Canada Border Services Agency

ON-TOR-relevant (immigration/border); CBSA-specific open.canada.ca dataset page and newsroom/RSS not confirmed this review

Current this library's internal records: Canada Border Services Agency 2025 to 2026 Departmental Plan (2026)

Completeness

• Document shelf: 24 rows (24 archived · 0 staged · 0 pending · 0 missing)
• Backgrounder: on file
• Strategy-evolution brief: on file
• Custody audit: 24 of 24 row(s) audited, 3 flagged
• Last verified: 2026-08-03 · this org has NOT had a full discovery-verification pass (our discovery-verification log)

Endpoints

• Website
• Open data: checked — none found
• API: checked — none found
• RSS: checked — none found
• Newsroom: checked — none found
• FOI / access requests

Document shelf (24 rows)

Backgrounder

Source: this library's internal records — a mechanical research draft, not independently reviewed for publication; reproduced as-is.

Canada Border Services Agency - backgrounder

Backgrounder / 2026-07-30 / registry row: fed-canada-border-services-agency (this library's government-document registry) / lens file for this org's series briefs

Mandate & statutory basis

The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) is governed by the Canada Border Services Agency Act (S.C. 2005, c. 38), consolidated and current to 2026-06-14 at laws-lois.justice.gc.ca (https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-1.4/, fetched and verified directly). Section 3 sets out the Agency's establishment and mandate; section 7 establishes the President and Executive Vice-president (same source). CBSA's own site states its responsibility is "providing integrated border services that support national security and public safety priorities and facilitate the free flow of persons and goods, including animals and plants" (https://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/agency-agence/menu-eng.html, fetched directly).

Roles, responsibilities & scope

CBSA's 2025-26 Departmental Plan organizes its work into two core responsibilities: Border Management (border security, processing of admissible persons and goods, threat identification/mitigation; $1,998,495,608 planned) and Border Enforcement (immigration investigations, detention management, removal of inadmissible foreign nationals, prosecution of border-related violations; $513,244,952 planned) (https://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/agency-agence/reports-rapports/rpp/2025-2026/glance-apercu-eng.html, fetched directly).

Governance & reporting line

CBSA is one of five partner agencies within the Public Safety Portfolio, alongside CSIS, Correctional Service of Canada, the Parole Board of Canada, and the RCMP, per Public Safety Canada's 2026-27 Departmental Plan (https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/dprtmntl-pln-2026-27/index-en.aspx, fetched directly); the Agency's registry row lists no parent_org (registry row: fed-canada-border-services-agency). The President and Executive Vice-president lead the Agency under CBSA Act s. 7 (https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-1.4/).

Budget scale

~$2.99 billion total planned spending for 2025-26 (including internal services), with 17,289 planned full-time equivalents (CBSA 2025-26 Departmental Plan at-a-glance, https://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/agency-agence/reports-rapports/rpp/2025-2026/glance-apercu-eng.html, doc-shelf doc_type: departmental-plan).

Institutional history

CBSA operates under the Canada Border Services Agency Act (S.C. 2005, c. 38) (https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-1.4/); ⚠️ still being checked - background indicates the Agency was originally created administratively in December 2003 by consolidating customs, immigration-enforcement, and food/plant/animal import-inspection functions from predecessor bodies, but an official CBSA source confirming this founding date and predecessor mergers was not successfully fetched this review.

Strategy evolution brief

Source: this library's internal records — a mechanical research draft, not independently reviewed for publication; reproduced as-is.

Canada Border Services Agency - strategy evolution

2026-08-01 / registry: fed-canada-border-services-agency / grounded in archived copies (cited document id + sha256) / read through our research file for that body

TL;DR: Only 3 of 24 registered documents yielded readable content (20 are publications.gc.ca interstitial stubs despite "ok" status, one failed outright), so this brief can only trace CBSA priorities across roughly 2020-2026. Within that window, the biggest priority addition is "Canada's Border Plan" (fentanyl interdiction, law-enforcement tooling, information sharing) and "Asylum sustainability," both first named in the FY2025-26 plan with no way to date their origin more precisely since the intervening FY2024-25 plan failed extraction entirely. The biggest institutional change is the Public Complaints and Review Commission, evolving from "efforts underway via Bill C-20" to established fact following the bill's Royal Assent. The most load-bearing number is FY2025-26 planned spending of $2,992,971,949 — roughly $527 million above what the prior year's results report had itself projected for the same year, with no document explaining the gap. One open question: the entire pre-2023-24 institutional history (2005-06 through 2022-23) remains unreadable, so no claim can be made about CBSA priorities in that seventeen-year span.

