Residents of Trois-Rivières will soon be able to pick up their passport in person or apply for it at a new passport office near their home rather than having to travel to Quebec or Montreal.
Family Minister Karina Gould, responsible for the passport file, is to make the announcement in Trois-Rivières on Wednesday morning, a federal government source confirmed to the QMI Agency.
A handful of other passport offices across the country will be open soon after.
However, the service offered at this new office will be limited to non-urgent requests, i.e. those that exceed 48 hours.
This latest addition increases the number of passport offices in Quebec to eight.
It should also be remembered that, since July 25, urgent requests requiring an in-person pick-up can be processed at the Pointe-Claire office, in the west of Montreal.
The summer was marked by historic delays in delivery times, creating huge frustrations for travelers, some of whom had to abandon their vacation plans.
The massive resumption of travel had given rise to out-of-the-ordinary scenes during the month of June, when offices in the Montreal area were invaded by travelers anxious not to be able to collect their documents in time before their flight.
In Quebec, some people had even put up camping tents to settle in front of the entrances to the offices of Laval, Saint-Laurent and especially the Complexe Guy-Favreau complex, in the borough of Ville-Marie, in Montreal.
To meet the explosion of requests, Ottawa had notably promised the hiring of hundreds of new employees and optimized the process of processing and printing the precious document.
Minister Gould had also hired people to manage the queues and set up a system for processing requests from tickets distributed on site according to the urgency of the file.