The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and Shared Services Canada (SSC) delivered a report to the minister of public safety offering a forward-looking action plan to address major IT outages that disrupted border processing this fall.
The Canadian Trucking Alliance (CTA) is urging the federal government to release the report and action plan publicly, saying outages continue to affect supply chains and carrier operations.
The outages occurred between Sept. 28 and Oct. 5 and stemmed from two unrelated IT changes that overlapped, initially triggered by “human error” that caused significant system corruption, according to the report.
The disruptions were national in scope, affecting programs, services and clearance processes across all modes, including highway carriers, air, marine, rail and postal operations.
The plan outlines two phases of corrective actions to be completed in spring and fall 2026. By March 2026, CBSA and SSC plan to review and implement oversight improvements, including enhanced training and role clarity for IT personnel, and measures to strengthen scrutiny, collaboration and communication to reduce human-error risks.
By October 2026, the agencies expect to strengthen controls around system updates and upgrades, conduct a joint audit of change and incident management processes, review CBSA’s IT architecture and improve system robustness, backups, redundancy and protection of front-line operations during disruptions.
Modernizing technology
The corrective actions aim to reinforce internal processes, enhance collaboration with industry and government partners and modernize technology to help reduce future outages, minimize downtime and strengthen contingency planning.
“Industry cannot afford repeated system failures, and the disruptions over the past few months were damaging to carrier operations and drivers,” Lak Shoan, CTA’s director of policy and industry awareness programs, said in a news release. “Now we need to work together and see timely implementation to restore reliability and confidence in the system.”
The CBSA confirmed the CBSA Assessment and Revenue Management (CARM) system was not affected, noting it operates on a separate platform and remained fully functional.
