March 19, 2020 COVID-19 CBSA Commercial & Trade Update

COVID-19 Daily Commercial Update to Industry – Stakeholders

Borders remain open for commercial operations and the CBSA is actively working to facilitate goods movement.

• Truck drivers and the exemption from 14 day quarantine as it relates to agricultural commodities.

• Various ways to ease the burden, where legislation permits, with regards to recourse actions (i.e. filing disputes/appeals).

Key Issues

Context in which CBSA is considering issues raised.  Please note that we are currently working on developing an issues tracker which will be available online in the coming days.

• CBSA issued a Customs Notice indicating that effective immediately, the period of 90 days for submitting corrections, following a CBSA trade compliance verification where errors were found, will automatically be extended by 30 days.

• CBSA issued a Customs Notice that indicates it has decided to provide for a 45 business days grace period for late accounting penalties.  Clients will not have to submit an application to have late accounting penalties waived. This applies to transactions released from March 11, 2020, to May 14, 2020, inclusively.

• CBSA has received a number of requests to consider alternate ways to submit paper documents. We are reviewing them to determine feasibility from a program, policy and operational perspective, and will release information as decisions are made.

Other Sources of Information

• In order to support the continued global movement of goods and people and the ongoing delivery of essential services, the Governments of Canada direction on self-quarantine exempts healthy workers in the trade and transportation sector who are important for the movement of goods and people across the border, such as truck drivers and crew on any plane, train or marine vessel crossing the crossing the border.