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How to Find Loads in Canada: A Carrier's Guide

2026-07-26 · 8 min read

Most new carriers in Canada start on a load board, stay on it, and never build anything else. That works until rates soften. This guide covers the four places freight actually comes from, and roughly when each one starts to matter.

1. Load boards

Load boards are the fastest way to move a truck that is sitting. They are also the most competitive channel, because every other carrier sees the same posting at the same moment.

What they are good for: filling an empty backhaul, covering a lane you do not normally run, and getting started before you have any broker relationships.

What they are bad for: margin. A posting visible to a thousand carriers gets priced like a commodity. If your business plan depends on board freight alone, you are competing purely on who will haul it cheapest.

The practical approach is to treat the board as a gap-filler rather than a pipeline. Cover your committed lanes with relationships, and use the board for the empty legs in between.

2. Freight brokers

A broker sits between the shipper and you, takes a margin, and handles the paperwork. Once you have run a few clean loads for the same broker, you start getting called before the freight ever hits a public board — which is where the better rates live.

Building this is unglamorous:

Check credit before hauling. A broker with a good rate and 90-day payment habits is a worse deal than a lower rate that pays in 30. Ask for references, and check the broker's bond and days-to-pay.

3. Direct shippers

Direct freight pays the most because there is no intermediary margin. It is also the hardest to win: shippers want capacity guarantees, insurance certificates, and often EDI or portal integration before they will hand you a lane.

This becomes realistic somewhere around five to ten trucks, or earlier if you specialise — a reefer operator who knows a specific produce lane cold can win direct business well before a general dry-van fleet can.

4. Partner carriers

Other carriers have freight they cannot cover: a truck breaks down, a driver calls in, a lane goes over capacity during a seasonal peak. Carriers who know and trust each other pass this work around constantly, and it never touches a board.

This costs nothing but reputation, and it is the most underused channel for small fleets.

Backhaul is where the money is lost

A load that pays well outbound and leaves you 600 km from anything is not a good load. The number that matters is what the round trip earns per kilometre, including the empty running.

Before booking, ask:

Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver reload quickly. Freight into Atlantic Canada or the northern prairies often does not, and the rate needs to reflect that before you accept it.

Know your cost per kilometre first

None of this means anything without knowing your own break-even. A rate is only good relative to what the trip costs you to run — fuel, driver pay, maintenance reserve, insurance, licensing and the fixed overhead the truck has to carry.

If you are tracking that in spreadsheets, it drifts out of date fast. Carriers running more than a couple of trucks generally move it into a trucking management system so that cost per kilometre, settlements and IFTA come off the same load data rather than being re-keyed. TruckerPro publishes a detailed breakdown of Canadian driver pay models if you are working out what the driver side of that number should be.

A reasonable starting sequence

  1. Month 1–3. Board freight, almost entirely. Learn which lanes reload and which strand you. Track every trip's real cost.
  2. Month 3–12. Identify the three or four brokers who pay fairly and move freight you can actually run. Get on their call list.
  3. Year 2+. Use the board for gaps only. Start conversations with shippers on the lanes you already run consistently.

The goal is not to leave load boards behind — even large fleets use them. It is to stop depending on them for your base freight.

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