A run of operational items from the Canada Border Services Agency in August affects highway carriers in the Eastern Townships, importers holding tariff-rate-quota goods in bond, EDI filers of aluminum declarations, anyone filing mass adjustments in CARM, and travellers who rely on the remote-area border permit. None of them changes a duty rate, but each changes a procedure that a shipment or a person will run into.
Highway sufferance warehouses at East Farnham and St-Césaire have closed
Customs Notices 26-18 and 26-19, published August 19, confirm that the highway sufferance warehouses at East Farnham (100 Léon Paul) and St-Césaire (2500 chemin St-François), Quebec, both surrendered their licences effective August 10, 2026. The CBSA has decided not to advertise for a replacement operator at either location. Bonded highway carriers that used these facilities must now report and declare at another highway sufferance warehouse. Questions go to the CBSA’s Stanstead office.
Practical impact: carriers running in-bond movements through the Stanstead corridor should update their routing and cargo control instructions now, and importers whose goods were released through either site should confirm which warehouse their carrier has moved to.
Customs Notice 26-18 (East Farnham) · Customs Notice 26-19 (St-Césaire)
TRQ goods entering a customs bonded warehouse: the permit must cover the exit date
Customs Notice 26-20, effective August 21, 2026, clarifies how goods subject to a tariff rate quota are handled when they go into a customs bonded warehouse. To claim the within-access rate, the shipment-specific import permit issued by Global Affairs Canada must be valid on the date the goods leave the warehouse, not merely on the date they went in. Where no shipment-specific permit is held at the time of entry, the goods are entered under the General Import Permit and the applicable surtax is declared on the Type 10 accounting declaration; once a shipment-specific permit is issued, the declaration is amended before the Type 20 or 21 exit declaration is filed. The notice warns that non-compliant goods face additional duties, taxes and penalties. It aligns with Global Affairs Canada’s steel permit guidance in Notice to Importers No. 1163, under which a shipment-specific permit is valid for 30 days: five days before and 24 days after the expected date of entry given in the application, with the date of entry being the date the CBSA is expected to release the goods.
Practical impact: importers using bonded storage to time steel or other quota-controlled releases should apply for the permit against the planned ex-warehouse date, not the warehouse entry date, make sure the Type 10 declaration carries the permit information, and confirm the release date on the Type 20 falls inside the permit’s validity window.
Read Customs Notice 26-20 on the CBSA website
Aluminum imports: smelt-and-cast reporting goes live in the IID on October 1
CBSA technical bulletin TCC26-0107, updated August 18, reminds EDI clients that Global Affairs Canada has proposed making the reporting of the country of largest smelt, country of second-largest smelt and country of most recent cast conditional for aluminum imported under General Import Permit No. 83, the Aluminum Import Monitoring Program. Three new component type description codes are being added to the Single Window Integrated Import Declaration to carry that data, and the certification lab now supports them, including the generic country codes “2A” and “99”. The conditional requirement is expected to go into production on October 1, 2026, the date on which Customs Notice 26-15 says the amended permit makes the smelt and cast data mandatory; until then the fields remain optional. Importers using the CSA release process and shipments valued at $5,000 or less are exempt.
Read Customs Notice 26-15 on the CBSA website
Practical impact: importers of aluminum products under GIP 83 should be collecting smelt and cast origin from their mills now, since the data will have to be on the declaration in six weeks, and service providers should be testing the new IID segments in the certification lab before October.
Two housekeeping items: energy efficiency regulator changes, and mass adjustment case numbers
Responsibility for Canada’s Energy Efficiency Regulations moved from Natural Resources Canada to Environment and Climate Change Canada on July 30, 2026. Comments on proposed Amendment 19, published June 20, are still taken through the Canada Gazette portal until August 29, and submissions already made carry over without resubmission. Separately, CARM Bulletin 5422 warns that mass adjustment case numbers must not be re-used on subsequent CAD versions, that only one mass adjustment case number is allowed per adjustment, and that previous case numbers must be cleared from every line before a new adjustment is filed. Adjustments that break these rules are rejected, and legislative time limits are not protected when that happens.
Remote Area Border Crossing permits extended to November 30
The CBSA has extended all active Remote Area Border Crossing (RABC) permits to 11:59 p.m. on November 30, 2026; the program closes on December 1, 2026. From that date, travellers entering Canada through the affected remote areas (the Northwest Angle, Pigeon River and Lake of the Woods, the Canadian shore of Lake Superior, the Sault Ste. Marie upper lock system and Cockburn Island) must report at a port of entry or at a designated telephone reporting site, the locations of which are still to be set. The agency says the change aligns Canadian reporting with how travellers already report to U.S. Customs and Border Protection in the same areas. Roughly 11,000 people hold RABC permits each year, about 90% of them American.
