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An export director at a European tire factory who wants to import tires into Canada will find plenty of advice about paperwork. Most of the first page of search results is customs brokers and duty calculators, and they do that part well. What they rarely say is who will actually buy an earthmover tire in Alberta or a flotation tire in Saskatchewan, and how that buyer decides to try a brand it has never run. This guide covers both halves for OTR and agricultural tires: the rules and the duty first, then the buyers and the channel, written from the seat of people who have sold tires to mining fleets and dealer networks.
The buyers are fewer than most manufacturers expect, and they are easy to name once you know where to look. On the OTR side they are mining and oil sands fleets, quarries and aggregate producers, earthmoving contractors, ports and forestry operators. On the agricultural side they are farm equipment dealerships, independent tire dealers in farming regions, and the equipment makers who fit tires at the factory.
For a mining fleet, the tire decision rarely sits with a category buyer. It sits with procurement and maintenance engineering together, and they judge a tire on cost per hour and on whether a replacement is available when a truck is down. Headline price comes later. That is why a new brand cannot sell OTR tires from a price list alone.
The tire importers in Canada that serve this segment are usually dealers with field service crews, because a large OTR tire is mounted at the mine, not in a shop. For a manufacturer, this means the first partner has to be able to service the tire as well as sell it.
New tires are governed by the Motor Vehicle Tire Safety Regulations, administered by Transport Canada (Justice Laws, SOR/2013-198). The standard that applies to most tires in this guide is CMVSS 119. It covers tires for vehicles with a gross vehicle weight rating above 4,536 kg, trailer (ST) tires and FI tires, which the regulations define as tires "designed for use only on farm implements that are occasionally driven or drawn on a road".
In practice, tire certification in Canada asks four things of the manufacturer and the importer:
Off-road tires need one more check. The CBSA memorandum on the importation of tires states that the designation for off-road use "must be clearly and permanently marked on the sidewalls", or the tire must be of an obvious off-road design; otherwise it is refused entry (CBSA Memorandum D19-12-2). Farm implement (FI) tires are named in the regulations. For mining and earthmover tires that never run on a public road, the regulations contain no explicit exclusion, so we confirm the position with Transport Canada before the first shipment rather than assume it either way.
New OTR and agricultural tires fall under heading 40.11 of the Customs Tariff. According to the CBSA Customs Tariff, Chapter 40, revised 1 September 2026 (CBSA, Customs Tariff 2026, Chapter 40):
The practical point is origin. An agricultural or OTR tire made in the EU that meets the agreement's origin rules enters duty free, while the same tire from a country without a Canadian trade agreement pays 6.5%. On a container of large tires, that difference can decide whether a dealer can match an incumbent. A customs broker confirms the rate before any quote.
Every duty above, and the declaration and record keeping, falls on the importing company. So before the first quote, the manufacturer has to decide whether the Canadian dealer imports the tires or the factory registers as a non-resident importer and delivers duty paid. Each answer changes the price the dealer sees and who carries the liability. We explained how this works in the first months of a representation in our piece on what a manufacturer's representative in Canada actually does.
OTR is a replacement purchase with a small, findable set of buyers. Every mine runs a known fleet, and tires are a significant line in its maintenance budget. A challenger brand wins by displacing the incumbent on cost per hour and availability, one fleet at a time. In the Middle East, our company introduced a challenger OTR brand to mining fleets and opened more than 12 major mining accounts in under a year, on exactly that argument. You can see that record on our tire and industrial distribution project page.
The route we would follow in Canada is the same. First, a trial on a few trucks or machines, with hours tracked and shared honestly, including the bad weeks. Second, stock held close enough to the site that a failed tire is replaced in days, not after a container crossing. Third, a dealer with field service who is willing to put its own name next to the brand. Agricultural tires follow the same logic with a different calendar: dealers book stock well ahead of the season and want the sizes that fit the equipment they already sell, with a clear warranty process behind them.
A manufacturer can build this itself, or appoint a sales agent in Canada who opens the first accounts while the factory keeps its own pricing and invoicing.
If we were advising an OTR or agricultural tire maker this week, we would ask a customs broker to classify each size and confirm the origin documents for the preferential rate, put the mining sizes in front of Transport Canada before anything ships, and choose one province and one segment to start. Then we would find two or three fleets or dealers willing to run a measured trial. Trial results move this market far more than a brochure does.
If it would help to talk it through, a short call is easy to book here: https://calendly.com/tehranitrading/introductory.
Twenty years of building brands in markets where they had never existed.
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