[angman]

Hi Suburban99 welcome to the forum. The Boxster will be a great purchase for you regardless of what year or model.

I'm from Vancouver and I honestly thinik your budget is a bit too low (espeially if you have to import one yourself). Boxsters are fairly good and reliable cars (although we all have our minor issues and annoyances). However, mileage seem to dictate pricing on these cars more than anything and if you're looking for under 20K Canadian you're looking at a very high mileage car from the states.
It's great that you work on your own car but parts can get expensive and the higher the mileage the more that needs to be replaced or looked after.

If you are importing one yourself you will need to pay 6% duty as well as taxes and the actual cost of bringing one to Canada. A broker can do it for you for a cost of about $1500-2000 on top of the fees and taxes. If you do it yourself you will need to factor in travel, accomodations, time, insurance and fuel as well. From what I have noticed you can pick up a pretty good boxtser locally for about 20K to start. I have seen a few sell over the past year for 16K to 18K but they were in horrible shape and very high mileage.

If you were to import from somewere closer to avoid expensive airfare and travel/transportation costs and go to Seattle or Portland their prices are not significantly better once you factor in all the costs.

Good luck with your search, it will be worth it.