Posted at 5:00 a.m.
People who applied for a passport last March are clogging up the system despite themselves. They call by the hundreds on the 1 800 line, make file transfer requests, make appointments online, even if they filled out their form several months ago.
“The minister says we need to make sure we have a valid passport when booking travel, but last March the government website said passports were issued within 20 working days. I relied on this information, ”laments Christine Tina Paliotti.
“If they were considering a flood of requests, why didn’t they change the deadlines? asks the woman who made an appointment on March 17 at a Service Canada office for her daughter’s trip to Thailand on June 23. His receipt told him that the passport would be delivered around May 3.
Without news of the travel document around mid-May, Mme Paliotti has multiplied the steps to save the holidays of his daughter. Like many other people in her situation, she spent hours dialing the Passport Canada helpline number, she made a request to transfer her file from Gatineau to Laval, she contacted her MP, she stood in line in front of a desk.
“On the day of her departure, around 5 p.m., she received a call asking when she was leaving. But his departure was in the morning and it had been written on the form! It was too late ! “, says the mother of the family, amazed. Her daughter paid $5,000 for the trip she didn’t take.
“The way they operate is not logical at all! There are people who have been waiting for months and others who show up at an office at the last minute and manage to get their passports in time,” she says.
There is nothing logical in that. It’s very unfair.
Christine Tina Paliotti
Hundreds of calls
Hélène T. also applied for a passport renewal on 1er April, for her two teenagers for a family trip to Mexico on July 4. Last week, she called Service Canada to find out the status of her applications made 12 weeks earlier.
“Each time, to get the line, I had to call a hundred times. In all cases, it took me an hour to get on the line and then 45 to 50 minutes to manage to speak to someone, “explains the one who prefers to remain anonymous so as not to harm her efforts to obtain the passports of his children.
On the phone, an employee offered to transfer her request from Gatineau to Complexe Guy-Favreau, where she could pick up the passports when they were ready. Since then, she has had no news of the travel documents.
“Things need to be improved. It is not an efficient system. It’s not normal that the person on the other end of the line is unable to tell me the status of my transfer request. Was said transfer accepted or not? asks Hélène T.
Employment and Social Development Canada as well as Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada were unable to tell us on Monday how many passport applications made in March are still waiting to be processed… or when those applications will be processed. .
Remember that only people who had a “reason justifying an urgent trip” were able to renew their passport for at least 15 months during the pandemic. Ottawa has limited the issuance of travel documents “to support containment efforts and protect personnel.”
PHOTO PATRICK SANFAÇON, THE PRESS
In the middle of the day on Monday, the government site indicated that the wait at Complexe Guy-Favreau was four and a half hours.
Online meetings are rare
Queuing right away to try to get an appointment? Waiting 48 hours before the August trip to get an emergency passport? Geneviève Grégoire has been juggling these questions for a few days. She tried in vain to obtain a time slot through the federal government’s website to apply for a passport for her son.
She was hoping to get a time slot in mid-July. “We would still have time, but there are none, appointment slots, she notes. So I can’t see when the queuing and camping is going to end if all they do is give out passports for travel in the next 12 or 24 hours. »
The family must take off from the airport on August 12 and then board a cruise ship. Geneviève Grégoire realized on Thursday that her son’s passport was due to expire on July 31. “We completely missed it,” she admits.
She is now wondering what is the best course of action. The trip that cost thousands of dollars is non-refundable. The government site indicates that there is a two-week wait plus the postal delay for people whose trip is planned between 3 and 45 days and who submit an application at one of the passport processing offices.
I go online and the site gives us seven possibilities [de bureau des passeports] when we make the largest possible radius which is 250 kilometers. I go there every day, but I have little hope…
Genevieve Gregoire
“Our other game plan was to go to New Brunswick, but we still have to get organized,” she adds.
The backlog is such that the government has been giving priority since last week to travelers who need a passport within 48 hours. People whose international trip is in three days or more can still receive a later appointment… provided they wait in line.
In the middle of the day on Monday, the government site indicated that the wait at Complexe Guy-Favreau was four and a half hours.
At the office of the Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, Karina Gould, it is recognized that online appointments are rare and that it is more advantageous to travel. Employees sort it out, according to the urgency of each case, and hand out appointment coupons. The minister, who had an announcement on child care Monday in Winnipeg, Manitoba, did not address the issue of passports.
Monitor officials
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced over the weekend a new “task force to improve government services.” It is made up of 13 ministers, i.e. one third of its cabinet. The first meeting took place late Monday afternoon.
The Prime Minister’s Office says the group’s work will focus on processing times for applications for services such as passports, immigration applications and airport wait times. A source in Minister Gould’s office said it’s a kind of oversight committee to make public servants understand that they need to get on with the job of addressing these issues.
The Conservative Party mocked this initiative. “More bureaucracy, more meetings and more incompetent Liberal ministers are not what we need to solve this crisis,” denounced its deputy leader, Luc Berthold, in a press release.
Rather than focusing on solving the crisis, hard-working public servants will now have to shift their focus to helping a task force of Liberal cabinet ministers study the problem.
Luc Berthold, Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party
“Canadians need front-line workers to process applications and reduce the backlog, not a summer research project for a Liberal cabinet minister,” he concludes.
The task force is chaired by Minister for Women and People’s Equality and Youth, Marci Ien, and Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, Marc Miller. Minister Gould is one of them, as are Immigration Minister Sean Fraser and Transport Minister Omar Alghabra.