The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) systems outage across Canada continues to create chaos for our industry and the critical cross-border supply chains, which are the lifeblood of the province of Ontario.
The OTA requests the Ford Government demand answers from Ottawa as to why this severe systems outage continues to have damaging impacts for trucks entering Canada; and when the supply chain can expect these delays to be addressed and normalized.
In the meantime, OTA has learned the following:
- Both the Queenston-Lewiston and Peace Bridge crossings in the Niagara region have advised all Canada-bound commercial carriers to avoid these international crossings until further notice, due to ongoing processing delays related to the CBSA systems outage that occurred earlier this week.
- Due to the challenges carriers are facing, CBSA representatives from the Southern Ontario region have confirmed trucks destined for either of the Niagara border crossings that would like to divert to another border crossing for return to Canada, can cross without changing their port code information.
- In addition, if a carrier has submitted a paper entry at another POE (Pars or RMD), the physical file will need to be changed by the POE you are arriving at. This may require additional work by CBSA officers to process the shipment and collaboration with the two POE’s to get the shipment cleared.
Ottawa must make a statement and provide an explanation of what is happening to our supply chain and the inability of trucks to be processed for entry into Canada. OTA remains in regular contact with all Ontario international bridge crossings and commits to providing members with the most update information as it becomes available.