How Sask. residents can travel to and from the U.S. with the least amount of delay

If your holiday travel plans include passing through one of Saskatchewan’s border crossings into the U.S. the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) has some tips to help make your trip as smooth as possible.

CBSA Chief at the North Portal crossing southeast of Estevan Scott Kienlen says people should make sure they are aware of their personal exemptions before attempting to cross the border.

“The biggest thing is knowing your personal exemptions, know what you’re allowed to bring back into Canada, you can check that out on our CBSA website,” Kienlen said in an interview with CTV Morning Live Saskatchewan.

Kienlen said that planning ahead as well and knowing wait times can be something easily overlooked.

“Especially for land borders, we have a border wait time application that’s available again on our CBSA website as well as our CBSA directory of our offices and there you can check the various office hours of our land borders in Saskatchewan.”

Two land border crossings in Saskatchewan are open 24 hours per day, seven days a week. Those are North Portal and Regway, which is located south of Moose Jaw.

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People also need to “be prepared to declare,” Kienlen said. “So all your goods that you’re brining back into Canada have your receipts handy and those types of things. If you are receiving some gifts while visiting family or friends per haps just leave them unwrapped when you’re coming through,” he added.

Kienlen said if Canadian travelers are in the United States for at least 48 hours they have a limit of $800 of goods that can be brought back.

“Within there is 40 ounces of alcohol or 1.5 litres of wine, 200 cigarettes or seven grams of tobacco and the dollar value is included in that $800.”

If you exceed the $800, Kienlen said duty taxes will be collected.

“Again you can reference our CBSA website and there’s a duty and tax collector there for your assistance,” he said.

According to Kienlen, in the first 10 months of 2023, border crossings across the prairies saw an excess of five million travellers.

“Things have gotten a lot busier from last year, we processed just over 5.5 million travellers in the prairies from January 1 to October 31st this year, that’s about two million more than what we did last year,” Kienlen said.

People can help reduce their wait time by travelling early in the morning.

“It’s not nearly as busy then and maybe a little quicker to go through.”

So far in 2023, CBSA’s prairie region has seized 77 firearms, 404 prohibited weapons along with various types of drugs, according to an agency report.

“We did have a really good year there in intercepting a lot of contraband, particularly narcotics and weapons, firearms in particular we seized 77 that’s 19 more than the previous year,” Kienlen explained.

According to Kienlen, illicit drug seizures are also up from around 1,500 last year to around 1,700.

“We are definitely intercepting more contraband coming into the country.”