Kelly Potter Scott is looking forward to taking her 10-year-old daughter across the Canadian border for the first time for a girls getaway in upstate New York in a couple of weeks.
But as he spent hours waiting outside a Toronto passport office, Potter Scott said he had to rely on an official’s assurances that his daughter would have her documents for the weekend trip with family and friends. friends.
“If we don’t get it, my daughter won’t be able to come with us, which will be unfortunate,” Potter Scott said. “We cross our fingers, we get it on time.”
She was among dozens of people in a row stretching across the block on Wednesday, some in folding chairs as they made their way to the door to submit their passport applications.
Some aspiring travelers expressed concern that their summer vacation plans could be shuffled, as the urge to walk through the accumulated pandemic fueled a delay in passport processing times.
Officials have been preparing for an increase in demand for passports with the relaxation of COVID-19 border measures, which has added 600 new employees to help resolve the influx of paperwork. Last month, Service Canada reopened all passport service counters across the country, and additional counters have been added to more than 300 centers.
But as many Canadians seek to venture abroad after more than two years of pandemic-restricted travel, some passport applicants say they have been forced to camp outside service centers or reschedule trips. due to bureaucratic bottleneck.
He seemed to take federal officials by surprise.
“The fact is that while we anticipate an increase in volume, this massive increase in demand has exceeded expectations and exceeded capacity,” Minister for Families, Children and Social Development Karina Gould told a parliamentary committee on May 30. .
“We know a lot of people have been put in very difficult circumstances. And that’s why I’ve told officials to work as hard as they can to meet demand.”
Between April 1, 2020 and March 31, 2021, Service Canada issued 363,000 passports, as services were limited to urgent travel cases.
But as the world has reopened, demand has skyrocketed. Between April 1, 2021 and March 31, 2022, nearly 1.3 million passports were issued.
Since April, more than 317,000 passports have been issued, and the federal forecast for 2022-2023 is between 3.6 million and 4.3 million applications.
According to last week’s projections, 75 per cent of Canadians applying for a passport receive one within 40 working days, a spokesman for Canada’s Employment and Social Development said in a statement. Ninety-six percent of those who apply in person at a specialized location receive a passport within 10 business days.
Nadia Elsayed in Oakville, Ontario, said she mailed her young daughter’s passport application in early April, indicating a provisional travel date in late May.
Elsaed waited for the envelope to arrive in her mailbox as that date came and went. As passport services did not pick up the phone, she turned to her Member of Parliament and learned that her daughter’s documents were in a stack of other applications in Gatineau, Que.
He arranged for his daughter’s application to be sent to another office in the Toronto suburbs of Mississauga. Officials told him they would aim to have his passport ready 48 hours before his family travels to the United States this month, Elsayed said, but that is too close for convenience.
“It still feels a little airy, to be honest,” he said. “It looks like we’re waiting and we’re just waiting for things to come out.”
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on June 9, 2022.