Guide · Trusted-Trader Programs
How to Get a PIP Certification: the Application Walkthrough (2026)
Short answer: PIP (Partners in Protection) asks you to put your company, your security, and every partner who touches your freight on paper with CBSA, then keep all of it current as your chain changes. There is no membership fee. The real cost is the work — and most of that work is documentation most teams have never had to write down before.
PIP is not just for importers. It reaches importers, exporters, carriers across highway, rail, marine, and air, customs brokers, freight forwarders, warehouse operators, couriers, and shipping agents.
The profile is the program. Who holds the pen?
Step 1 — Confirm you are eligible
PIP is CBSA's Canadian trusted-trader program, the equivalent of CTPAT south of the border. If your business is an importer, exporter, carrier (highway, rail, marine, or air), customs broker, freight forwarder, warehouse operator, courier, or shipping agent, you are eligible to apply.
Step 2 — Complete the company profile
PIP starts with your company on paper: who you are, what you move, how your operation is structured. This is the baseline record CBSA works from for everything that follows.
Whoever owns this step needs to be someone who can keep it current, not just complete it once — an out-of-date profile is treated the same as an incomplete one.
Step 3 — Write the security profile
This is the real work of the application: your physical security, your personnel security, and your procedures, documented section by section the way CBSA expects to read them.
The standard to write to: procedures that match what actually happens on the floor, not what the binder says should happen — and evidence attached, not promised.
Step 4 — Document every business partner
Every carrier, warehouse, and handoff in your chain belongs in the record, with their security standing known, not assumed. This includes:
- A documented partner list, covering every entity that physically touches your freight.
- Security requirements communicated to each partner, not just filed internally.
- Partners who never answered, flagged rather than quietly dropped from the list.
Step 5 — Prepare for the practice to be checked, not just the paper
A profile is a claim. A CBSA review checks the claim against the dock, the driver, and the double shift, and the distance between the two is what fails a company.
Before that review arrives, be able to show:
- Procedures tested under real conditions, not only written down.
- Training records for the people who actually execute the procedures.
- Incidents and corrections on file — a documented fix is evidence of a working program; a clean file with no incidents on record is often read as a file nobody is watching.
Step 6 — Keep the profile alive after certification
New lane, new partner, new building: each one quietly outdates the profile. PIP membership is not a document you filed once — it is a document you keep alive, with a named owner and updates whenever routes or partners change, so it is review-ready on demand rather than rebuilt from memory when a review is announced.
Where PIP applications commonly stall
- The security profile sits half-finished because everyone who could write it already has a full-time job running the operation it describes.
- The partner list is incomplete — a chain documented at the direct-carrier level but silent on the sub-contracted leg of a route.
- The policy and the floor disagree — a procedure written for the profile that is not the procedure a driver or a warehouse team actually follows.
- Nobody owns keeping it current — the profile was completed once, for onboarding, and never touched again.
How PIP connects to CTPAT and AEO
Through mutual recognition, a verified PIP chain earns standing toward CTPAT and AEO — the same underlying evidence, read by a different authority. Run PIP as one cohesive assessment alongside those programs rather than a separate project, and your suppliers answer once instead of being asked the same question by three different forms.
Guide
Download: the PIP certification steps, print-ready
The same six-step walkthrough above, formatted to one printable page for whoever owns the application.
This page walks the application step by step. For what CBSA expects to see behind each step, read PIP certification in Canada: requirements and evidence.
The profile does not write itself
Run your 8 highest-risk partners through the full assessment, by request, no credit card, and see how to get a PIP certification, carried for you.
The programs this maps to: PIP · PIP certification in Canada · CTPAT vs PIP vs AEO · CTPAT