Customs brokers and cross-border carriers received a heads-up this week that multiple Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) portals—including eManifest, the Canadian Export Reporting System (CERS) and the CARM Client Portal—will be intermittently unavailable between 06:00 ET on 21 February 2026 and 13:00 ET on 22 February 2026. The advisory, issued via the Canadian Society of Customs Brokers (CSCB) on 19 February, notes that users may be forcibly logged out and should follow established contingency procedures or carry paper packages to the border.
![CBSA warns of eManifest, CERS and CARM outages during 21–22 Feb system maintenance]()
Businesses that are already juggling visa or travel document requirements alongside customs filings can streamline the paperwork by tapping VisaHQ’s digital platform, which offers guided Canadian visa processing and real-time status updates—a helpful safety net when government systems go dark. Details are available at https://www.visahq.com/canada/
CBSA says frontline officers will continue to process shipments and that no Administrative Monetary Penalties (AMPs) will be levied for failures to transmit during the outage window. Highway carriers are instructed to equip drivers with two hard copies of cargo documents—echoing lessons from last autumn’s CARM stress test, when system downtime cascaded into six-hour truck queues at the Windsor–Detroit gateway. Trade lawyers point out that the maintenance overlaps with the start of the retail re-stock cycle for spring merchandise, raising the stakes for just-in-time supply chains. Importers of perishable goods are particularly vulnerable if EDI acknowledgements lag once the system returns. To mitigate risk, logistics managers are pulling submission cut-offs 12 hours forward and alerting U.S. partners to potential delays. Some automotive OEMs plan to pre-clear Saturday-night shipments to avoid idling assembly lines on Monday. The episode is also a reminder that CARM Release 2—scheduled for October 2026—will further centralise compliance on CBSA servers, making redundancy planning a permanent fixture of cross-border trade.
Businesses that are already juggling visa or travel document requirements alongside customs filings can streamline the paperwork by tapping VisaHQ’s digital platform, which offers guided Canadian visa processing and real-time status updates—a helpful safety net when government systems go dark. Details are available at https://www.visahq.com/canada/
CBSA says frontline officers will continue to process shipments and that no Administrative Monetary Penalties (AMPs) will be levied for failures to transmit during the outage window. Highway carriers are instructed to equip drivers with two hard copies of cargo documents—echoing lessons from last autumn’s CARM stress test, when system downtime cascaded into six-hour truck queues at the Windsor–Detroit gateway. Trade lawyers point out that the maintenance overlaps with the start of the retail re-stock cycle for spring merchandise, raising the stakes for just-in-time supply chains. Importers of perishable goods are particularly vulnerable if EDI acknowledgements lag once the system returns. To mitigate risk, logistics managers are pulling submission cut-offs 12 hours forward and alerting U.S. partners to potential delays. Some automotive OEMs plan to pre-clear Saturday-night shipments to avoid idling assembly lines on Monday. The episode is also a reminder that CARM Release 2—scheduled for October 2026—will further centralise compliance on CBSA servers, making redundancy planning a permanent fixture of cross-border trade.
