Motorcycle Brands in Canada

Ask which motorcycle brands are “Canadian” and you get a short answer and a long one. The short answer is Can-Am. The long answer is the registration data: what Canadians actually keep plated and insured, which brands are adding machines and which are only holding the ones they sold a decade ago. This page is built on one public dataset, with its limits stated up front.

What Canadians actually have registered

Quebec publishes every registered vehicle as open data, one row per machine, including make and engine displacement. In the 2022 edition there were 213,825 motorcycles registered in the province, up from 183,222 in 2017. No other province publishes motorcycle registrations broken out by brand, which is why this one dataset carries the whole article.

Harley-Davidson is more than twice the size of the next brand. Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki and Suzuki together hold 45.9% — dominant as a bloc, but not one of them leads on its own. And sitting fifth is a brand that is not a two-wheeler at all.

Can-Am is the Canadian answer — and it has three wheels

BRP is headquartered in Valcourt, Quebec. Its on-road line, the Ryker and the Spyder, is three-wheeled and is registered as motorcycles, which is why Can-Am appears at 25,110 machines and 11.7% of the fleet. That single brand accounts for 12,199 of the 30,603 registrations the province added between 2017 and 2022 — roughly two of every five motorcycles added to the Quebec fleet in those years were Can-Am three-wheelers.

So if the question is “is there a Canadian motorcycle brand”, the honest answer is: one, it is BRP’s Can-Am, and the thing it sells is a different shape from what most people picture when they ask.

Which brands are growing, and which are only holding

• Can-Am +12,199 registrations (+94%) — the largest single gain in the fleet.
• Harley-Davidson +5,362 (+11%) — still growing from an already dominant base.
• KTM +2,877 (+125%) and Indian +1,822 (+247%) — the fastest movers in percentage terms.
• BMW +1,986 (+27%), Kawasaki +1,926 (+8%), Triumph +1,771 (+60%).
• Honda +368 (+1%), Yamaha +581 (+2%), Suzuki −473 (−2%) — three of the four Japanese brands are flat or shrinking in registrations even though their combined share is the largest bloc.

That last line is the interesting one. A registered fleet is mostly old bikes: only a small fraction of it turns over in any year. A brand whose registrations are flat still has a large installed base — it is simply not adding to it at the rate the newer entrants are.

Canadians ride bigger bikes than you would guess

Over half the fleet — 55.0% — is 1000 cc or more, and nearly a third is above 1400 cc. That is the Harley and big-tourer effect. Everything under 500 cc combined is 10.5%. The 500–800 cc band, where most mid-size cruisers and roadsters sit, is 17.3% of the province’s motorcycles.

Where a newer brand fits

Benda does not appear in the 2022 registration data — the brand arrived in Canada after it was compiled, and we are not going to quote a number we do not have. What the data can do is place the line on the map. The Benda models on sale in Canada sit either side of the 500 cc mark: the Chinchilla 500 and Napoleonbob 500 use a 475.6 cc engine, which puts them in the 250–500 cc band (6.4% of the Quebec fleet), and the LFC 700 Pro, at 676.9 cc, is in the 500–800 cc band (17.3%). Together those two bands are less than a quarter of the province’s motorcycles — the mid-size end of a fleet that leans heavily toward big bikes. The Dark Flag 950 (948 cc), listed as coming soon, would fall in the 800–1000 cc band.

If you are shopping that class, the sub-700cc cruiser comparison puts the current models side by side, and the Canadian motorcycle buying guide covers licensing, certification and winter storage. Benda machines are sold and serviced in Canada through its authorized dealer, TerraX Equipment in Toronto.