Disclosure of funds at a Canadian airport

score:3

Accepted answer

If you are actually carrying (including your checked luggage) more than $10,000 Canadian in cash or certain bearer-type instruments, then you should pro-actively declare it.

The country you are leaving (and possibly other countries you are traveling through such as the US) may have similar regulations, which would usually be in their own currency, of course. They're interested in the total amount of value- if you have $10,000 US equivalent in Vietnamese dong the US authorities need to know at their border, or your cash could end up being theirs. It's not a problem (generally) if you declare it and have some kind of plausible reason for having that much cash, or so I'm told.

It's unlikely you will be asked exactly how much money you have, but you should have a reasonable amount for your stay. If you told them $2,000 and you have $50 in your pocket they might question your intentions and how you were going to support yourself while in-country, which would lead to more questions and more opportunities for something to come up that does not support your entry.

Upvote:2

There are two reasons why they asked you this question. One is that they want to be sure that you have enough money for the time that you'll be in Canada and enough to leave as well... Then the second one is that there are some limitations in the amount of money you can travel with. For instance, if you had indicated that you would come with 1 million CAD, they would probably have questioned by you were traveling with so much money.

The delta between what you have declared and what you really have doesn't really matter as long as it isn't significant.

To be honest, I believe these kind of controls are rather random. They will only check in details if they have some doubts or if you aren't lucky :)

Upvote:4

Is this a problem? Will they ask me at the airport how much money I have on me? Can they access my visa application and ask why I didn't bring as much as I promised?

  1. No, it's not a problem.
  2. Maybe but only to check you don't carry more than 10K in cash which you'd need to report.
  3. Access, I believe yes but that's likely to be not relevant.
  4. Bring? Noone carries piles of cash any more to cover their stay, everyone uses debit/credit cards.

Altogether: no, this is not a likely avenue of questioning.

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