Kelly Potter Scott was looking forward to taking his 10-year-old daughter across the Canadian border for the first time for a girl escape in New York State in weeks.
But while she spent hours waiting in front of the Toronto Passport Office, Potter Scott said she had to trust an employee’s assurances that her daughter would have her travel documents for the weekend with family and friends.
“If we don’t get it, my daughter just won’t be able to come with us, which will be a shame,” said Potter Scott. “We are keeping our fingers crossed, we understand it in time.”
She was among dozens of people in a queue that stretched down the block on Wednesday, some holding folding chairs as they walked to the door to apply for passports.
Some ambitious travelers have expressed concern that their plans for a summer vacation could be confused, as the accumulated pandemic passion for wandering feeds the backlog in passport processing time.
Officials are preparing to increase the demand for passports by easing border measures for COVID-19, attracting 600 new staff to help deal with the flow of documents. Last month, Service Canada reopened all passport offices across the country and added additional counters at more than 300 centers.
But as many Canadians want to go abroad after more than two years of pandemic travel, some passport seekers say they have been forced to camp outside service centers or reschedule trips due to bureaucratic difficulties.
This seemed to surprise federal officials.
“The fact is that while we were expecting an increase in volume, this huge jump in demand was ahead of forecasts and ahead of capacity,” Family, Children and Social Development Minister Karina Gould told a parliamentary committee on May 30th.
“We know that a lot of people have been put in very difficult circumstances. So I ordered the staff to work as hard as they could to meet the demand.”
Between April 1, 2020 and March 31, 2021, Service Canada issued 363,000 passports because services were limited to emergency travel.
But when the world reopened, the demand skyrocketed. Between April 1, 2021 and March 31, 2022, nearly 1.3 million passports were issued.
More than 317,000 passports have been distributed since April, and the federal forecast for 2022-2023 is between 3.6 million and 4.3 million applications.
According to estimates from last week, 75 percent 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 on a specialized site receive a passport within 10 working days.
Nadia Elsayed of Oakville, Ont., Said she mailed her daughter’s passport application in early April, indicating a preliminary travel date in late May.
Elsayed waited for the envelope to arrive in her mailbox, as that date came and went. As the passport office did not pick up the phone, she turned to her member of parliament and found out that her daughter’s documents were in a pile of other applications in Gatineau, Que.
She arranged for her daughter’s request to be sent to another office in the Toronto suburbs, Mississauga. Officials told her they would seek to prepare the passport 48 hours before her family travels to the United States this month, Elsayed said, but that is too close for comfort.
“I still feel a little up in the air, to be honest,” she said. “It just feels like we’re holding back and just hoping things will work out.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on June 9, 2022.
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