Two customs notices, both issued August 19, 2026, both with an effective date of August 10, 2026. Customs Notice 26-18 records that the company at 100, Leon Paul, East Farnham, Quebec surrendered its "BW" type highway sufferance warehouse licence. Customs Notice 26-19 records the same thing for 2500, chemin St-Francois, St-Cesaire. In both, the CBSA states it "has decided not to advertise for a new highway sufferance warehouse at this port," and in both, bonded highway carriers clearing there "will have to declare at another highway sufferance warehouse."
Same week, same wording, same CBSA superintendent listed for questions at Stanstead. Two ports lost their public highway sufferance warehouse and neither is getting a replacement.
Here is the part that costs somebody a Friday afternoon: the notices are dated nine days after the closures took effect. If you had bonded freight routed to either address between August 10 and August 19, you found out about it from a driver, not from a notice.
What a "BW" licence actually is, and why losing it takes more than one warehouse with it
CBSA Memorandum D4-1-4, Customs Sufferance Warehouses (date modified July 6, 2026), is the operating manual here. It defines a sufferance warehouse as a facility licensed "for the control, short-term storage, transfer, delivery and examination of imported goods held in bond" (paragraph 2), under section 24 of the Customs Act and the Customs Sufferance Warehouses Regulations.
The B class is the highway class. Within it, per paragraph 126, BW is the public facility, and the CBSA restricts it to one within the area of a CBSA office. BL is different: it is space a bonded carrier leases inside a BW.
Read those two together and you get the consequence the notices do not spell out, so treat this as our reading rather than as something CBSA has written down: when the BW licence goes, any BL tenancy sitting inside that building has nowhere left to sit. If your carrier told you they have their own bonded space at East Farnham, ask which licence type it is before you assume they are unaffected.
Do this today
Pull every open in-bond movement with East Farnham or St-Cesaire as the destination warehouse. Then pull your saved templates and EDI profiles and check the warehouse codes in them, because that is where a dead destination survives longest. A template nobody has opened since March is how you file the same wrong thing forty times.
The clock you are now running against
Goods in a sufferance warehouse are not parked indefinitely. D4-1-4 sets the maximum periods before removal, and blowing through them is not a paperwork problem, it is a forfeiture problem:
- General goods: 40 days after the day the goods were reported (paragraph 102)
- Perishables: 4 days (paragraph 103)
- Nuclear substances: 14 days (paragraph 104)
- Firearms, tobacco and vaping products: 14 days, and they are forfeited after that (paragraph 105)
- Spirits: 21 days, and they are forfeited after that (paragraph 106)
A re-route resets nothing. The clock runs from the report date, not from the day your freight arrives at whichever warehouse you send it to instead.
The 60 day rule, and why you still got nine days notice
D4-1-4 paragraph 35 says a licensee asking to cancel must advise the CBSA through the CARM Client Portal at least 60 days before the effective closure date. Paragraph 59 says that before any sufferance warehouse closes, all in-bond goods must be accounted for, either by paying the duties and taxes or by transferring the goods to a location the CBSA has authorised.
So the CBSA had notice. The trade got the notice on August 19 for a closure on August 10. That gap is worth knowing about because it tells you where to look next time: the operator knows first, the CBSA knows second, and the published notice is last. Your carrier and your warehouse contact are a faster early warning system than the notices page, and if you are the importer of record, the duties and taxes in paragraph 59 are your money moving on someone else's timetable. If you are still getting your CARM account and delegations in order, our CARM readiness check covers the portal side of that.
Finding where your freight goes instead
Neither notice names a replacement port, because there is not one. What the notices do give you is a named human: Superintendent Michel Dubois, CBSA, 2 Highway 55, Stanstead, Quebec J0B 3E2, 819-876-7821 extension 177. Both notices carry the same contact.
Call before you re-route rather than after. The CBSA Directory of Offices and Services lists sufferance warehouses by location and is the right place to confirm the alternative, but the directory tells you what exists, not what the district expects for your commodity or your carrier's bond. One phone call is cheaper than one refused report.
