The Port of Vancouver is Canada's largest port, a federally owned gateway in British Columbia whose terminals are spread along Burrard Inlet, the Fraser River and Roberts Bank on the Strait of Georgia. In 2022 it handled about 141 million metric revenue tons of cargo and 3.5 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) of containers, making it the fourth-largest port in North America by tonnage. The first terminal of the old Port of Vancouver, Ballantyne Pier, opened in 1923, and the present port dates from 2008, when three separate harbour authorities merged into the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority. It matters as Canada's main gateway to the Pacific Rim, moving grain, coal, cars and containers between Canada and more than 170 trading economies.
141 Million Tonnes in 2022: How Three Ports Became One
The headline tonnage is the sum of three ports that used to compete with one another. The old Port of Vancouver, responsible for 233 km of coastline from Vancouver to the United States border, handled 79.4 million tonnes in 2005/06, along with 2,677 foreign vessels. The Fraser River Port Authority, founded in 1913 as the New Westminster Harbour Commission, handled 36 million tonnes in 2007 and, thanks to its car terminals, was the largest auto port in Canada. The North Fraser Port Authority, the smallest, moved nearly 18 million tonnes in 2004, mostly logs and wood fibre, along the river's north arm.
The split caused visible waste. In 2006 the local press found that the newly expanded Fraser Surrey Docks were sitting idle after their main customer, CP Ships, moved its business to the Vancouver side, which was already close to capacity. Transport Canada allowed the three authorities to study a merger that June, and a certificate of amalgamation took effect on 1 January 2008, creating Port Metro Vancouver. The name "Port of Vancouver" returned on 6 April 2016. By 2022 the combined port was handling 141 million tonnes and receiving 2,834 foreign vessel calls a year.
16,000 Hectares of Water and 350 Kilometres of Shoreline
The Vancouver Fraser Port Authority is responsible for about 16,000 hectares of water and 1,000 hectares of land, along roughly 350 km of shoreline stretching from Burrard Inlet up the Fraser River and south to the United States border. Within that area are 27 major marine terminals and 57 berths, grouped by the port into five business lines: automobiles, breakbulk, bulk, containers and cruise.
The bulk side has the longest list of terminals. It includes grain terminals such as Alliance Grain, Cargill, G3 Terminal Vancouver, Pacific Elevators and Richardson International; Lantic's sugar terminal; chemical and fuel terminals including Chemtrade and Suncor's Burrard Products Terminal; and Westshore's coal terminal. The deepest berths offer a draught of about 18.4 m. In 2014 the port was 4th in the Americas by tonnage, 29th in the world for total cargo and 44th for container traffic. It enabled about $240 billion of trade and sustained 115,300 jobs, $7 billion in wages and $11.9 billion of GDP across Canada.
3.5 Million TEU: Centerm, Vanterm, Fraser Surrey and Deltaport
Container traffic, 3.5 million TEU in 2022, runs through four terminals. Two of them, Centerm and Vanterm, sit on Burrard Inlet inside the City of Vancouver itself. Fraser Surrey Docks handles containers and breakbulk on the Fraser River. The largest, Deltaport, is not in Vancouver at all but at Roberts Bank in Delta, at the end of a long causeway over a shallow bank in the Strait of Georgia.
Roberts Bank opened in 1970 as a 20-hectare pod of reclaimed land for coal, served by the Roberts Bank Rail Corridor, which now carries CN, CP and BNSF trains. It was expanded in 1983 and 1984, and in June 1997 the GCT Deltaport container terminal opened beside the coal berths. In January 2010 Deltaport added a third berth and doubled its capacity, and the reclaimed site is now about four times its original size. A further programme of road and rail upgrades inside the terminal was designed to add another 600,000 TEU of capacity without enlarging its footprint.
