carry it. Kirby, the largest US inland tank-barge operator, ran 1,105 barges in 2025 and earned $374.5M of operating income on $1,935M of marine revenue, a 19.3% margin [A] — four-fifths of it on the Mississippi and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, a year-round network with petrochemical plants on its banks. Canada has no such network. The St. Lawrence–Great Lakes system is classified with coastal shipping, not here. What remains is 103 establishments, 55 of them in British Columbia and 65 with fewer than ten employees [A]: Fraser River towing and log work, harbour ferries and water taxis, lake and river tour boats, seasonal northern resupply. The one inland freight system of any length, the Mackenzie, makes the point. Its long-time commercial operator, Northern Transportation Company, failed, and in December 2016 the Government of the Northwest Territories bought the assets for C$7.5M [A] explicitly to keep fuel moving to communities with no other option. A lifeline route that the private market could not sustain and the state now runs is not an opening. The harbour and river niches are startable with one vessel and a Transport Canada certificate, and some are decent livelihoods — but each is a single waterway with a short season and a fixed number of customers, and none was found that scales past its own shoreline. Maritime software is screened separately.

The freight cycle is where this screen dies. TFI International — the Canadian consolidator, and the best-run comparable available — saw revenue fall to $7.88B from $8.4B in 2025, with less-than-truckload down 12% and logistics down 13%, and net income down to $310.6M from $422.5M. A single-truck operator entering that market carries a truck payment against spot rates set in the same downturn, with fuel, insurance and a driver shortage that is really a wage problem. The fleet software at 4841 is screened separately.

The trailer is the business, and it is priced. Flatbed, temperature-controlled and oversize freight pay better than dry van because the equipment and the permits are harder, which is also why entry costs more. TFI bought Daseke for $1.1B including debt in a deal covering 4,900 tractors and 11,000 flatbed and specialised trailers [B] — about $224,000 of enterprise value per truck [derived], which is the number a would-be fleet is bidding against. On the temperature-controlled side Marten turned $883.7M of 2025 operating revenue, down from $963.7M, with net income down by a third [A], and about 59% of truckload and dedicated revenue from temperature-sensitive freight [B]. The acquirer's own numbers say what the trailer is now earning: TFI's Truckload segment took US$2,733.4M before fuel surcharge in 2025 and US$220.1M of operating income — 8.1% of revenue, down from 9.9% [A]. Both are asset businesses with cyclical rates, and the cycle is going the wrong way. The single-truck version of this is genuinely enterable and is screened separately at 484121 — this record is about the fleet, and the fleet is bought rather than built.

Urban transit is a buyer, not a market to enter. Routes, fares and service levels are set by a municipality or a regional authority, and the 183 establishments are mostly those agencies and their operating arms: 99 of them employ 100 people or more [A], the opposite of an owner-operator industry. The economics explain why nobody competes for the rider. Canadian agencies collected C$4.0B of operating revenue in 2025 on 1.55 billion trips, still 82.2% of 2019 ridership [A], and the Canadian Urban Transit Association reports that operating revenue covered only 35% of operating cost in 2023, down from 51% in 2019 [C]. A service that recovers a third of its cost from customers exists by appropriation, and only a government can run it. The enterable proposition is the contract underneath: some systems — York Region, many smaller municipalities, most paratransit — tender operations to private operators for a fixed fee per service hour. That is a real business, and it is held by a few multinational contractors who bid with a depot, a trained workforce, a bonding line and a safety record on comparable systems. The tender's qualification criteria are the barrier: an entrant without prior transit operating history does not reach the pricing round, and the winner's margin is whatever the agency's cost model allows over a multi-year term. What is sold to transit more accessibly — scheduling and paratransit software, screened separately at 485, and specialised transport at 4859 — is where a new firm should look.

The opening looks obvious. Greyhound Canada shut every remaining route in May 2021 [B], Ontario deregulated intercity bus the same year, and only 63 establishments are left in the whole country [A]. A coach, a carrier licence and a ticketing site are enough to run a scheduled corridor. The cut is what the only continental network earned. When FirstGroup sold Greyhound Lines in October 2021 it disclosed $422.6M of revenue and $1.8M of adjusted operating profit for the prior year, took $172M in cash, and had to keep $320M of pension, self-insurance and lease liabilities to get the deal done [A]; the buyer's own release put the enterprise value at about $46M plus $32M deferred [A]. A pandemic year flatters nothing, but Greyhound had been retreating from Canada since 2018. The mechanism is the passenger: the intercity bus rider is the traveller without a car, choosing on price against a rideshare post, a discounted rail fare or not travelling. Fares cannot rise to cover a half-empty coach, and rural segments — the ones left unserved — are half-empty by construction; British Columbia and others now subsidise those directly. The dense corridors that do cover their cost are where the returning scale operator and the established regionals already run. An entrant gets the routes nobody wants at fares nobody can raise. Unlike School Bus Contracting (4854), there is no tender here guaranteeing the revenue. Transit scheduling software is screened separately.

