(Ottawa) It will soon be possible to pick up your passport in person in four cities where this service was not yet offered, learned The Press. The Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, Karina Gould, is to make the announcement this Wednesday morning in Trois-Rivières.
Posted at 6:50 p.m.
Travelers will therefore be able to apply for a non-urgent passport in person at the Service Canada office on rue Royale and pick it up on site 10 days later instead of having to travel to Quebec or Montreal to complete these procedures.
The same will be true in the cities of Sault-Sainte-Marie in Ontario, Charlottetown in Prince Edward Island, and Red Deer in Alberta.
The federal government, still struggling with a large backlog of passport applications, wants to avoid people asking for their new travel document by mail, said a source familiar with the matter.
The Department of Employment and Social Development had misjudged Canadians’ desire to travel after two years of the pandemic. It received more than a million requests in 2022, but had only managed to process nearly 750,000 as of August 11. These are the latest statistics to be made public by the Department.
At the height of the crisis at the end of June, hundreds of desperate travelers lined up for days outside the Service Canada office located in Complexe Guy-Favreau in Montreal in the hope of obtaining their precious document. in time for their summer vacation abroad.
The volume of new applications has since declined, from 266,027 in June to 234,552 in July, but the government anticipates a likely spike in passport applications this fall ahead of the Christmas holidays.
Mme Gould had already announced in July that the passport collection service was being added to five Service Canada offices: in Pointe-Claire, Brampton and Whitby in Ontario, in the Sundance district of Calgary in Alberta, and in Richmond in British Columbia. More offices in other locations across the country will be added in the coming weeks.
This service is intended to complement that offered in the 29 passport offices across the country.