Do this today
Confirm the substitute warehouse with the district, put the code in your templates in writing, and tell your carriers in the same message. Do not let each dispatcher pick their own answer, because that is how you end up reconciling three different warehouse codes on one client's account at month end.
While you are in there: the portal is down twice this weekend
Unrelated to the closures, but landing in the same week. CBSA notice TCC26-0130 schedules eManifest Portal maintenance for Saturday, August 22 and Sunday, August 23, 2026, from 06:00 to 07:00 ET each day. Portal users may be forced to re-log on. Documents can still be created and submitted, and user accesses can still be updated.
The one hour window is not the interesting part. The System Outage Contingency Plan (date modified April 22, 2026) is, and it is worth having read once before you need it:
- Submit electronic data at least 2 hours before a scheduled outage.
- During an outage, carriers present two paper copies of the cargo control document at the first point of arrival. An A8A(B) or an ACI cargo transmittal printout both qualify.
- Brokers and importers can get release on paper at the CBSA office where the goods are, using an EDI Exception Lead Sheet with "System Outage" selected. The stamp does not excuse you from sending the electronic release request afterwards.
- Get back to normal procedures within 2 hours of the system returning, and submit the electronic declarations within 24 business hours.
- Technical Commercial Client Unit: 1-888-957-7224 in Canada and the United States, +1-613-946-0762 from overseas.
Why this keeps happening, and what it tells you
D4-1-4 paragraph 110 says decisions on opening and closing sufferance warehouses are made case by case, with no standardised national threshold. There is no formula that says a port of a certain size gets a warehouse. An operator surrenders a licence because the economics stopped working for them, and whether a replacement gets advertised is a local call.
Which means small ports lose bonded capacity quietly and permanently. If your lane depends on a single small warehouse, that is a concentration risk sitting in your operation with no owner. Name a second option now, while nobody is shouting.
Everything above comes from documents you can read yourself. Both customs notices are on the CBSA customs notices page, and we keep a browsable copy of the D10 and D13 memoranda in our D-Memoranda reference. D4-1-4 sits in the D4 series, so read that one at the CBSA link above.
Questions brokers are actually asking
My freight is already sitting at East Farnham. What happens to it?
D4-1-4 paragraph 59 is the rule: before the warehouse closes, all in-bond goods must be accounted for by paying the duties and taxes, or by transferring the goods to a location the CBSA has authorised. The closure was effective August 10. If you have goods you cannot account for, call the Stanstead superintendent listed on the notice today, not next week.
Does re-routing give me a fresh 40 days?
No. The maximum periods in paragraphs 102 to 106 run from the day the goods were reported. Moving them to a different warehouse does not restart the count, and for spirits at 21 days and firearms, tobacco and vaping products at 14 days, the consequence of running out is forfeiture, not a penalty you can argue about later.
Is the CBSA going to license a new warehouse at these ports?
Both notices say the CBSA "has decided not to advertise for a new highway sufferance warehouse at this port." That is the decision as published. Paragraph 110 of D4-1-4 says these calls are made case by case, so it is not permanent in the sense of a regulation, but plan on the answer being no.
My carrier has bonded space in that building. Are they affected?
Ask them which licence type. BW is the public facility and BL is leased space inside one (paragraph 126). Our reading is that leased space inside a surrendered BW goes with the building, but D4-1-4 does not spell that consequence out, so get it confirmed by the district rather than taking our word or your carrier's.
How do I stop finding out about this from a driver?
Watch the source, not the summary. The customs notices page is where 26-18 and 26-19 were published, and it is a different feed from the CBSA newsroom, which carries press releases and never carries these. Check it weekly, or have something check it for you.
Where do the numbers in this post come from?
The closures, addresses, dates, licence type and contact are quoted from Customs Notices 26-18 and 26-19 as published on the CBSA site and read on August 21, 2026. The storage periods, the 60 day cancellation notice, the accounting-before-closure rule and the case by case wording are from D4-1-4, date modified July 6, 2026, cited by paragraph number so you can check each one. The outage procedures are from the System Outage Contingency Plan, date modified April 22, 2026. Where we drew a conclusion the documents do not state, on BL tenancies, we said so in the same sentence.