Is The US-Canada Border Closed After The Federal Government Shutdown? Here's What We Know

(MENAFN- Live Mint) Hours after the US government shutdown on Wednesday due to an impasse between Democrats and Republicans on federal spending, there was buzz about a closure along the US-Canada border.

Search volumes about the purported border closure spiked shortly after the shutdown, indicating concern about a potential fallout due to such a closure.

Screengrab showing the spike in search volumes on Google.

However, it seems like the concerns are unfounded as there have been no official communication about the border between the two North American nations being closed.

Also Read | US shutdown begins: What it means, who will it affect, how long it could last? Is the US-Canada border closed?

The concerns, and the search query, seems to stem from a different issue: not a closure, but a system outage that affected the movement of commercial trucks along the US -Canada border.

The system outage hit the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) on Tuesday morning local time, causing delays in commercial processing, particularly at ports of entry in Southern Ontario, Canadian outlet CityNews reported .

That said, the outage was partly resolved as of 1.45 pm local time on Tuesday.

Non-commercial traffic between the two countries remained unaffected, but the outage sparked the ire of the Canadian Trucking Alliance (CTA), which slammed the CBSA for "neglecting" IT systems.

"The outages continue to increase significantly in frequency and duration and are highly disruptive to carriers and their customers during this sluggish freight economy, which cannot afford any delay costs," a CTA statement said.

CTA President Stephen Laskowski further wrote, "Although the outages over the last few weeks have been very significant, this matter has been an ongoing issue for many years. Trade between the United States and Canada is regularly brought to a halt because Ottawa has failed to address outdated systems used to process shipments. Today, the entire northern border has come to a standstill because of that neglect."

According to CBSA figures, Canadian border services officers oversee a daily flow of approximately 400,000 people and billions of dollars in goods and services across the border. In 2024, the CBSA said it processed 4.5 million trucks entering Canada-approximately 12,328 trucks per day.

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