Cargo stakeholders say they are ‘losing faith’ in the Canada Border Services Agency’s technology after a 28-hour eManifest outage on 30 April forced hundreds of trucks to park at border crossings from Windsor to Pacific Highway. The glitch—the second major failure this spring—prevented carriers from transmitting advance commercial information, triggering manual processing and multi-hour delays.
![Frequent Outages of CBSA eManifest Shake Shipper Confidence]()
During periods of border-system uncertainty, many logistics and mobility managers lean on specialist providers such as VisaHQ to keep personnel and cargo moving. Through its Canada portal (https://www.visahq.com/canada/), the firm can expedite driver visas, electronic travel authorizations and other permits, offering real-time tracking and dedicated support so that key staff are not left waiting when government IT platforms go down.
Industry group CIFFA estimates that each hour of downtime at a busy land port costs shippers roughly C $1.7 million in driver time, fuel and production slow-downs. Several automotive plants in Ontario ran short shifts as just-in-time parts were held up. Although CBSA restored service by the evening of 1 May, carriers report residual backlogs and warn that repeated disruptions erode confidence in the agency’s ambitious digital modernisation agenda. CBSA committed in 2025 to migrate its legacy systems to a cloud-based platform by 2027, but union sources say funding shortfalls have delayed testing. The agency told Global News it will commission an external audit; in the interim, officers have been instructed to accept paper backup documents when eManifest is offline. For global-mobility teams managing intra-company transfers, the outages create an additional risk: workers arriving with commercial freight may be unable to clear immigration formalities if the same IT backbone is affected. Employers may need contingency plans—such as routing through airports or pre-positioning critical parts—to avoid payroll disruption. Policy analysts suggest Ottawa may have little choice but to accelerate investments or cede ground to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which has offered to share elements of its Automated Commercial Environment to create a joint platform.
During periods of border-system uncertainty, many logistics and mobility managers lean on specialist providers such as VisaHQ to keep personnel and cargo moving. Through its Canada portal (https://www.visahq.com/canada/), the firm can expedite driver visas, electronic travel authorizations and other permits, offering real-time tracking and dedicated support so that key staff are not left waiting when government IT platforms go down.
Industry group CIFFA estimates that each hour of downtime at a busy land port costs shippers roughly C $1.7 million in driver time, fuel and production slow-downs. Several automotive plants in Ontario ran short shifts as just-in-time parts were held up. Although CBSA restored service by the evening of 1 May, carriers report residual backlogs and warn that repeated disruptions erode confidence in the agency’s ambitious digital modernisation agenda. CBSA committed in 2025 to migrate its legacy systems to a cloud-based platform by 2027, but union sources say funding shortfalls have delayed testing. The agency told Global News it will commission an external audit; in the interim, officers have been instructed to accept paper backup documents when eManifest is offline. For global-mobility teams managing intra-company transfers, the outages create an additional risk: workers arriving with commercial freight may be unable to clear immigration formalities if the same IT backbone is affected. Employers may need contingency plans—such as routing through airports or pre-positioning critical parts—to avoid payroll disruption. Policy analysts suggest Ottawa may have little choice but to accelerate investments or cede ground to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which has offered to share elements of its Automated Commercial Environment to create a joint platform.
