After a highly disruptive Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) system outage earlier this fall, which caused supply chain chaos across Canada, and the subsequent announcement of a 30-day review by Minister of Public Safety Gary Anandasangaree, recurrent system outages have continued to persist and continued to cause supply chain disruptions, delivery delays, added costs, and other issues during an ongoing trade war and economic uncertainty for fleets and the business community.
As the industry and trade chain partners await the findings of the Minister’s review, the Canadian Trucking Alliance (CTA) and its members are imploring the Government of Canada to ensure the proposed solutions prioritize the funding required to modernize these antiquated systems, and that these potential fixes are implemented expeditiously to help end this long-standing issue for all trade chain partners.
In its correspondence to the Government of Canada on this topic, the Alliance put forward various recommendations, including funding to overhaul these legacy IT systems, reviving the CBSA’s system outage working group, improving and amending contingency procedures, and investigating the creation of a reimbursement mechanism for businesses when unexpected, lengthy, and damaging outages occur.
“We’ve continued to experience multiple outages, some lasting several hours, even after the Minister launched the 30-day review. As the industry awaits the forthcoming recommendations, our members’ message is clear: we need strong, effective solutions implemented quickly to restore confidence and stability in a system that has been neglected for decades,” said Lak Shoan, CTA’s Director of Policy and Industry Awareness Programs.
Although the timeline around the release of the Minister’s review has not been confirmed, the CBSA has indicated to the Alliance the review process is underway, and it will outline an action plan and identify specific processes and technological improvements to significantly reduce the frequency and impact of outages.
The Agency is also working closely with Shared Services Canada to reduce the risk of future outages, minimize any system downtime, strengthen contingency plans, and based on the experience gained from these recent outages, enhancing communication protocols when outages occur.
The solutions put will directly impact Canada’s cross-border productivity and be indicative of the type of message being put forward to trading partners across the globe.
“On the eve of the upcoming CUSMA review and the ongoing tariff war with the U.S., it is imperative the Government of Canada send strong signals to our trading partners that doing business in our country is seamless, efficient and cost-effective,” said Shoan.