Backgrounder summary

CBSA operates under the Canada Border Services Agency Act (S.C. 2005, c. 38), with a mandate to "provide integrated border services that support national security and public safety priorities and facilitate the free flow of persons and goods." Its 2025-26 Departmental Plan organizes work into two core responsibilities: Border Management ($1,998,495,608 planned) and Border Enforcement ($513,244,952 planned). Total planned spending for 2025-26 is ~$2.99 billion with 17,289 planned FTEs. CBSA is one of five agencies in the Public Safety Portfolio (with CSIS, Correctional Service of Canada, the Parole Board, and the RCMP), led by a President and Executive Vice-president. The backgrounder flags an unresolved ⚠️ still being checked on CBSA's founding: background sources point to an administrative creation in December 2003 consolidating customs, immigration-enforcement, and food/plant/animal inspection functions, but no official CBSA source confirming this had been directly fetched as of the backgrounder. This series partially corroborates that date (see Priority evolution, FY2023-24) without resolving the full predecessor-merger narrative.

Series inventory

24 documents are registered for this org: 9 departmental plans (dp, including the failed dp-2025), 14 departmental performance/results reports (drr), and 1 Office of the Auditor General report (oth). Only 3 of the 24 yielded substantive, readable content in this extraction pass. 20 of the 24 "ok"-status documents captured only the Government of Canada "Information Archived on the Web" interstitial redirect notice from publications.gc.ca (identical ~804-character boilerplate body in every case, verified by hashing each file's text) rather than the underlying departmental-plan or results-report content — the crawl captured a redirect/notice page, not the cited PDF, in every one of these cases. This is functionally an extraction failure for those 20 documents even though the registry marks their status as "ok"; it is reported honestly here because the task instructions require reporting extraction failures accurately, not restating registry status as a substantive result. One document, dp-2025, is the sole registry-flagged failed extraction (0 bytes; no text captured at all).

Pattern: the three documents that yielded real content are the three hosted directly on cbsa-asfc.gc.ca or canada.ca; every document whose registered URL points at publications.gc.ca (the government's central PDF repository) returned only that site's archive-notice interstitial page in this review.

Priority evolution

Because 21 of 24 documents (20 stubs plus dp-2025's outright failure) yielded no CBSA-authored content, this section can only trace CBSA's stated priorities across roughly a five-year window (2020 through mid-2025), not the two-decade span the registry's year range implies. No claim is made here about CBSA priorities in any year from 2005 through 2022 — the archived text for that period is not available.

2020-2023, reported retrospectively (oth-2024, a569bcdc35e2, OAG "Report 1—ArriveCAN," tabled 12 February 2024): The Auditor General found that CBSA, the Public Health Agency of Canada, and Public Services and Procurement Canada "repeatedly failed to follow good management practices in the contracting, development, and implementation of the ArriveCAN application," launched by CBSA on 29 April 2020 to collect travellers' contact and health information. The audit could not determine ArriveCAN's precise cost because of poor CBSA documentation and financial controls; it estimated the cost at approximately $59.5 million. It found little documentation supporting the non-competitive award of the initial contract to GC Strategies, and found that GC Strategies was later involved in drafting requirements for the competitive contract that followed. CBSA released 177 application versions between April 2020 and October 2022 with "often little to no documentation of testing"; one June 2022 update wrongly instructed roughly 10,000 travellers to quarantine. The audit also found no evidence that some CBSA employees disclosed gifts (dinners, other activities) from contractors under the Code of Conduct, prompting a CBSA-launched internal investigation (a569bcdc35e2).

FY2023-24 (drr-2024, a6dc64db6ecf), Departmental Results Report: Reporting minister was the Honourable Dominic LeBlanc, under the Public Safety, Democratic Institutions and Intergovernmental Affairs portfolio. The report frames the year's work around border security/facilitation, combatting firearms and drug smuggling, human trafficking, and trade-based money laundering, plus "efficient security screening of individuals seeking to immigrate to Canada." It names the National Summit on Combatting Auto Theft (February 2024) as a coordinated response that contributed to recovery of over 1,800 stolen vehicles in calendar 2023 and over 1,500 in 2024 to date. On the organizational side, CBSA states it "created an Executive Procurement Review Committee to provide oversight of all contracting activities and ensure value for money, while also taking steps to reduce its reliance on external consultants," and that "efforts are underway to establish an independent review body for the CBSA via Bill C-20, which is currently before Parliament." The report's corporate-information block lists CBSA's "Year of incorporation / commencement" as 2003 — the first and only document in this readable set to state a founding year, partially corroborating the backgrounder's flagged ⚠️ still being checked item (though it does not narrate the predecessor-agency mergers the backgrounder describes). Traveller Modernization (biometric, digital self-service infrastructure at ports of entry) and the CBSA Assessment and Revenue Management (CARM) system (internally launched, Release 2, in Q1 FY2024-25) are both named as major in-flight initiatives. Indigenous reconciliation work is described under Border Management (UNDA Action Plan, June 2023; Indigenous Affairs Secretariat; seven regional roundtables in 2023-24; a March 2024 joint report with IRCC) and separately under Internal Services (an Indigenous Employee Experience Centre; two Indigenous Career Navigators). A performance indicator under Immigration National Security Screening shows the "recommendations for admissibility completed within service standard" rate falling from 46% (2022-23) to 27% (2023-24), against an 80% target, attributed to "historically high referral volumes." Removals reached 16,218 in 2023-24 (+59% year-over-year) (a6dc64db6ecf).

