Customs Brokers near you

Customs brokers in Canada are licensed by the CBSA. Its Memorandum D1-8-1 states that only licensed customs brokers may account for goods and pay duties under section 32 of the Customs Act as the agent of the owner or importer, and that a licence authorizes the holder to transact business as a customs broker at any CBSA commercial office in Canada. Applicants must also post financial security before a licence is approved.

The Customs Brokers Licensing Regulations set out who can qualify. An individual applicant must be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident, at least eighteen years old, of good character, with sufficient financial resources and knowledge of the laws and procedures relating to importing and exporting, demonstrated by examination. A corporation must be incorporated in Canada, with a majority of directors who are citizens or residents, and at least one officer who has the required knowledge. Partnerships must have members who each meet the individual qualifications.

You can check a brokerage against the CBSA's own published list of licensed customs brokers, which gives official business names along with their websites and contact addresses. Ask for the licence held by the company you are dealing with rather than assuming that a freight company offering to handle clearance holds one itself.

The CBSA Assessment and Revenue Management system, known as CARM, is the official system of record for assessing and collecting duties and taxes on commercial goods imported into Canada. Before you import or export, your business needs a business number and an import-export program account, referred to as an RM account. Registration happens in the CARM Client Portal, and the first person to register the business becomes its business account manager, who then approves access for everyone else.

This matters when you hire a broker because the relationship now runs through your own portal account. The business account manager delegates access so the brokerage can act on your behalf, which means you keep visibility of your transactions, statements and balances rather than seeing them only through an intermediary. Businesses that want their goods released before duties and taxes are paid enrol in the Release Prior to Payment sub-program and post the required financial security themselves.

A practical consequence is that onboarding a broker is no longer instantaneous. Register the business, confirm who your account manager is, and grant the delegation before your first shipment is due, not while a container is sitting at the border.

A freight forwarder arranges the physical movement of your goods; a customs broker handles their entry into the country. Many companies offer both, either under one roof or through an affiliate, and that can be convenient because the transport and the declaration draw on the same documents. The trade-off is visibility: when one invoice covers freight, clearance and disbursements, it is harder to see what you are paying for each part, so ask for the components to be itemised.

Clearing your own goods is legally possible for an importer acting on its own behalf, and some businesses with a narrow, stable product range do exactly that. It becomes a poor bargain as soon as the range widens, the origin rules get complicated or the volume grows, because the cost of a misclassification repeated across hundreds of transactions dwarfs what a brokerage would have charged. Businesses that import occasionally but unpredictably tend to be the worst candidates for doing it themselves.

Brokerage is usually billed as an entry fee per transaction, with additional charges for extra classification lines, other government department releases, corrections and after-hours work. Separate from the fee is the disbursement question: if the broker advances duties and taxes on your behalf, expect terms and possibly a credit check, and under the current portal arrangements many importers now pay the CBSA directly instead. Ask which model a brokerage uses, because it changes your cash flow more than the entry fee does.

On LokalMatch you describe the import once, including the kind of goods, where they come from and roughly how often you ship, and the request goes to customs brokers serving your area. They contact you with their own terms. LokalMatch is not a broker, does not clear goods and does not set anyone's fees; brokers pay for the requests they receive, which is how the service stays free for the business making the enquiry.