Two platforms set the price of a ride and own the demand, so a fleet owner is a supplier of vehicles and drivers into someone else's marketplace. Where taxi licences remain capped, they have usually lost most of their value to exactly that shift. What is left is fleet leasing to drivers — a financing business with vehicle depreciation and insurance risk attached, not a transport one.

Routes are awarded by school boards on multi-year tenders, and the incumbent has the yard, the drivers and the buses already depreciated. Driver shortage is the binding constraint on every operator, which means winning a tender you cannot staff is worse than losing it. The routing software at 611110 is screened separately.

The pre-screen called this a real owner-operator path, and the screen agrees more than it disagrees. Charter is small-company work: 95 of Canada's 154 establishments have fewer than twenty employees [A], and the American Bus Association's census found 88.8% of North American motorcoach companies run fewer than 25 coaches, with 192 Canadian carriers operating 2,838 [C]. Scale confers little. Coach USA, with 2,250 vehicles and 2,700 employees, filed Chapter 11 in June 2024 saying demand remained well below pre-pandemic levels, and was sold off in pieces [A]. A careful local operator is not at a disadvantage to a giant. The cut is the ratio of fixed asset to usable days. A highway coach is financed, insured and certified twelve months a year, and charter demand — school trips, tours, teams, conventions — arrives in a season and is quoted job by job with no term. The census shows what the last cycle did to the fleet: carriers fell from 1,873 to 1,566 between 2020 and 2022 while coaches fell only a tenth, and miles per coach doubled from 21,945 to 44,519 as travel came back to a thinner set of operators [C]. When demand drops the payment does not, and there is no contract to carry the operator through. This is not a clean kill. The exception is year-round contract work — industrial crew transport in Alberta and British Columbia, employee shuttles — where the coach is paid for by a term agreement and charter fills the gaps. A full study would test one depot's catchment for that base load before anything else. Transit scheduling software is screened separately.

A residual code, screened through its two reachable niches: special-needs and non-emergency medical transport, and airport or hotel shuttles. The rest was not examined. (School bus contracting is its own record at 4854, despite the pre-screen note.) Entry is genuinely easy — a converted van, a commercial policy, a municipal licence — and the counts show it: 217 of 451 Canadian establishments have one to four employees [A], and the US industry is 5,996 establishments averaging about fourteen people on roughly $36,700 of payroll per head [A]. Demand is ageing-driven and not going away. The cut is that the operator never sells to the passenger. Trips are assigned by an intermediary that holds the payer's contract — in Canada the transit agency's paratransit programme or a health authority; in the US a Medicaid broker. Modivcare, the largest broker, shows how much of the money reaches the fleet and on what terms: on $1,957M of NEMT revenue in 2024, up 0.3%, it paid $1,505M to transport providers and kept an 11.7% gross margin, down from 12.4% [A] — and still filed Chapter 11 in August 2025 [A]. The payer squeezes the broker, the broker squeezes the per-trip rate, and the van owner at the end of the chain has no say in volume, routing or price and can be replaced by the next van. Airport shuttle, the other niche, lost its shared-ride customer to ride-hailing, the same shift the Taxi, Limousine & Rideshare Fleet record (4853) describes. Paratransit scheduling software is screened separately.

A crude line is the best business in the oil patch once it exists: shippers sign long contracts, the toll is approved rather than negotiated, and the barrels have nowhere else to go. Enbridge's Liquids Pipelines segment earned $9,710M of adjusted EBITDA in 2025 on a Mainline that averaged 3.1 million barrels a day and was apportioned for nine months of the year — demand exceeded the pipe [A]. That is the attraction, and it is also the trap. The only new Canadian export line built in a generation, the Trans Mountain expansion, saw its cost estimate rise from $21.4B to $34.2B, and the Parliamentary Budget Officer values the finished asset at $29.6B to $33.4B depending on whether contracts renew [A]. A completed, full, tolled pipeline is worth less than it cost to build, and the owner that absorbed the difference was the federal treasury. Meanwhile the incumbent adds capacity by optimising steel already in the ground: Enbridge sanctioned 150,000 barrels a day of new Mainline capacity for US$1.4B [A], a cost per barrel no greenfield route can approach. The 38 Canadian establishments are not a fragmented field — six employ more than 500 people and the small ones are field offices and feeder systems tied to the same few owners. Regulation is a second wall, but it is not the binding one: a fully permitted line still has to be financed against an incumbent whose next barrel of capacity is nearly free. The measurement and accounting software sold to these operators is screened separately at 486.