Delays at Passport Offices | New strategy to eliminate long lines

(Ottawa) Passport office managers will have to be at work by 7 a.m. Wednesday to give tickets to people who have been queuing for days outside Service Canada offices. This appointment system will be accessible to people who have a trip in less than 48 hours.

Mylene Crete
The Press

“It’s not possible to treat 500 people in an office in a day, so it’s really to prioritize people who need to travel urgently,” said the Minister of Families, Children and of Social Development, Karina Gould, in an interview.

His ministry is facing an “unprecedented” number of requests with the lifting of health restrictions. People want to travel outside the country after going without during the two-year pandemic.

There are queues in front of passport offices in all the major cities of the country, but it is in Quebec that the situation is most critical.

Many departures on trips are planned as the end of classes and the Saint-Jean-Baptiste holiday approach. Others have applied for passports in anticipation of the construction holiday at the end of July.

People who receive a ticket with the new appointment system will be asked to leave the line to return at a given time the same day or the next day. Managers and Service Canada employees will also have to inform travelers whose trip is less urgent to prevent them from waiting outside their offices for nothing.

“It’s to make sure people in line have the information they need,” she explained. There are people who only go to check the status of their passport. You don’t have to queue for that. »

They will be able to get appointments in the following days, the minister’s office said.

The government received a high volume of passport applications in the mail. Normally, the application should be processed within 20 days, but some people have been waiting for months. They have no news as their departure approaches.

People who have to leave during the National Day weekend should go to one of the Service Canada offices specializing in passport applications tomorrow or Thursday to make their urgent request. They must bring their documents and bring their plane ticket as proof of travel.

Reinforcement from the Revenue Agency

The government is trying to convince some 200 temporary employees of the Canada Revenue Agency to help it deal with the passport crisis. The request has been sent, but it is not known how many will respond to the call.

“We are looking for hundreds of them,” exclaimed the minister.

These Canada Revenue Agency employees find themselves out of work after tax time and the government hopes they will agree to work for Service Canada.

They would be added to the 600 employees already hired by the government to process the numerous passport applications and the 600 others who must be recruited.

Minister Gould also hopes to get help from the Departments of Immigration and Global Affairs.

reactions

In Quebec, the failures of the federal government made the Minister of Canadian Relations, Sonia LeBel, react. “It’s insane to see people camping to get a passport,” she wrote on Twitter. We invite the federal government to quickly find a solution in order to process requests more adequately. »

Conservatives and Bloc members continued to criticize the minister and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for their mishandling of the crisis on Tuesday. Despite everything, Karina Gould remained calm during the interview. “We know this is one of the biggest challenges and we have to solve it,” she acknowledged.

His department had prepared for an increase in passport applications, but not of this magnitude. The high volume of mail-in requests and the fact that 85% of them are first requests took officials by surprise. Each request therefore takes longer to process.