The National Highway System () in Canada is a federal designation for a strategic transport network of highways and freeways. The system includes but is not limited to the Trans-Canada Highway, and currently consists of of roadway designated under one of three classes: Core Routes, Feeder Routes, or Northern and Remote Routes.
The Government of Canada maintains very little power or authority over the maintenance or expansion of the system beyond sharing part of the cost of economically significant projects within the network. Highways within the system are not given any special signage, except where they are part of a Trans-Canada Highway route.
The system was first designated in 1988 by the Federal/Provincial/Territorial Council of Ministers Responsible for Transportation and Highway Safety, a council consisting of the federal, provincial and territorial Ministers of Transport. A total of of highway were originally designated as part of the system. Highways selected for the system were existing primary routes that supported interprovincial and international trade and travel, by connecting major population or commercial centres with each other, with major border crossings on the CanadaâÂÂUnited States border, or with other transport hubs.
The system was further expanded in 2004, with the addition of approximately of highway that was not part of the original 1988 network. It was in this era that the current "core", "feeder" and "northern or remote" classes of route were established. In September 2006, the Council of Ministers Responsible for Transportation and Highway Safety approved a short set of Engineering Guidelines and Desired Objectives for the National Highway System (NHS). The document framed the NHS as critical corridors for CanadaâÂÂs economy and mobility, and states that new construction on NHS routes should aspire to nationally consistent objectives, while rehabilitation may use more local judgment for cost-effective reconstruction decisions.
The 2006 engineering guidance identifies desired objectives for geometric design and operations, including access control, minimum design speeds by terrain, and typical minimum cross-section dimensions (for example, a 3.7 m minimum lane width on two-lane roads, and minimum shoulder widths with paved portions). The document also references national and pan-Canadian design and traffic-control standards, including the Canadian Highway Bridge Design Code for bridge design and the Transportation Association of Canada (TAC) manual for signing, markings, and traffic control devices. Not all highways within the system are designated in their entirety, but may instead be part of the system over only part of their length; a few highways even have two or more discontinuous segments designated as part of the system. In some locations, the National Highway System may also incorporate city arterial streets to connect highway routes which are part of the system but do not directly interconnect, or to link the system to an important intermodal transport hub; such as a shipping port, a railway terminal, an airport or a ferry terminal; which is not directly on a provincial-class highway.
Routes within the system continue to be maintained, funded and signed as provincial, rather than federal, highways. The only exceptions are highways through national parks and a portion of the Alaska Highway, which are managed by Parks Canada and Public Works and Government Services Canada, respectively. The National Highway System has been criticized for lacking a truly comprehensive expansion plan. In many parts of the country, the system relies on two-lane highways, or expressways which are not fully up to international freeway standards; according to Lakehead University economics professor Livio di Matteo, many parts of the system, even on the main Trans-Canada Highway portion of the network, still leave "the nation's eastâÂÂwest flow of personal and commercial traffic subject to the whims of an errant moose".
American transportation planning academic Wendell Cox has also identified improvements to the system, so that Canada would have a comprehensive national freeway network comparable to the American Interstate Highway System, as an economically critical project for the country to undertake in the 21st century. Cox notes that many Canadians prefer to drive between Western Canada and Eastern Canada by travelling through the United States rather than on Canadian highways; even though the distance may be longer than the Trans-Canada Highway route, as it frequently takes a shorter amount of time due to the US Interstate system's higher speed limits, increased lane capacity, higher number of alternative routes, and reduced likelihood of being delayed by a road accident.
The NHS is a federal designation of existing provincial and territorial highways and connecting links, rather than a separate nationwide route-numbering program. In the 2005 review, the system was organized into three route categories; Core, Feeder, and Northern/Remote; based on agreed criteria and thresholds, while route numbering remained under the existing provincial and territorial highway systems.
Transport Canada summarizes the three-category structure as follows:
The 2006 NHS engineering guidance does not prescribe a unique NHS route marker. Instead, it directs jurisdictions to use national traffic-control device standards for signing and pavement marking (via the TAC Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Canada).
