​CTA Call to Action: Let Government Know You Want Fix to Recurrent Border Blackouts

July 2017

Since January 1, 2017, there have been about 30 outages of CBSA’s EDI/portal systems due to an antiquated computer system. Despite CBSA’s best efforts to mitigate these incidents, the system crashes keep happening with no easily-attainable solution in sight. Meanwhile, trucking companies, their drivers, as well as customers are being significantly impacted by these outages.

CTA has created a messaging campaign that will allows carriers to send a form email each time the system goes down, reminding the ministers from Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, International Trade, Finance and the Treasury Board how system outages are hurting our industry and weakening cross-border commerce. The email urges the ministries responsible for the border to increase support to CBSA and fix these recurrent problems.

“The EDI/Portal outages are a significant threat to the financial health of our members and their customers,” said CTA President Stephen Laskowski. “The membership needs to remind these ministers their efforts in ensuring efficient trade, including upcoming negotiations with Washington on the future of NAFTA, will be greatly undermined if we don’t first deal with our internal border problems in our own backyard.”

The CTA letter campaign also reminds the ministers that CBSA staffing shortages at various commercial ports – a historic (and growing) problem – needs to be dealt with along with EDI/Portal Outages.

CTA is currently requesting that officials respond to the Alliance with short and long-term plans to fix these systems outages.

Starting today – and to be repeated each time CBSA’s system shuts down – please click here to send an automatic email to the ministries responsible for CBSA and border policies. ( Click here for French).

Carriers can also fill out CTA’s System Outages survey, which will provide CBSA information on operational challenges and extra costs carriers face when system issues occur. To take the survey click on this link: http://survey.ontruck.org/t/ALNnrZYuXA