The federal government is looking to clear passport backlogs by the end of the summer, after acknowledging they underestimated the demand for passports following the relaxation of COVID-19 restrictions.
Officials say that Service Canada has made specialized passport sites "more responsive and efficient" to help Canadians who have urgent passport needs, with plans to expand the strategy and add additional passport offices in the coming weeks.
Speaking on AM800's The Morning Drive, Families, Children and Social Development Minister Karina Gould says there's more to the issue than greater amounts of people looking to travel, which built up over the pandemic.
"Actually about 85 per cent of the applications are for first time passport holders, which are more complex than a simple renewal," she continued. "And so there's a series of factors, number one being travel restrictions being lifted so people wanting to get a passport to travel but then the additional more complex passports that are being sought as opposed to simple renewal."
Gould says they did know that there would be a surge, but they didn't know exactly when that was going to be because they didn't know when travel restrictions were going to be lifted.
She says had they known definitively that travel restrictions would lift in March, they would've had to start hiring additional back in October.
"We actually did start hiring additional people back in October and in January, but it wasn't enough for the surge that we did see. And so since April we've hired about another 600 people, and since about three weeks ago we've started another real ramp up in hiring," Gould said.
Gould says the passport office in Windsor is pretty good, and because there are lower volumes of processing, the government is seeing people from other parts of the province coming here.
"Because they don't see the huge lineups that they do in places like Toronto or Ottawa, so that's been a challenge managing that. But there's a triage system at all passport offices now to make sure that we can accommodate people who have urgent travel as quickly as possible and then provide appointments for people who are travelling later."
Gould recommends not mailing your passports, as she says now is not the time to apply.
Internal government evaluators published an in-depth study of the country’s passport program back in March 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning, which foreshadowed many of the issues that have now become a government crisis in passport processing.
- with files from AM800's The Morning Drive