CANADA's Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications has been exploring ways to increase efficiency at the nation's container ports, lower costs that would otherwise be passed on to the consumer and make the nation's producers globally more competitive.

This comes after members of the committee conducted a tour of the nation's ports earlier this month to gain a first-hand insight into how containerised freight is being handled, taking into account future growth as well.

Container traffic between North America and Asia is expected to grow from 15.3 million TEU in 2003 to 33.5 million TEU in 2015, said a report by Canadian Transportation & Logistics magazine.

It is the goal of the committee to assess whether port charges should fall under the federal government's control to fuel greater efficiency and increase the handling capacity of the entire transport system for containers.