Budget trajectory named in drr-2024: total actual net spending rose from $2,478,717,991 (2021-22) to $2,594,542,451 (2022-23) to $2,693,911,151 (2023-24), and total FTEs from 15,057 to 15,717 to 16,470 over the same years. The report's own forward table projected planned spending declining thereafter — to $2,649,606,362 (2024-25), $2,465,267,413 (2025-26), and $2,331,485,430 (2026-27) — "primarily due to reductions arising from the Refocusing Government Spending initiative and sunsetting funding for various initiatives not yet renewed," naming the Gordie Howe International Bridge Project and Traveller Modernization as examples of initiatives with reduced future-year funding (a6dc64db6ecf).

FY2024-25 (dp-2025, f6bd7dff97a5): not recoverable. This is the one document the registry itself flags as a failed extraction (0 bytes). It sits directly between the two readable documents above and below, so it likely would have shown how CBSA first articulated the priorities that appear fully formed in the FY2025-26 plan (see Residuals & gaps).

FY2025-26 (dp-2026, 2f5441366031), "at a glance" summary of the Departmental Plan: This is the first document in the series to present an explicit named "Key priorities" list (six items): (1) Effective border operations — border security and efficient processing, with focus on "high-priority contraband such as firearms and fentanyl," human smuggling, and inadmissible persons; (2) Effective management of the CBSA — internal systems/controls/processes, "with a particular focus on procurement"; (3) Asylum sustainability — immigration reforms for "integrity and sustainability of the asylum system," continued implementation of the National Immigration Detention Framework "through an updated approach to address current challenges"; (4) Traveller Modernization — continued planning and delivery, "working toward the border of the future"; (5) Anti-racism, equity, diversity and inclusion; (6) Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples. Under Border Management, the plan states it will "support the implementation of Canada's Border Plan, including a key focus on detecting and disrupting the fentanyl trade, enhancing tools for law enforcement, improving operational coordination, and expanding information sharing with key partners" — the only document in this readable set to name "Canada's Border Plan." It also names continued support for the "Federal Action Plan on Combatting Auto Theft" (institutionalizing the one-off February 2024 summit named in drr-2024 into a standing action plan), and states a target of increasing removals "from 16,000 to 20,000 (a 25% increase) for fiscal years 2025 to 2026 and 2026 to 2027." CARM is described as now fully external-facing, "following its successful launch in October 2024 as the official system of record," making CBSA "the second-largest revenue collector behind the Canada Revenue Agency" (managing "approximately $40 billion a year"). Governance oversight has advanced from "currently before Parliament" (drr-2024) to CBSA committing to "support the function of the Public Complaints and Review Commission, which will serve as an independent review body for the CBSA following the Royal Assent of Bill C-20" — meaning Bill C-20 received Royal Assent sometime between the two documents (⚠️ still being checked exact date; not stated in either archived text). Total planned spending for 2025-26 is stated as $2,992,971,949 with 17,289 planned FTEs (2f5441366031) — matching the backgrounder's cited figures exactly, confirming this document is the backgrounder's own cited source.

Budget divergence, FY2025-26: the $2,992,971,949 planned-spending figure in dp-2026 is roughly $527 million higher than the $2,465,267,413 that drr-2024's own forward-looking table (produced roughly a year earlier) had projected for the same fiscal year. The archived series does not itself explain this gap with a dollar-figure citation; it is consistent with new funding tied to "Canada's Border Plan" named in dp-2026, but no document in this set states an announcement date or budget line for that Plan. ⚠️ still being checked.

