Other support activities for transportation

A residual, and the pre-screen was right that freight brokerage and forwarding do not live here — they are at 4885. What Statistics Canada does list under this code is an odd set: driving services for auto and truck delivery, packing and crating of goods for transport, livestock feeding stations for animals in transit, and independently operated pipeline terminals [A]. These share nothing but a filing category, so the screen looks at the two a person could actually start. Packing and crating — building export crates and preparing machinery or artwork for shipment — needs a shop, lumber and a few skilled hands, and sells to manufacturers and movers by the job. Driving services sell a licensed driver's time to a carrier or a dealer who owns the vehicle. Both are reachable within weeks, which is the problem: nothing is sunk, nothing is licensed beyond the individual's own credentials, and the customer can replace the supplier with an employee. The business counts carry a signal of their own. Canada has 1,208 establishments, 874 of them with one to four employees and 608 in Ontario, against only 2,290 in the whole United States, where the average establishment has about twelve staff [A]. A Canadian count more than half the American one, made almost entirely of micro-firms and concentrated in one province, looks less like an industry than like drivers incorporating themselves — a reading this screen could not confirm. Either way the entrant would be selling labour by the hour with no asset to defend it. The livestock, pipeline-terminal and remaining activities were not examined.