News

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.

The MTA in collaboration with the CTA, have created a messaging campaign that 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.

‘œThe
EDI/Portal outages are a significant threat to the financial health of our
members and their customers,” said CTA President Stephen Laskowski. ‘œThe
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 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.

All our regional associations are
currently requesting that officials respond to the Alliance and their regional associations 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
are encouraged to fill out the 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

For further information please contact:

Terry Shaw

Manitoba Trucking Association

[email protected]

204 632-6600