Many Canadians had a lot of trouble getting their passport on time for their vacation.

During the pandemic, no one really thought about renewing their passport and we can see the consequences now. In the last month, Service Canada received over 250 000 calls every day of people asking when they will get their papers. It has been a gigantic increase compared to last year. With a waiting time on the phone of about 3-4 hours, people are getting annoyed and making complaints. 

Some people had to cancel their vacations because they couldn’t get them delivered quickly enough. As a last resort, people camped outside the service canada office in order to get a passport in time for their vacations.

To deal with the slow processing of the passports, Service Canada reopened all of the offices that had been closed during the last years and hired around 600 new employees. But it’s still not enough for the huge quantities of demands. 

Marguerite Lortie, a student at La Camaradière, had this problem. She had to wait 2 months before getting her passport. Before the pandemic, it usually took around 10 days before getting it, but now it is taking more than 30 days. 

There is also a problem with the pictures. In some cases, people have to go through the long process two times because the picture doesn’t meet the criterias. The list of criterias is linked at the bottom of the article.

Charles-Etienne Simard, also a student of La Camaradière, had to go to 3 different places to get a picture for his passport. The centers offering this service didn’t have the right setup to take pictures and had to refuse every client that came.

Passport photos criteria

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/canadian-passports/photos.html