Public data project
Live index · Aug 10, 2026 · monthly reading on the 10thShop metal →
The CSSP Tracker
Ottawa is spending $100 million to cut the cost of moving Canadian steel between provinces. We sell steel for a living, and every tagged piece in our warehouse carries its origin and its cost. This page tracks whether any of that money shows up in what Canadian steel actually costs, log by log, and we show our work. One thing to know up front: any passthrough takes months to walk from mills to distributors to us, so early flat readings are expected, not a verdict.
Three origins, one warehouse, one question
Every log in our building says where its steel was melted and what it cost us landed. The rebate path exists only for Canadian-origin metal, so we index each origin separately and watch whether they diverge.
Canadian index minus imports (US and overseas combined). It sat near -3.0 in late May and closed to zero by launch: Canadian steel lost a 3-point cost edge before the program existed. Rebased at launch, so day one read 0.00; if the rebate reaches our costs, it goes negative from here. Expect months, not weeks: producers price the saving to distributors first, then it lands on us, then on you.
Our landed cost, origin by origin
Carbon steel cost per item, indexed to program launch (Aug 10, 2026 = 100). Dashed: the ten weeks before the program, from our pricing system's daily cost records, sole-origin products only. Solid: log-exact tracking from the daily warehouse report. A new reading lands on the 10th of each month.
Where the money enters, and where it can leak out
The rebate lands on one specific freight bill in the middle of the supply chain. Between that bill and your invoice sit two or three handoffs, and the discount has to survive every one of them.
The mill
Canadian-origin steel starts here, mostly Ontario and Quebec. Mill certs prove where it was melted; they're the program's admission ticket.
Q: does the mill price move at all, or is freight someone else's problem by contract?
The rail or marine leg
Whoever pays this freight bill gets 50% back from Transport Canada. Rail carload and marine breakbulk only. Trucking, which moves most retail metal, gets nothing.
Q: who's named on the freight bill, and how fast do they claim?
The distributor
Master distributors rail tonnage into Atlantic branches. Their landed cost drops the day they claim.
Q: first handoff. Does the saving show up in their delivered price, or stay in the margin?
The retail counter
That's us, in Dartmouth NS. This page measures our landed cost daily, log by log. If it drops, our shelf prices follow our pricing rules down. We're asking every steel supplier we buy from, in writing.
Q: second handoff. Same question, one step closer to you.
You
A builder, a machinist, a farm shop, a weekend project. The last stop, and the one the program was sold on.
Q: nobody was checking whether the discount survives the trip. That's this page.
The honest ceiling. A full passthrough is worth up to about 5% at retail on covered carbon. That's the direct freight math (rail on Atlantic-bound carbon runs $75-100 a tonne, industry ranges, not quotes; half back is $38-50 on steel landing at $1,800-2,500 delivered) plus the competition a cheaper Canadian tonne should spark across every lane. Anything bigger is noise from somewhere else; a flat zero for months is an answer too. And the sharper test is the race, not the level: this program exists to make Canadian steel the better buy, so the Canadian line should fall against US and overseas metal in the same warehouse. The gap below zero, and staying there, is what success looks like.
The supplier passthrough scoreboard
We're putting one question to every steel supplier we buy from: will your delivered prices reflect the rebate. Aggregate answers only. We don't name suppliers, and a committed tile only counts once new pricing is actually on paper.
First asks go out with the program's first week. The fund is first come, first served, so every week a supplier sits on the claim is money someone else's supply chain collects.
What mill prices were doing before day one
Retail prices move for a hundred reasons that have nothing to do with freight. Statistics Canada's mill-gate index, rebased to the month the freight promise was made: steel is up 4.8% since, non-ferrous metals are up 16.2% (as of June 2026; StatCan publishes about six weeks behind). That churn is exactly why we don't read raw price levels. We read the gap between two baskets that live in the same store and face the same weather.
What the CSSP is, no seasoning
- Program
- Commodities Sectoral Support Program (CSSP), Transport Canada
- Launched
- Aug 10, 2026
- The promise behind it
- Federal package of Nov 26, 2025: halve interprovincial freight rates for steel and lumber
- Fund
- $100M total, first come, first served, $50M cap per recipient
- Rebate
- 50% of eligible rail carload or marine breakbulk freight, actual cost after discounts
- Who can claim
- Any shipper that arranges transport and pays the freight: producer, intermediary, or end user. No minimum volume
- Eligible
- Canadian-origin steel with mill certs, moving between provinces or territories
- Not eligible
- Trucking, imports, moves within one province, anything shipped before Aug 10, 2026
- Ends
- Summer 2027, or when the fund runs dry, whichever comes first
- Payment
- Portal-only claims, paid within 20 business days of approval, auditable
The questions this page answers
Does the rebate reach buyers?
The gap answers this. Negative gap: yes, some of it. A flat gap while the fund drains: it stopped somewhere upstream. Either way, you'll see it here first, with the method attached.
Who captures it upstream?
Mills, railways, and distributors touch the money before any counter does. The scoreboard plus the gap narrows down which handoff eats the discount, if one does.
What happens when the fund runs out?
First come, first served funds can go fast. If prices never moved by exhaustion, that's a finding. If they drop and snap back after, that's one too. We publish the final reading either way.
We're glad to see Ottawa invest in Canadian industry, ours included, and we don't do parties. This page asks one question: who benefits. We publish what real costs do and let you decide what it means.
