Canada’s Border Clearing Systems are a Stain to the Country’s Image

In the last year, the majority of talk coming from the federal government, with industry support, has revolved around removing internal trade barriers to make Canada more resilient and less reliant on external pressures from outside our borders.

The PMTC agrees with this initiative and has raised this issue many times over the years, so the government has our support on this initiative. At the same time, we must place a focus on other areas of our economy as well. I think we all acknowledge we are a trading nation, with our biggest trading partner directly south of our border. Canada and USA trade accounts for over 900 billion per year, with over 580 billion of that coming through land crossings. It is imperative to our economy, and our trading relationship, that Canada has a stable and reliable system in place to clear the goods that cross our border daily. The slogan of the province I reside in, Ontario, is ‘Open for business.’ While that might be the case, as a result of the mess we are currently in at the border, we may have to add a warning to that tag line ‘Open for business, but good luck getting your product here!’

As I write this article, in my inbox I have update #53 from the Canadian Border Services Clearing Agency (CBSA) providing me with information on the current level of delays for receiving or sending messages from the CBSA portal for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and eManifest portal inbound data. This is the system we use to clear goods through customs that are entering Canada. The first message appeared on April 25, 14 days ago. The current delay is two to four hours. The multiple updates received during this time range in delays of minutes, to delays of over seven hours. The general pattern is through the night the backlog clears, we are almost caught up in the morning, then as the days goes along, the system can’t keep up and the backlog in the system expands again. The most recent issue stems from an update to the IT network that was performed on April 19. The issue is not new, however. In September of 2025 an update crashed the system altogether as a result of data corruption. Drivers, and the goods they were carrying were stuck for hours, and some for days. A review pinpointed the issue as a human error. Fair enough, but that is far from the only issue we have with the system.

A 30-day review was mandated by the Minister at the time and was completed in the fall. Findings were presented to industry on January 28 and not much has changed since. The bottom line, the technology for the current system that is being used to clear loads was developed in the 90’s… let that sink in. The 1st smartphone, the Blackberry, was released in 1999… ecommerce, which has increased how many shipments cross the border per day dramatically, didn’t even exist. We are a trading nation, and we are using a system that is so outdated it would be comical if it wasn’t for the fact that it is costing our economy millions of dollars per day, maybe more, and much of it on the back of the transportation industry. In the 30-day review, we were presented with the top 10 priorities, as well as short term and long-term timelines.

#1 on the list was improved engagement and communications. #2 was to improve emergency management and contingency plans. We appreciate the work the CBSA has done to improve on these levels, and on these two fronts, things have improved, however we do believe when systems go down, more staff could be moved outside to open more lanes and manually clear more loads to alleviate the massive backlogs of vehicles that occur.

The most concerning thing to us in the report was that upgrading the technology was listed as a long-term goal. From what we have heard, an RFD to seek out firms to take on this task will not go out until the first quarter of 2027… which means we likely won’t even begin the process until late 2027 or 2028. This is no way close to urgent enough in our view. This needs to be prioritized by the feds.

The current system simply is unable to handle the volumes that it is required to process, and until the federal government supplies the funds to upgrade, and we get moving on doing so, no amount of fixing, patching, or contingency plans will make this problem go away. We have been kicking the ball down the road on this for over 25 years, and the road is heading uphill. The time to act is well behind us, and to be blunt, the debacle we are dealing with is embarrassing to our great country. Just heard a bing, likely update #54.

Bulletin