On top of tariffs, shippers face jacked-up border enforcement and penalties - Toronto Star

Tractor-trailers stop near the Peace Bridge border crossing between Canada and the U.S., in Buffalo, N.Y., on March 20, 2026.

MONTREAL - Enforcement on cross-border cargo has ramped up enormously under the Trump administration, costing time and money and acting as a trade deterrent, shippers say.

As a tariff wall rises along the 49th parallel, transport industry insiders say freight screening and penalties have also shot up, part of a stricter approach to customs in a more protectionist United States.

“It is a massive shift,” said Breanna Leininger, who heads U.S. operations at Vancouver-based Pacific Customs Brokers.

Border officials’ demands for documentation on the goods she ships have gone up tenfold from several years ago, she said.

“The number of entries that we’re seeing where customs is taking a deeper dive has hugely changed. Whereas five, three years ago we might have seen a handful of those instances in a quarter, now we see a handful of those or more a day,” said Leininger, who handles 5,000 customers that send products across the border.

To prove compliance with product classifications and trade agreements, importers are increasingly told to provide a longer trail of paperwork like labour and manufacturing records. Sometimes they have hours to hand it over, in other cases up to 30 days, with the degree of proof as well as the items tariffed seeming to change by the month.

“The bar is constantly being moved. The type of information asked for is consistently changing,” Leininger said.

Statistics back up her story on stringent enforcement.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures show that the number of audits this year is on track to grow 26 per cent from 2024.

An audit is an evaluation of an importer’s records to check compliance with tariff classifications, customs valuations and coverage under a free-trade pact such as the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA). And the resulting penalty can span years’ worth of violations, rather than just the shipment in question — even if it stems from a breach that was unknown to the importer, such as a shift in a component’s country of origin, customs brokers say.

In the first half of this year alone, U.S. customs authorities collected US$70.6 million from various trade penalties by late July, a 169 per cent leap from the entirety of 2024.

That six-month sum is also up 53 per cent from all of 2025.

The jacked-up enforcement comes as Canada and America find themselves in an escalating trade war, with fresh rounds of tariffs fired off by both sides over the past several weeks.

The border holdups and extra time required to source product records all serve to pile on expenses and, in some cases, discourage cross-border commerce.

“It adds huge costs to it. You put something into a warehouse and it’s thousands of dollars,” said Alan Dewar, executive vice-president at Winnipeg-based customs brokerage GHY.

“The drivers, they’re stuck for a weekend, overnight — that adds to costs. There’s spoilage that could exist. There’s service charges that exist if you don’t get goods to a specific spot based on the time you guaranteed,” he said.

Added Leininger: “Many have been able to navigate it, but some give up as well because it feels just too enormously challenging.”

Sometimes, a product doesn’t fit neatly into a single tariff category, or it falls into two different ones depending on which side of the border it sits, causing more headaches.

“In Canada, ratchet straps are classified as Chapter 82, which is like a hand tool. In the United States, ratchet straps are classified in Chapter 84, which is a machine, because they say there’s a gearing mechanism,” said Dewar.

Adding to the uncertainty is the greater authority ascribed to officials at ground level.

On June 3, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to bolster customs enforcement, directing the head of Homeland Security to take “any action he deems necessary,” including maximum penalties for noncompliant brokers.

“Before, the officers would have noticed certain things and then they would refer it up the chain and either that would become an investigation or an audit action. Now much more of that is taking place at the port at the time the cargo is there,” Leininger said.

“It really is dependent on officer discretion.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it “continually assesses and adjusts its trade enforcement posture” based on risk, trade trends and statutory requirements.

“Importers are responsible for exercising reasonable care and providing complete and accurate information to CBP,” said spokesperson Trish Driscoll in an email.

One example of the more detailed demands relates to rules of origin — a key factor in whether an item is CUSMA-compliant.

Several years ago, importers would do little more than provide a certificate of origin, bill of lading and invoices, said Dewar. Now they might be asked to furnish sourcing records — primary documents that trace a product back to the origin of its parts or materials — and production papers showing where it was assembled.

“They’re making it more complex, and that creates an element of chaos. And where there’s uncertainty, that doesn’t stimulate investment,” Dewar said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2026.