A load goes missing overnight from a trailer parked in Burnside, or a driver shows up at a distribution centre to find someone already picked up the freight using his company’s name. Either way, the shipper wants to know who pays for it. In Nova Scotia, a standard commercial auto policy insures the truck and trailer, not what is loaded inside them. Cargo insurance, a separate policy that covers the freight itself while it is in a carrier’s care, is what actually responds to a stolen load, and truck and trailer theft is climbing fast enough this year that insurers are changing what they expect a carrier to prove before they will write it.

What Cargo Insurance Actually Covers

Cargo insurance, sometimes sold as motor truck cargo coverage, responds to loss or damage to freight while it is in a carrier’s care, custody and control. That includes a load stolen from a trailer, freight damaged in a rollover, or goods ruined because a reefer unit failed mid-route. It sits apart from commercial auto, which insures the truck itself, and apart from general liability, which responds when someone outside the business is hurt or their property is damaged. A carrier can hold all three policies and still find a gap if nobody has checked how they actually fit together. If trucking and transportation is your business, this is usually the coverage worth reviewing first.

Most cargo policies exclude a short list of things outright: damage from freight that was packed or secured badly, spoilage the goods were always going to suffer on a long enough haul, and losses tied to weather events beyond anyone’s control. Theft is the one that catches carriers off guard. According to a breakdown of standard cargo wording from Marsh Canada, many policies exclude theft or what is sometimes called mysterious disappearance, meaning freight that goes missing without a clear, provable cause, unless the carrier can show reasonable security measures were actually in place. An empty trailer and a shrug don’t usually cut it.

Cargo Theft Is Climbing Faster Than a Lot of Policies Assume

How Much Has Cargo Theft Actually Gone Up?

Équité Association, which runs Canada’s cargo theft database, recorded 984 truck thefts in the first three quarters of 2025, up from 591 over the same months in 2024. Trailer thefts rose from 383 to 638 over that stretch. Recovery is getting worse at the same time: the national cargo recovery rate fell from 13 percent in 2024 to 9 percent in 2025, and the trailer recovery rate dropped from 64 percent to 44 percent, according to data reported by Insurance Business Canada. Most of that activity concentrates around Ontario’s Peel Region and the Greater Toronto Area, but freight moving out of Halifax and through those same corridors is exposed to the same theft rings, and a cargo policy written before this shift may not match how insurers are pricing the risk now.

Fraudulent Pickups Are the Newer Version of This

What Is a Fraudulent Pickup?

A fraudulent, or fictitious, pickup is when criminals gather details about a legitimate load, including who is supposed to collect it and when, then show up first using forged paperwork or a truck marked to look like the real carrier’s. The freight is gone before the actual driver arrives, and it can take hours before anyone realizes the load left with the wrong company. Équité Association has named this one of the fastest-growing versions of cargo theft in Canada, built specifically around how much a pickup depends on paperwork and a name instead of direct verification.

Why Insurers Are Asking More Questions at Renewal

Carriers renewing cargo coverage this year are running into more questions than they used to. According to Truck News, insurers increasingly want to see documented security procedures, working GPS or telematics tracking, and proof that a fleet is actually using that tracking data rather than just paying for the hardware. Cyber liability is getting pulled into the same conversation, since a dispatch or load-booking system that gets compromised can hand a criminal the exact pickup details a fraudulent pickup depends on. That doesn’t mean coverage is drying up. It means a carrier who shows up with a paper trail on security gets an easier renewal than one who shows up with a truck and a logbook.

This isn’t only a trucking company’s problem. A contractor moving equipment between job sites in a company trailer carries a version of the same exposure, and so does any business whose goods leave the building in someone else’s hands. See other business types for how this shifts outside the four industries covered here.

What to Actually Do This Month

• Ask your broker in writing whether your cargo policy excludes theft without proof of security measures, and get a plain answer on what “reasonable security” means under your wording.
• Put a documented pickup verification process in place: a phone call to a number already on file, not one printed on a driver’s paperwork.
• Confirm your GPS or telematics system is actually being monitored day to day, not just installed and forgotten.
• Check whether your dispatch and load-booking software carries any cyber liability protection, since a breach there is often where a fraudulent pickup starts.
• Review your cargo limit against what shippers are contractually requiring this year, not against last year’s renewal number.
• Photograph and log trailer seals at pickup and drop-off, so a dispute over what left the yard has a clear record behind it.

I place cargo and fleet coverage for trucking and transportation companies across HRM alongside restaurants, contractors and commercial property owners, and freight cover is usually the piece that gets the least attention until something goes missing. Rayanur Rahman treats those as four different problems because they are: a hauler’s exposure on the road looks nothing like a kitchen’s exposure at close, or a job site’s exposure overnight.

Check the Wording Before the Trailer Sits Empty

A carrier running clean loads through Burnside or the 102 isn’t suddenly a target because of a report published somewhere else in the country. But the rules for keeping a load insured have moved faster than a lot of policies have, and coverage written two years ago may not match what an insurer expects from a fleet today. Freight theft is a numbers problem before it becomes a claims problem, and the carriers who get through it cleanest already knew what their policy required of them before they needed it to answer.

About the author. Rayanur Rahman is a commercial insurance broker with Western Financial Group in Bedford, Nova Scotia. He places commercial policies for restaurants, contractors, trucking and transportation companies and commercial property owners across the Halifax Regional Municipality, with access to the standard Canadian insurers and to specialty and MGA markets. He will read an existing cargo or fleet policy line by line and say plainly whether the security and theft wording still matches what is actually moving through your yard. Reach him at 902-321-1712 or book a 30 minute call.

Sources: Insurance Business Canada, cargo theft surge and underwriting standards. Équité Association, Faking the Load: Identity Theft and Fictitious Paperwork in Cargo Theft. Truck News, cargo theft and cyber risks driving insurance scrutiny. Marsh Canada, Motor Truck Cargo Legal Liability 101. Photo by Tom Jackson on Pexels. Photo by Robert So on Pexels. General information only, not advice on your specific policy. Check your own wording.