The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) commercial operations team has provided the CTA the following information and statement regarding the significant disruptions currently being experienced with their electronic systems:
We acknowledge the disruptions to the trade chain caused by systems outages. It appears that an initial outage created a cascading effort on our capacity to process the data. Senior officials at our branch are engaged with our IT counterparts on this issue.
With respect to your concern about Border Services Officers familiarity with the contingency plans. I can confirm that we followed up with operational staff…to ensure consistent application of the Systems Outage Contingency Plan at all POEs.
To summarize the plan, EDI processing delays of greater than 60 minutes constitute a CBSA outage and contingency processes apply. In the case of highway release at the first point of arrival, release may be granted on the strength of an A8A Cargo Control Document, with a hand-written transaction number form a customs broker (per ‘2.6.1 Highway FPOA release’ in the SOCP).
We can confirm that internal messaging has been sent out to all POEs, with follow-up as needed with specific ports.
The procedures to follow during system outages/interruptions can be found here https://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/eservices/contingency-urgence/menu-eng.html