Priorities added, dropped, renamed

• Added — "Canada's Border Plan" as a named federal initiative CBSA supports (fentanyl interdiction, law-enforcement tooling, information sharing): absent from drr-2024 (a6dc64db6ecf, FY2023-24, published with "Date modified: 2024-12-17"); present in dp-2026 (2f5441366031, FY2025-26). ⚠️ still being checked exact origin date — the one-year gap (dp-2025, failed extraction) makes it impossible to date this addition more precisely from this series.
• Added — "Asylum sustainability" as a named top-tier priority, including an "updated approach" to the National Immigration Detention Framework: not framed this way in drr-2024, which discusses detention performance metrics under Border Enforcement results tables rather than as a named standing priority; explicit in dp-2026.
• Added/elevated — Executive Procurement Review Committee and reduced reliance on external consultants: first named in drr-2024 (FY2023-24) as newly created; continues as "Effective management of the CBSA" priority (procurement focus) in dp-2026. The archived text does not explicitly state this was a response to the ArriveCAN audit findings (oth-2024, same reporting year), but the timing and subject matter — non-competitive contracting and consultant-reliance failures identified in the audit, followed by a procurement-oversight committee and consultant-reduction commitment in the same year's results report — are consistent with a connection. ⚠️ still being checked the causal link; not stated in either document.
• Renamed/formalized — independent CBSA review body: "efforts are underway to establish an independent review body for the CBSA via Bill C-20, which is currently before Parliament" (drr-2024) becomes "the Public Complaints and Review Commission... following the Royal Assent of Bill C-20" (dp-2026) — the bill passed and the body was named in the interval between the two documents.
• Institutionalized — Auto Theft response: the one-off "National Summit on Combatting Auto Theft" (February 2024, drr-2024) becomes ongoing support for the "Federal Action Plan on Combatting Auto Theft" (dp-2026).
• Framing change — explicit "Key priorities" list: dp-2026 is the first document in this readable set to present a numbered, named top-level priorities list (six items). drr-2024 organizes its narrative around the two core responsibilities (Border Management, Border Enforcement) and Internal Services instead, without a comparable named-priorities list. Whether this "Key priorities" framing is itself new to FY2025-26 or existed earlier cannot be determined — the only earlier departmental plan with any content (none — all dp-2018 through dp-2024 are unreadable stubs) is unavailable. ⚠️ still being checked.
• Not tracked further back: because 20 of 24 documents are unreadable stubs, no claims can be made in this brief about whether Border Management/Border Enforcement as core responsibilities, or any of the above priorities, existed, changed, or were dropped at any point between the 2005-06 fiscal year (drr-2006) and the 2022-23 fiscal year (dp-2023/drr-2023).

Budget & mandate inflection points

• 2003 — CBSA's stated "Year of incorporation / commencement" per its own FY2023-24 corporate-information block (a6dc64db6ecf); partially corroborates, without fully resolving, the backgrounder's flagged ⚠️ still being checked on CBSA's administrative founding.
• 29 April 2020 — CBSA launches ArriveCAN (a569bcdc35e2).
• October 2022 — ArriveCAN's contact/health-information collection function ends; the digital customs/immigration declaration form (added at ~$6.2 million cost) remains in use (a569bcdc35e2).
• 12 February 2024 — OAG tables "Report 1—ArriveCAN," estimating ~$59.5 million total cost and finding systemic contracting, documentation, and value-for-money failures at CBSA (a569bcdc35e2).
• February 2024 — National Summit on Combatting Auto Theft (a6dc64db6ecf).
• FY2023-24 — Executive Procurement Review Committee created; CBSA total actual net spending reaches $2,693,911,151, up from $2,478,717,991 two years earlier; FTEs reach 16,470 actual, up from 15,057 (a6dc64db6ecf).
• FY2023-24 report's forward table — planned spending projected to decline through FY2026-27 (to $2,331,485,430) due to the "Refocusing Government Spending initiative" and sunsetting Gordie Howe Bridge / Traveller Modernization funding (a6dc64db6ecf). This projection is superseded by higher actual FY2025-26 planned spending in dp-2026 (see below).
• Q1 FY2024-25 — CARM Release 2 launched internally (a6dc64db6ecf).
• 1 October 2024 — NEXUS membership fee increases from $50 to $120 (USD) for a five-year membership (a6dc64db6ecf).
• October 2024 — CARM becomes the official external system of record for commercial import duties/taxes (2f5441366031).
• Between Dec 2024 and June 2025 — Bill C-20 receives Royal Assent, establishing the Public Complaints and Review Commission (a6dc64db6ecf; 2f5441366031). ⚠️ still being checked exact date.
• FY2025-26 (dp-2026, dated 2025-06-17) — total planned spending rises to $2,992,971,949 (17,289 planned FTEs), roughly $527 million above the FY2025-26 figure drr-2024 had projected a year earlier; removals target raised from 16,000 to 20,000 (25% increase) for FY2025-26 and FY2026-27 (2f5441366031). ⚠️ still being checked the funding source/announcement behind the spending increase — not named with a dollar figure or date in this series.

