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On 28 May 1980, 22 workers on a Canadian Pacific Railway steel crew were killed in a bus accident on the Trans-Canada Highway near Webb, Saskatchewan, west of Regina. It was one of the deadliest motor vehicle disasters in Canadian history.

There have been many tragic events in Canada’s aviation history. Some of these have involved Canadian aircraft, commercial as well as non-commercial. In other cases, many Canadians have died in the crash of a non-Canadian aircraft. Crashes that occurred over Canadian soil, or search and rescue efforts in which Canadians have played a large part, are also part of this history.

The White Pass & Yukon Route railway was built to meet the demand for transportation to the gold fields of the Yukon River basin during the Klondike Gold Rush. Completed in 1900, it was a feat of engineering and one of the steepest railways in North America. It ran 177 km from Skagway, Alaska, to Whitehorse, Yukon. Today, tourist rail excursions run on a portion of the original line.

   Aviation, the art and science of flying, has been a practical reality since the early 20th century. Canadians have participated in its development almost from its inception.

Military aviation began with the use of balloons for observation as early as 1794, during the French Revolution.

An astronaut is an individual involved in flight beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. Since the Canadian Space Agency held its first recruitment campaign in 1983, 14 Canadians have completed astronaut training and nine have participated in 17 missions to space. Specifically, they have flown as payload specialists, mission specialists, and flight engineers on NASA shuttle flights and expeditions to the International Space Station (ISS). Canadian astronauts have played key roles in repairing satellites and building the ISS using the Canadarm and Canadarm2 robotic technologies, and have advanced scientific knowledge by conducting a variety of experiments in space.

The birchbark canoe was the principal means of water transportation for Indigenous peoples of the Eastern Woodlands, and later voyageurs, who used it extensively in the fur trade in Canada. Light and maneuverable, birchbark canoes were perfectly adapted to summer travel through the network of shallow streams, ponds, lakes and swift rivers of the Canadian Shield. As the fur trade declined in the 19th century, the canoe became more of a recreational vehicle. Though most canoes are no longer constructed of birchbark, its enduring historical legacy and its popularity as a pleasure craft have made it a Canadian cultural icon.

The Trans-Canada Highway is a continuous road that allows vehicle travel across Canada. The highway runs through each of Canada’s 10 provinces, from Victoria, British Columbia, to St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. At 7,821 km, it is the fourth-longest highway — and second-longest national highway — in the world.

Inuit and subarctic Indigenous peoples have traversed the North since time immemorial. Indigenous knowledge and modes of transportation helped early European explorers and traders travel and survive on these expanses. Later settlement depended to an extraordinary degree on the development of transportation systems. Today, the transportation connections of northern communities vary from place to place. While the most remote settlements are often only accessible by air, some have road, rail and marine connections. These are often tied to industrial projects such as mines.

A snowmobile is an automotive vehicle for travel on snow. It is steered by skis at the front and propelled by a belt of track at the back. Québécois mechanic Joseph-Armand Bombardier made the first snowmobile in 1935. Today, there are more than 600,000 registered snowmobiles in Canada. They are used for transportation, recreation, hunting and trapping, especially in rural areas and the North.

A dugout canoe was a common type of canoe, traditionally used by ​Indigenous peoples and early settlers wherever the size of tree growth made construction possible. The dugout canoe was most popular along the West Coast, where waters teeming with sea life—whales, seals,  sea lions, salmon,  halibut, herring, eulachon and shellfish—sustained a complex maritime culture. (See also Northwest Coast Indigenous Peoples in Canada.)

Canada's first highways were the rivers and lakes used by Indigenous peoples, travelling by canoe in summer and following the frozen waterways in winter. (See also Birchbark Canoe; Dugout Canoe.) The water network was so practical that explorers, settlers and soldiers followed the example of the Indigenous peoples. (See also Coureurs des bois; Voyageurs.) To a greater extent than most other countries, Canada depends for its social, economic and political life on efficient communication and transportation. (See also Economy; Politics.)

TC Energy Corporation (formerly TransCanada Corporation) is a natural gas, oil and power-generation company headquartered in Calgary, Alberta. TC Energy owns more than 92,600 km of natural gas pipeline in North America and transports more than 25 per cent of the gas consumed on the continent. It also operates power plants and gas storage facilities. A public company, it trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol TRP. In 2018, TC Energy registered $13.7 billion in revenue and $3.5 billion in profit and held $98.9 billion in assets. The company employs about 7,300 people, more than half of them in Canada.

Few inventions have left as profound a mark on the world as the automobile. The first automobiles built in Canada were regarded as novelties, but the Canadian automotive industry eventually expanded to become one of the country’s significant manufacturing and exporting sectors. Assembly-line production helped reduce the cost of automobiles and made it possible for more individuals to purchase them. The rise of the automobile has impacted travel and it has necessitated research and regulations into pollution, safety standards and sustainability (see Transportation; Traffic Law in Canada).

The Montreal metro opened on 14 October 1966. The second Canadian subway system after Toronto’s, which opened in 1954, the Montreal metro was the first subway in North America to run on rubber tires instead of metal wheels. Extensions to the Montreal metro were built on Montreal Island over the two decades after it opened, and then to the city of Laval, on the island of Île Jésus, during the 2000s. The system runs entirely underground, and each station has a distinct architecture and design. The Montreal metro consists of four lines running a total of 71 km and serving 68 stations. In 2018, its passengers made more than 383 million trips.

Pipelines are systems of connected pipes used to transport liquids and gases — namely oil and natural gas — across long distances from source to market. More than 840,000 km of pipelines criss-cross the country. They represent part of the oil and gas sector which directly and indirectly employs approximately 740,000 people. According to Natural Resources Canada, the sector earns the government an average of $20 billion in royalties, fees and taxes each year (see Natural Resources in Canada). It also contributes nearly 11 per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product.

Pipelines, however, have  been controversial in Canada. Pipelines help transport fossil fuels and research indicates  that  fossil fuel use,   is significantly contributing to climate change. In recent years, Indigenous groups, environmentalists, municipalities and labour unions have opposed numerous pipeline projects due to the risk of  contaminated local waterways from spills and leaks. (See also Environmental Movement in Canada).

The Canadair CL-28 Argus was a long-range maritime patrol plane built in Canada. When it entered service with the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) in 1957, it was the most advanced anti-submarine aircraft in the world. After unification of the Canadian Armed Forces in 1968, the CL-28 was re-designated as the CP-107. It was replaced in the early-1980s by the CP-140 Lockheed Aurora.