What Actually Happened
TCC26-0077 posted at 10:15 ET on April 16 with the usual language: higher than usual volumes, delays in outbound EDI and eManifest messages, estimated 3–5 hours. It resolved at 17:35. That's over seven hours wall-to-wall. If you filed a PARS release on a morning arrival and expected an RNS by noon, you didn't see it until late afternoon or evening. If you were waiting on a reject to correct and refile, you burned half a day.
This wasn't a system outage. Transmissions went in. They just sat in queue. Acknowledgements, release notices, reject messages, completeness notices for commercial accounting under CARM—all of it delayed. The eManifest portal users got the same treatment. ACI status updates lagged. If you had a carrier waiting on an A8A or X70 to pull a container out of the port, that truck sat.
The advisory said "outbound messages." That means your inbound filings likely went through fine. The problem is you had no confirmation, no RNS, no ability to move forward. And if you're running tight on a just-in-time supply chain or a same-day delivery commitment, seven hours is not a rounding error.
Where the Pain Shows Up
Release-prior-to-payment is the most exposed. You file PARS, you need the RNS to move the freight. If that RNS is delayed five hours, your trucker misses the delivery window, the receiver closes, and you've got detention or a redelivery charge. That's $150–$300 depending on the carrier and the city. If it's a Friday afternoon and the delay pushes past business hours, you're looking at Monday, which means weekend storage at the CFS or the terminal. That's real money.
For commercial accounting filers under CARM, the delay hits differently. You transmit your G1, you're waiting on the completeness notice or the CARM client portal to update. If that's delayed, you can't confirm the payment due date, you can't reconcile your GL codes, and your finance team is chasing you. The RPP bond liability is live the moment you file, but if you can't see the acknowledgement, you're flying blind on exposure. That's a bigger deal if you're managing a large importer with weekly RPP settlement in the low six figures.
Rejects are the worst. If you miskeyed a HS code or a CARM account number, you get a reject, you fix it, you refile. Normally that's a 20-minute turnaround. If the reject is delayed three hours, you've lost the entire afternoon. If the goods are perishable or high-value and sitting at Pearson or the Pacific Gateway, that delay has a multiplier effect. Cold chain doesn't wait.
Why Volume Spikes Happen and Why They'll Keep Happening
CBSA doesn't publish real-time throughput metrics, but you can infer. Mid-April is post-Easter, pre-summer goods are landing, and a lot of importers front-loaded shipments ahead of any potential CPTPP or CUSMA renegotiation noise. Add in the CARM rollout still bedding in—more commercial accounting filings, more portal activity, more G1s replacing old B3 workflows—and you've got structural volume growth on top of seasonal variance.
The eManifest side is simpler: more freight, more ACI filings. If the CBSA infrastructure was sized for 2023 volumes and we're running 2026 volumes with incremental system upgrades, you're going to see these advisories. They're not catastrophic, but they're not rare either. We've seen at least a dozen similar TCCs in the past 18 months.
The honest take: this is the new normal. CARM added complexity. The portal is better than the old CADEX system in some ways, worse in others. The EDI message flow is more granular, which is good for audit trails and bad for throughput when the pipes aren't wide enough. CBSA is aware. They're not going to say "we underbuilt capacity" in an advisory, but the pattern is clear.
What You Actually Do About It
First, assume a two-hour buffer on any time-sensitive release. If you need goods delivered by 3pm, don't file at 1pm and hope. File at 10am. If you're using customs brokerage services that promise same-day turnaround, make sure they're padding for CBSA delays, not just their own processing time.
Second, if you're self-filing under CARM, watch your notification settings in the portal. The email alerts lag even when the system is healthy. Log in and check status manually if you're on a tight timeline. Don't trust the email to arrive on time.
Third, talk to your carriers about detention and storage grace periods. A lot of truckers and terminals will waive fees if the delay is documented CBSA-side. Print the TCC advisory, send it with your proof of filing timestamp, and ask. Not everyone will play ball, but enough will that it's worth the ask.
Fourth, if you're running RPP and your bond is sized tight, make sure your broker or your trade compliance team is tracking outstanding releases in real time. A seven-hour delay means seven more hours of bond exposure before you see the final accounting. If you're near your limit, that could trigger a hold on new filings until the bond clears. The math is unforgiving: 10% bond coverage on $2M of weekly imports means you need $200K available at all times. If $150K is tied up in unacknowledged filings because of a processing delay, you've got $50K of headroom. One big shipment and you're stuck.
The Bigger Picture
TCC26-0077 resolved. The system caught up. But the underlying issue—CBSA infrastructure struggling with volume—isn't going away. We're going to see more of these. They won't all be seven hours. Some will be 90 minutes, some will be overnight. The question is whether your operation has enough slack to absorb it or whether you're running so lean that a three-hour delay cascades into penalties, missed delivery windows, and unhappy customers.
If you're still treating CBSA processing as a same-day guarantee, adjust your expectations. If you're building supply chain timelines that assume instantaneous RNS, you're going to get burned. This isn't about being pessimistic. It's about being realistic with the system we have, not the one we wish we had.
If your current brokerage setup doesn't give you live visibility into filing status and acknowledgement delays, that's a gap worth closing. Get in touch and we'll walk through what real-time tracking looks like on our end.
Originally published at https://www.canflow-global.com/en/insights/tcc26-0077-and-the-real-cost-of-cbsa-volume-delays/.