Where an NHS corridor is also part of the Trans-Canada Highway, jurisdictions may sign the route using Trans-Canada Highway markers in addition to provincial route markers. For example, OntarioâÂÂs traffic manual states that the Trans-Canada Highway route marker is installed beside provincial route markers when a provincial highway forms part of the Trans-Canada Highway route.
Routes within the system continue to be maintained, funded and signed as provincial, rather than federal, highways. However, the federal government provides some funding assistance for important maintenance and expansion projects on designated highways through cost sharing programs. For instance, several recent maintenance projects on National Highway System routes in Saskatchewan were partly funded under the federal government's Building Canada Fund: Major Infrastructure Component, while several four-laning projects in Ontario in the 2000s accessed federal funding under the Strategic Highway Infrastructure Program. There is no single, ongoing program for federal contributions to the National Highway System; rather, these contributions have been made through a variety of separate infrastructure investment programs of defined length and scope. Recent transportation planning proposals have identified public-private partnerships and dedicated fuel taxes as possible mechanisms for providing more stable funding, although no comprehensive program has been implemented to date. There is no NHS-wide toll policy; tolling decisions are made through the authorities responsible for the specific facility.
Following the 2005 review, the Task Force recommended a restructured NHS totaling 38,021 km (Core, Feeder, and Northern/Remote combined). It also reported that the proposed system represented 2.7% of CanadaâÂÂs highway network by length.
In the NHS Annual Report 2017 (published January 2019), the Council of Ministers reported a total NHS length of 38,098 km as of December 2017, and estimated that the NHS comprised about 3.7% of the length of CanadaâÂÂs public road network.
The 2017 annual report reported that in 2016 the NHS carried over 141 billion vehicle-kilometres of travel, including about 20 billion vehicle-kilometres of truck travel, and that total travel on the NHS increased 18% from 2005 to 2016.
The 2017 annual report reported over $43 billion invested in the NHS since 2006/07 (through 2017/18 reporting), and stated that there were 10,805 bridges on the NHS in 2017.
In its current form, the National Highway System includes routes in all Canadian provinces and territories except Nunavut, which has no conventional road connections to any other Canadian province or territory.
Officially the system maintains three classifications of road: Core, Feeder and Northern/Remote. Within the core and feeder classes, the system's official register made additional distinctions between conventional core or feeder routes and intermodal links or "anomalies", where a highway that does not meet the normal criteria for inclusion, or a municipal arterial road, has been adopted into the system to fill in a gap in the network. The "intermodal" and "anomaly" classes are not distinct designations, however, but simply represent an additional clarification of why the road holds "core" or "feeder" status. Since 2016, the "anomaly" category has been dropped and the road is simply included in the specific list. The tables below do not include "intermodal" municipal streets which connect major highways to intermodal facilities.
Note that some highways listed here may be designated as part of the National Highway System over only a portion of their total length, rather than over the whole highway. Termini listed below are those of a highway's NHS designation only, and may not necessarily always correspond to the termini of the highway as a whole. Transport Canada publishes a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction summary of NHS route lengths (Core, Feeder, and Northern/Remote) as of September 2005.
The system includes of highway in Alberta.
The system includes of highway in British Columbia.
The system includes of highway in Manitoba.
The system includes of highway in New Brunswick.
The system includes of highway in Newfoundland and Labrador.
The system includes of highway in the Northwest Territories.
The system includes of highway in Nova Scotia.
The system includes of highway in Ontario.
The system includes of highway in Prince Edward Island.
The system includes of highway in Quebec.
The system includes of highway in Saskatchewan.
The system includes of highway in Yukon.
Government reporting frames the NHS as a set of corridors and linkages that are vital to national mobility and to economic activity, including trade and travel between provinces and across major international border crossings.
The 2005 Task Force review argued that Canada depends heavily on highways for trade, commerce, and mobility, and described the highway system as the primary means of access to and from large regions of the country. The Task Force also noted that the growing connection between NHS designation and eligibility under federal infrastructure programs increased the importance of clarifying route eligibility criteria and thresholds.
The same review documented unresolved policy questions and differing viewpoints during system development, including whether and how to treat major corridors within large metropolitan areas, and how to define âÂÂperformance characteristicsâ and minimum service standards across a wide range of operating environments (from urban corridors to northern and remote routes).