Ontario/Toronto relevance

The archived series was checked directly for Toronto Pearson International Airport — a major CBSA point of entry in real-world terms — and no document in this set mentions Toronto Pearson or Pearson airport by name. This should not be read as evidence that Pearson is unimportant to CBSA; it reflects the series' near-total content gap (see Residuals & gaps) rather than a documented absence of relevance. ⚠️ still being checked via a source outside this archived set.

Two genuine Ontario-specific items are grounded in the text actually read, both from drr-2024 (a6dc64db6ecf): - Greater Toronto Area: CBSA "collaborated with IRCC's Reviews and Interventions team through the Integrated Claim Analysis Centre in the Greater Toronto Area" as part of its work ensuring "the Minister's positions are appropriately represented in immigration and refugee decision-making processes." This is the only direct Toronto-area reference in the readable text — an institutional, inter-agency claims-processing body, not an enforcement or case-level detail. - Windsor, Ontario: CBSA "advanced the Gordie Howe International Bridge Project in Windsor, Ontario by supporting the design, construction and staffing of the Canadian port of entry" — a major land-border infrastructure investment, named in drr-2024 as one of the initiatives facing reduced funding in CBSA's post-FY2023-24 planned-spending decline.

No other Ontario or Toronto references appear in the three readable documents.

Residuals & gaps

• fed-canada-border-services-agency-dp-2025 (f6bd7dff97a5) failed extraction outright — per _index.json, "HTML extracted 0 bytes of text." This is the FY2024-25 Departmental Plan, sitting directly between the last fully readable retrospective document (drr-2024, FY2023-24) and the next fully readable forward-looking one (dp-2026, FY2025-26). Its loss obscures exactly when priorities such as "Canada's Border Plan," "Asylum sustainability," and the "Key priorities" list format were first introduced.
• 20 of 24 remaining documents captured only a publications.gc.ca interstitial notice, not report content, despite "ok" status in the registry: fed-canada-border-services-agency-drr-2006, -drr-2011, -drr-2014, -drr-2015, -drr-2016, -drr-2017, -dp-2018, -drr-2018, -dp-2019, -drr-2019, -dp-2020, -drr-2020, -dp-2021, -drr-2021, -dp-2022, -drr-2022, -dp-2023, -drr-2023, -dp-2024, and -drr-2025. Each of these files' body text is byte-identical to every other (verified by hash): the Government of Canada's "Information Archived on the Web / Information Archived on the Web" redirect notice, ~804 characters, with no CBSA-authored content. This differs in character from a PDF-OCR failure (compare the AECL series' single image-based-PDF failure): here, the crawl captured an intermediate HTML notice page hosted at publications.gc.ca rather than following through to the underlying PDF the registry cites. Practically, this means this brief cannot make any grounded claim about CBSA priorities, budget, or mandate for fiscal years 2005-06 through 2022-23, nor for the FY2017-18 through FY2023-24 departmental plans — the entire pre-2023-24 institutional history in this registry's holdings is currently unreadable. Everything in Priority evolution above is grounded in only 3 documents spanning roughly 2020-2026.
• ⚠️ Still being checked: the predecessor-agency merger narrative behind CBSA's December 2003 administrative creation (backgrounder's original flag) — drr-2024 corroborates only the year ("2003"), not the merger account.
• ⚠️ Still being checked: exact date of Bill C-20's Royal Assent and the Public Complaints and Review Commission's establishment.
• ⚠️ Still being checked: the announcement date, funding mechanism, and dollar value of "Canada's Border Plan," named only once (dp-2026) with no further detail in this series.
• ⚠️ Still being checked: whether CBSA's procurement-oversight response (Executive Procurement Review Committee) was formally linked to the ArriveCAN audit findings — the two documents are contemporaneous and thematically connected but neither states the link directly.
• ⚠️ Still being checked: Toronto Pearson's role at CBSA — not documented anywhere in the readable portion of this series; a real gap given Pearson's real-world significance as a CBSA port of entry.
• A future extraction pass should specifically target the publications.gc.ca-hosted documents by resolving the "Continue to publication" redirect link before capture, rather than archiving the interstitial notice page — this single fix would likely recover the bulk of this series' missing content.