QUESTION PERIOD — Ministry of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship
Passport Services
June 14, 2022
Minister, the delays, long lineups and shockingly poor service that Canadians are currently subjected to while simply trying to obtain or renew a passport are completely unacceptable. Just this morning, I went to Galeries St-Laurent, my local mall that houses the Canadian passport bureau. There was a lineup of Canadian taxpayers for blocks and blocks. They were there with their lawn chairs and umbrellas, waiting hours on end to fill out passport applications and then having to wait for months before they receive their passports. Anyone watching the scene would not believe they were in Canada; they would think they were in some banana republic.
Two weeks ago, your colleague Minister Gould blamed your department for this mess by not anticipating that the demand for passports would be high. She told the House committee:
One thing that’s a bit of a challenge for us is that Service Canada doesn’t do the forecasting. IRCC does the forecasting, and the original forecast for this year was for about 2.4 million passports, which gets us into the ballpark of where things were prepandemic.
Minister, do you accept this criticism from your cabinet colleague that your forecast for the demand for passports was completely inadequate —
Thank you, senator. Your time has expired.
— or was Minister Gould throwing you under the bus for your mismanagement?
Minister Gould is a dear friend of mine and one of the most competent members of any party in the House of Commons. I don’t take her comments as a personal criticism.
We work together to advance policies that can simplify the process for passport renewal. We also work together to ensure that one another’s departments — and, in fact, this is true across cabinet — have the necessary resources to provide the kind of service that Canadians quite rightly expect.
I think you’ll appreciate, senator, that we are living through exceptional times. As the world opens up more or less simultaneously and there is a pent-up demand for travel, there are challenges in predicting with certainty the exact number of people who will be seeking to renew their passports at a given point in time.
More than 500 new staff have been added. The wickets are now all open. For what it’s worth, I had to renew my children’s passports — one new issuance and one renewal — and I did this the same way that everyone else does. It was a bit frustrating, but at the end of the day, we were served professionally by competent civil servants who are working to ensure that as many passports as possible can be issued. As we see demand stabilize now that capacity has been ramped up, I expect that over time you will see an improved quality of service — like you’re seeing across different sectors of the economy as the world opens up from COVID-19 restrictions.
