If you are willing to pre-borrow and pay a fee regardless if you trade the stock, then you can use the tools available.
Pre-Borrow is still reserved for portfolio margin customers. And portfolio margin isn't available to Canadian customers (even trading US equities). So Someone like me simply doesn't have access to the pre-borrow functionality. And I got a flat "NO" when asking about any locate functionality when asking IB support.
For the US markets if you have an offer on the screen, the SLB team will seek the stock and if they can locate it, will make it available. Naturally info such as size, history of the client, etc are factors. Small caps by their nature are hard to borrow.
So if you're a big enough customer you can just leave a live pending order on a HTB stock and IB will go do the external locate for you? I guess thats cool...But I really dont like the idea of leaving an order out there like that with no idea to know when it will be filled. I guess if its a limit it would work...but if you want to market in then you may just get filled at a random bad price. Cant wrap my head around how this workflow is supposed to work? Put a big limit order out there to sell a HTB stock...then you get that window that says contract is not available for short sale...then what?