Canada Customs Duties

Is This You?

You import goods into Canada. Your customs broker assures you everything is properly classified and you think your customs situation is in good shape. You find it hard to believe you could be leaving money on the table.

Who Can Know Everything?

What if there are new unpublished developments the broker doesn’t know about? And how can a broker know about all unpublished decisions? If something is missed, the result is often overpayment of customs duties – your overpayment.

Almost all of our clients were surprised at the extra duty relief and refunds we generated for them, and many are sophisticated importers.

Customs Rulings/DECISIONS in Canada

Decisions at the border on entry

Unpublished
Administrative appeal of tariff classification under section 59 of the Customs Act, and ruling

Unpublished
Administrative appeal of tariff classification under section 60 of the Customs Act, and ruling

Unpublished
Appeals to the Canadian International Trade Tribunal (CITT) Memorandums of Fact and Law

Unpublished
Advanced Rulings and Advanced Rulings Requests

Unpublished
Out-of court settlements prior to CITT hearings

Unpublished
Tariff rulings of the Canadian International Trade Tribunal

Published
Tariff rulings of the Federal Court of Appeal

Published
Tariff decisions Supreme Court of Canada

Published
Rationale of how court decisions on tariff classification can be transferable to other goods

Unpublished
Minutes of the Classification Committee of the World Customs Organization (WCO) dealing with tariff classification issues and opinions

Unpublished
Explanatory Notes of the Customs Act and WCO classification opinions

Published

How Do We Do It?

Simply put, we conduct unprecedented research and acquire better information faster. Sometimes we use the Access to Information Act to obtain disclosure of secret duty relief decisions. Over the past 20 years we've uncovered over 12,000 duty relief decisions that were never published.

Did you know that tariff classification and duty relief is a moving target impacted by many different sources? New rulings and decisions are issued every week. See the list.

Do you see how many sources of decisions and rulings are unpublished? How would your broker know about the unpublished decisions and rulings issued last week?

It is a full time job staying on top of the meanings of all of the published opinions, rulings and court decisions. But, what about the unpublished ones? Who researches that? We do.

On certain matters no one else has conducted the research we have. How do we know? Government sources have told us. "You are the first ones to ask us for this information and we are not sure how to generate the report."

How Will You Know?

If your competitor who imports the same thing you do applies for an Advanced Ruling (see 5. left) and gets duty relief, will he or she call you to share the good news?

Take the Road to Knowledge

If we've contacted you to offer our service, say yes. You have nothing to lose and much to gain. We contacted you because we have reason to believe we can help you lower your customs duty exposure. Perhaps we already have an unpublished decision or two relating to your imports. Or, perhaps we have a rationale for new duty relief on some of your products. If such an advantage is available along with a refund, why wouldn't you take it?

Can We Share Our Information With You?

Our clients get access to all applicable duty relief information which we've researched. As our client, you can take any favourable ruling we give you to your customs broker and apply it on your next importation to realize immediate duty savings.

4 Examples of Duty Relief

Jeffrey Goernert demonstrates and explains four real examples of duty relief we created for clients.

Three are unpublished and one is published. The published ruling was on IC recorders for Sony. To read the published ruling click here. You can see our Marco Ouellet and Jeffrey Goernert listed under Appearances for the appellant in this Ruling of the Canadian International Trade Tribunal.