A quota of 160 canoers (40 slalom and 120 sprint) will be allowed to qualify.
Both slalom and sprint will have one qualification event each at the Pan American Olympic Festival, where a specific number of boats per event will qualify.
The remaining quotas (after teams select their squads) in sprint will be reallocated to countries not already qualified.
The remaining seven who competed (Barbados, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago and Uruguay) were eligible for the three remaining quotas reserved for countries not having any quotas at the qualification event.
However the results of the Pan American Championships were used instead to determine the wildcards, with two of the previously nations not qualified (Guatemala and Dominican Republic) receiving a quota, along with the United States in the women's canoe event.