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Question Regarding Vehicle Importation/US Export

Carson_99

Newbie
Dec 17, 2019
8
0
I'm in a bit of an interesting situation right now. I'm a US citizen living in Nova Scotia, and I drove my car from the US to Canada for while I study. Through reading I've been informed I never received any Import Form 1 from CBSA when I initially brought the car over, and I'm aware that, legally, I need to register my car with the province and obtain a Canadian license as I've been here for longer than 90 days. This much is fairly simple.

What complicates things is that I have a Proof of Citizenship Application in process, which I'm expecting to receive in the coming months. When I become a PR of Canada I will then have to Import my vehicle and therefore export it from the US, however my car is fairly old and I'm not sure it would even make the 7 hr drive to the nearest land border. I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with US CBP and Exporting the vehicle while it is already in Canada, or if that is even possible?

My options as of now are go through the hassle of registering my car with the province and getting a license as a temporary import, potentially outright importing the car to Canada as I'm not sure I foresee any more border crossings in its future (nearly 15 year old car), or I could do nothing, keep my US plates and license and roll the dice, saving me any sort of confusion if I miraculously was able to drive the vehicle to a border crossing, most likely just to sell or junk it.

Any advice?
 

Carson_99

Newbie
Dec 17, 2019
8
0
I should clarify here that I'm trying to be AS TRANSPARENT AS POSSIBLE WITH CBSA/CBP. I'm aware of the volume of car theft/fraud that takes place across intl. borders, I just want to make sure that I'm following the law.
 

mbaleine

Hero Member
Mar 13, 2019
275
166
Not only is it not possible to export a car from the US via CBP while the car is physically in Canada, you must in fact physically bring the car into the US, let it be in the US for at least 72 hours, before the CBP would allow you to export it.

With Canada and the US being separate countries, you can in practice still import your US car into Canada without exporting it from the US. Canada doesn't care if you exported it property with the CBP or not. For Canadian import you just fill in the Canadian forms and pay the Canadian fees/taxes. The only catch is that if you import your US car without exporting it, CBP will in theory never allow you to bring your car back into the US. Note "in theory" because in practice, how in the world would CBP know that your car had been imported into Canada without being exported from the US unless they specifically go into some obscure database to check, but then again, why in the world would CBP have any reason to run that check in the first place?

Importing/exporting car has nothing whatsoever to do with citizenship/PR status. New PRs moving to Canada are exempt from paying the import tax; that's pretty much all the connection there is.