Mark Carney sells himself as the competent manager who will get Ottawa delivering again. On October 29, the Auditor General showed what that looks like at the border: an $800-million computer system that does its core job, but only because federal employees are propping it up with dozens of manual workarounds and the old technology it was supposed to retire.
The system is called CARM, the Canada Border Services Agency Assessment and Revenue Management system. It handles the money side of commercial imports. And as the Auditor General’s office put it in its news release, it “did not generate the expected efficiencies and value for money.”
This is not a side project
Customs duties and taxes on imported commercial goods are the federal government’s second-largest source of revenue after income taxes. According to the audit, they totalled around $42 billion in the 2024–25 fiscal year.
That matters even more now. Since the trade war began, Ottawa has used surtaxes on American goods as a weapon, and importers report those through the customs system. The CBSA’s own customs notice on the U.S. surtax order and its CARM portal guide for surtax declarations show how it works: importers self-declare what they owe. A government picking tariff fights with Washington needs that machinery running cleanly. It isn’t.
Thirty-eight workarounds and counting
CARM went live in October 2024. The agency planned to eliminate all manual workarounds within a year. The Auditor General found that “manual workarounds still existed 20 months later,” with at least 38 of them still in place at the end of the audit period.
Those workarounds aren’t free. The audit says the agency expects to spend at least 92,000 hours of employee time a year just navigating them. Every one of those hours, the report notes, is time not spent assessing “additional risky declarations.” In plain terms, staff are fighting their own software instead of checking whether importers paid what they owe.
The Logic summed it up bluntly: Canada’s new $800-million customs tool is so glitchy that agents are using the old one. In her opening statement on the reports, Auditor General Karen Hogan explained why: “some functions that the new system was meant to include were deferred to meet the planned deployment date.”
Over budget, and quietly raiding other budgets
The money tells the same story. The audit’s figures show total development and maintenance costs reached $804 million by 2025–26, against a budget that had been raised three times and still came up about $60 million short. On the maintenance side alone, the agency used about $88 million from its non-CARM budget to cover the gap, and the audit says shortfalls “were forecast to continue.”
The CBSA’s own update on CARM stresses that core development came in under its approved budget and that the portal is online 99% of the time. That’s the spin. The Auditor General’s finding is the bottom line: costs were underestimated, and the agency covered the shortfall by taking money from other parts of its budget. At an agency whose job is the border, that is not a rounding error.
Businesses left waiting
Importers carried the cost too. The audit found businesses filed an average of 19,000 requests for help a month. The agency couldn’t keep up. Its own data show the unresolved backlog climbing to 14,703 in June 2025, months into Carney’s time in office, and still sitting above 4,000 as of June 2026. The average fix took 34 days. Some requests were open for more than 500 days.
And there was no service standard at all, so a business had no idea when, or whether, it would get an answer. This is during a trade war, when Canadian companies are already absorbing tariff costs and scrambling to reroute supply chains.
“Not positioned to assess” value for money
Perhaps the most damning line is the simplest. Because most of the CBSA’s performance indicators were not designed to measure CARM’s benefits, the Auditor General concluded the agency “is not positioned to assess whether CARM is providing the value for money that was expected.”
After $800 million, Ottawa can’t tell you whether it got its money’s worth.
Carney owns this now
Yes, CARM began long before Carney. It started in 2010 and launched under Justin Trudeau. But Carney has been Prime Minister since March 2025, which covers most of the 20 months the workarounds have survived. The backlog peaked on his watch. The audit’s figures show accumulated maintenance costs climbed by about $69 million in 2025–26 alone, on his watch. Hogan’s broader verdict on this round of audits applies squarely to his government: organizations “were slow to address known issues,” which “contributed to delays, higher costs, and programs that did not deliver their expected benefits.”
This comes as Carney prepares to table his budget on Thursday, November 5. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has already warned, as the Globe and Mail reported, that federal debt is on track to reach $1.67 trillion by 2030–31. A government asking Canadians to trust it with ever more borrowing should first be able to show it can run the system that collects $42 billion a year at the border.
Right now, it can’t. It’s running that system on workarounds, borrowed budgets and the old software it promised to retire.
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