From promise to proof
The promise
Ottawa commits to halving interprovincial freight rates for steel and lumber.
Cost history begins
Our pricing system starts recording daily costs, later attributed by origin at the log level.
CSSP opens
50% rebate, rail and marine only. Baseline frozen: 7,685 origin-tagged carbon logs, every origin at 100.00.
TC webinars
Transport Canada walks shippers through claims. We'll be in the room.
Reading No. 2
First month of data. The earliest a passthrough signal could show.
Readings
Every 10th: fresh pull, updated gap, scoreboard changes, notes.
Program ends
Or earlier, if $100M runs out first. Final reading and a plain-language verdict.
How the index is built
Anyone quoting this page should be able to check it. Here's the whole method; the indexed series is downloadable below.
The unit is a log
Every tagged piece in our warehouse is a log: its own origin, mill, heat number, weight, and landed cost. The same product can be Canadian one week and Turkish the next, so we index logs, not catalog items.
Two ways of reading cost
The shelf index tracks what the steel on our floor cost us, updated daily. The fresh-buy reading tracks what suppliers just charged us for newly arrived logs, published monthly. A passthrough shows up in fresh buys first, then drifts into the shelf.
The origin split
At launch: 3,752 Canadian logs, 672 United States, 3,261 overseas. Another 1,134 logs (9% by weight) arrived with no recorded origin: excluded from the index, counted in public, and getting fixed at receiving.
The history splice
Before Aug 10, 2026 the lines come from our pricing system's daily cost records, restricted to products whose logs were all one origin at launch. From Aug 10 the tracking is log-exact from the daily warehouse report. The chart draws the history dashed and marks the splice.
The math
Per item, cost today against cost at launch, combined as a weighted geometric mean with weights frozen at launch. Same family of methods national statistics agencies use for elementary aggregates. A change in what we stock can't fake a move; only a change in what things cost can.
What stays private, and the limits
We publish index values, never dollar costs: our costs beside our public retail prices would hand over our margins, and this page exists to test a policy. Limits, stated plainly: one wholesaler-retailer, Atlantic Canada, our suppliers' invoices. Evidence, not a national statistic.
| Origin | Items | Logs on hand | Weight | Pre-launch history |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canadian origin | 405 | 3,752 | 229,198 lb | 149 sole-origin items joined |
| United States | 182 | 672 | 39,847 lb | 38 items (thin sample, disclosed) |
| Overseas | 521 | 3,261 | 209,319 lb | 241 items joined |
| Missing origin (excluded) | 197 | 1,134 | 42,947 lb | not indexed; fixing at receiving |
Questions people actually ask about this rebate
Who actually gets the CSSP rebate money?
Whoever pays the eligible freight bill. The program text says a shipper can be a producer, an intermediary, or an end user, with no minimum volume. In practice the first claimants are mills and the big distributors who rail steel between provinces, because they're the ones named on rail invoices. Trucking is excluded, which rules out nearly every retail delivery in the country, including ours.
Will the rebate lower prices for small shops and hobbyists?
Only if it survives the handoffs. The money enters on a freight bill two or three steps upstream from a retail counter, and each step chooses whether to pass it along. Best case, a full passthrough is worth up to about 5% on covered carbon steel. The clearer signal is relative: Canadian falling against US and overseas metal in the same warehouse. That's the gap this page checks daily. Give it months: the saving has to walk from producers to distributors before it can reach any counter.
Why is a metal retailer tracking this?
Because we had the data and nobody else was checking. We publish prices on 1,600 plus cut-to-length products every day, we buy Canadian steel, and we sit at the exact end of the chain the program was sold on. Full disclosure: a working rebate lowers our costs too. That's why the method and the raw numbers are public, so you don't have to take our word for anything.
Is $100 million big enough to matter?
Against the country's total steel freight bill, it's modest, and the $50M per-recipient cap means two large claimants could in theory drain the whole fund. But it's big enough to be measurable: on the lanes it covers, it's up to about a 5% retail effect if it fully passes through. Measurable is what this page cares about.
Doesn't excluding trucking leave some regions behind?
It creates an asymmetry, and we live on the sharp end of it. Rail-served volume players get their costs cut; replenishment that arrives by truck gets nothing directly. Regions fed mostly by road, like much of Atlantic Canada, only benefit if rail-fed distributors pass the saving through. That asymmetry is precisely what the gap and the scoreboard are built to expose.
Why track United States origin separately?
Because it carries its own policy weight. The US tariff wall and Canada's counter-measures were moving steel costs on both sides of the border before this rebate existed, and US-origin metal in our warehouse wears those effects directly. Folded into one import line, two different stories would smear together; split out, you can watch tariff effects and rebate effects separately. In the ten weeks before launch, our US-origin costs rose 3.4% against 2.0% for overseas metal, on an admittedly thin tracked sample of 38 items.
What happens when the fund runs out?
The program ends in summer 2027 or at exhaustion, whichever comes first, and there's no retroactivity. If the gap never moved by then, the $100M stopped upstream and we'll say so with thirteen months of data attached. If it moved, we'll show when, and by how much.
Cite it, chart it, check it
The indexed series for all three origins, the gap, the coverage stats, and the method ship as open files under CC BY 4.0. Index values only; the method explains why our dollar costs stay private. If you're writing about the CSSP, this is the only origin-split cost series we know of in Canada. Use it.
Media and researchers: sales@metalsrus.ca. We answer the same business day.