TSB Canada's 2025 Numbers: Fatalities Hit a 10-Year Low, But Fishing Vessels Are Still the Single Highest-Risk Category

The Headline Numbers

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada's 2025 marine transportation statistical summary recorded 990 total occurrences – 257 accidents and 733 incidents. Fatalities fell to 6, a 50% drop from 12 in 2024 and well below the 10-year average of 15 per year. Serious injuries rose to 45, up from 38 the year before. Shipping accidents (218, 85% of the total) were dominated by collisions (62, 28%), groundings (55, 25%), and fire/explosion (41, 19%). Total accidents themselves rose year-over-year, from 213 in 2024 to 257 in 2025 – a genuinely mixed picture: fewer deaths, but more accidents overall.

Fishing Vessels: The Number That Should Get the Most Attention

Fishing vessels were involved in 31% of all shipping accidents in 2025 – the highest share of any vessel category, ahead of solid cargo vessels at 23%. This tracks with the prior year's data too: in 2024, fishing vessels made up 26% of vessels in shipping accidents but 48% of accidents aboard ship specifically, and 11 of the 18 vessels lost that year were fishing vessels. TSB's Watchlist keeps Commercial Fishing Safety as an active, ongoing issue for exactly this reason – 27 fishing-related occurrences investigated between 2010 and 2025, with 55 recommendations issued to date, and TSB's own language is blunt: recurring unsafe conditions and inconsistent regional enforcement remain root causes it says the industry has not resolved.

What's Driving the Incident Numbers

Of the incident category (as distinct from accidents), 82% involved total failure of a machinery or technical system – a reminder that most of what TSB tracks day-to-day is mechanical reliability, not dramatic casualty events. That matters for how a crew reads “incident” statistics: the bulk of the volume is equipment failure, and equipment failure is where maintenance discipline and pre-departure checks have the most leverage.

Why Fewer Deaths Doesn't Mean Less Risk

A 10-year-low fatality count alongside a rise in total accidents is worth reading carefully rather than taking as unambiguous good news. It can reflect genuinely better emergency response and survival outcomes – which is real progress – without reflecting a reduction in how often things go wrong in the first place. For fishing vessel crew specifically, the message from this year's numbers is the same one TSB has been repeating across its Watchlist cycle: the accident rate in this sector hasn't meaningfully improved, and the vessels most exposed to it are usually the smallest ones with the least regulatory margin for error.

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Related Reading

• Silver Condor – a real 2025-published TSB fishing vessel investigation behind this week's featured incident
• Svanoy – a real TSB investigation into a pleasure craft/ferry collision covered the same week