Recalls and investigations

Car Recalls in Canada: What the Record Shows

Transport Canada runs its own recall programme with its own campaign numbers and its own unit counts. Almost nobody publishes it.

2 min read · 61 figures, all from the federal record · rebuilt 3 weeks ago

Transport Canada has issued 17,953 vehicle recall campaigns since 1975. They are published as open data and almost nobody puts them next to the American ones, which is a problem if you drive in Canada: the campaigns do not always match, and the unit counts are for Canada alone.

17,953

Recall campaigns

129,569,706

Vehicles affected

Cumulative, counted once per campaign

114,803

Model-year records

10 Sep 2026

Most recent

What Canada recalls

Other 12,804 12.6%

Brakes 11,613 11.5%

Electrical 10,746 10.6%

Accessories 9,504 9.4%

Structure 7,805 7.7%

Fuel System 7,401 7.3%

Seats And Restraints 6,290 6.2%

Steering 6,258 6.2%

Lights And Instruments 6,209 6.1%

Engine 5,332 5.3%

Airbag 4,668 4.6%

Powertrain 4,414 4.4%

Suspension 4,355 4.3%

Label 3,922 3.9%

Recall records by system, as Transport Canada classifies them.

By manufacturer

Make	Campaigns	Vehicles affected in Canada
FORD	1,343	23,313,802
CHEVROLET	929	19,579,440
DODGE	580	11,252,851
GMC	562	9,700,405
MERCEDES-BENZ	477	1,409,669
BMW	449	2,206,714
FREIGHTLINER	376	417,788
HONDA	363	9,811,157
JEEP	336	4,993,529
MACK	334	147,277
PONTIAC	332	10,848,288
NISSAN	330	3,839,918
BUICK	326	7,418,490
INTERNATIONAL	315	339,827
TOYOTA	314	9,219,020
VOLVO	312	688,864
LINCOLN	288	8,527,434
VOLKSWAGEN	284	3,804,721
CHRYSLER	280	8,560,669
HYUNDAI	271	7,844,131

Source — Transport Canada Vehicle Recalls Database, published monthly as open data.

How this was made. Nobody wrote this article and left it to age. It is generated by a query against the complaint database, and rebuilt every time the data is — so the numbers in the sentences above are the numbers as they stand today, not as they stood when somebody last had time to update them. How the grading works.