Up to 29 Million Tonnes: Westshore, North America's Busiest Coal Export Terminal
The other half of Roberts Bank is Westshore Terminals, the busiest single coal export terminal in North America and the site's first tenant in 1970. It typically ships more than 20 million tonnes of coal a year, and a $49 million equipment upgrade completed early in 2010 raised its capacity from 24 million to 29 million tonnes. Part of that coal is metallurgical coal from mines in the interior of British Columbia, some operated by Teck Resources. Part comes from the Powder River Basin in the United States, because West Coast communities in the US have rejected new coal export terminals, which leaves Roberts Bank as the route for that coal to reach Asia. British Columbia's carbon tax applies to the embodied emissions of coal mined in the province but not to the American coal, a point environmental groups have criticised.
Its most serious accident came on 7 December 2012, when the bulk carrier Cape Apricot struck the causeway, destroying about 100 metres of the structure and its coal conveyor and spilling an estimated 30 tonnes of coal into the water. It was the first marine accident in the terminal's 42 years, and the damaged berth returned to service in February 2013.
11.5 Metres: Keeping the Fraser River Open to Deep-Sea Ships
On the Fraser River the key number is depth. Since 1999 the port authority, rather than the Canadian Coast Guard, has dredged the deep-sea channel of the river's South Arm, working the final 36 km (22 miles) between Sand Heads at the river mouth and New Westminster each year from mid-June to the end of February. As of 2014 the work cost about CAD$15 million a year, of which about CAD$10 million came back through sales of the dredged sand to cement makers.
The payoff is a channel that takes ships up to 294 m long, 38 m in beam and 11.5 m in draught with the help of the tide, under a maximum air draught of 53 m. That draught has risen in steps: 8.7 m until 1976, then 10.7 m, then 11.5 m from 2003. The same channel serves the river's two car terminals, Annacis Auto Terminals and Richmond Auto Terminal, which sit on the islands and flats described in our guide to the Fraser River delta.
400 Metres Wide: The First Narrows and the Lions Gate Bridge
Every ship bound for the inner harbour must pass through the First Narrows, a strait about 400 m (1,300 ft) wide between Prospect Point in Stanley Park and the sandbanks off the Capilano River mouth. Above it hangs the Lions Gate Bridge, opened in 1938, with a main span of 473 m and 61 m (200 ft) of clearance for shipping. Inside, Burrard Inlet widens to about 3 km between the First and Second Narrows, the busiest part of the port, then narrows again to 350 m at the Second Narrows. Freighters waiting to load or discharge often anchor outside in English Bay, on the far side of Stanley Park and the downtown peninsula.
Oil is a growing share of the inlet's traffic. The Trans Mountain pipeline has carried crude from Edmonton to the Vancouver area since 1953, and its expansion to Burnaby on Burrard Inlet, which began operating on 1 May 2024 after costs rose above C$34 billion, raised capacity from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels a day. Stand.earth, an environmental group, estimated the project meant a seven-fold increase in tanker traffic in the inlet.
810,090 Passengers: Canada Place and the Alaska Cruise Season
The port also counts people. In 2022 it handled 810,090 cruise passengers on 307 sailings, mostly through Canada Place, the sail-roofed terminal built on the Canadian Pacific Railway's Pier B–C of 1927. It served as the Canada Pavilion at Expo 86, gained another cruise berth in 2001 and is the starting point for cruises to Alaska. In 2005/06 the old port recorded 910,172 cruise passengers, when Ballantyne Pier still shared the traffic; that pier stopped cruise operations at the end of 2014.
2.4 Million TEU More: Roberts Bank Terminal 2
The port expected container traffic to triple by 2030, and its answer is Roberts Bank Terminal 2, a new container terminal at Roberts Bank designed to add about 2.4 million TEU of capacity a year. It has been opposed by environmental groups and First Nations, who point to its effects on orcas, salmon and the Western sandpiper, a migrating shorebird that gets roughly half of its food on the journey from a biofilm on the Roberts Bank mudflats. A 2020 environmental assessment report concluded that the expansion would have numerous adverse effects. The federal government approved the project in early 2023, with Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault calling it "justified under the circumstances", and on 10 January 2025 the Federal Court dismissed a claim that the approval breached the Species at Risk Act.
For the land and water around the terminals, see our guide to the Fraser River and our survey of Canada's geography. For comparison, the busiest container port in the United States handled about 10.3 million TEU in 2024, as our history of the Port of Los Angeles explains.