Frustrations are growing on Vancouver Island and beyond as Passport Canada deals with an influx of hundreds of thousands of passport applications leading to some delays.
Jesus Rivera took the day off work Monday and drove to Victoria from Nanaimo, desperately hoping he would be heading home with his passport. He is supposed to leave for Mexico City Tuesday morning.
“It’s frustrating, it’s really stressful, it’s really stressful because I’m in limbo I don’t know what to do,” he said.
Rivera mailed his application on Feb. 24. The process is only supposed to take 20 business days, but he’s still waiting.
“I was here at 6 a.m. and I was in the office and they said we can do nothing you have to wait for our call.”
Rivera isn’t alone. The lineup outside Victoria’s Passport Canada office at the Bay Centre downtown stretched all the way out into the mall over two floors on Monday morning shortly after opening.
Liam Singleton has a flight to Mexico next week but still hasn’t his received passport. It is the second time he’s had to drive down from Nanaimo in the past week and believes he’ll have to come back yet again.
“I think the whole system is pretty messed up but I think I’m going to get my passport in time so here’s hoping,” he said.
With pandemic travel restrictions finally easing, people have been racing to book trips, to finally vacation or see family and friends.
Service Canada says in the first year of the pandemic, between April 1, 2020 and March 31, 2021, it issued 363,000 passports. In the past year that’s shot up to 1,273,000. It has received 500,000 applications in the past seven weeks alone.
Calls for passport inquiries have gone up from about 5,000 a day pre-pandemic to 200,000 a day now.
“As of right now this is the number issue that we are hearing from in our office,” said Nanaimo-Ladysmith MP Lisa Marie Barron. ‘The government needs to be putting into place appropriate staffing to be able to deal with the quantity of passport applications that are coming in.”
Service Canada says staff are working overtime and on weekends to try to deal with the backlog, adding that the average wait time is still just five days for in-person applications and 26 days for mail-in.
That hasn’t been the case for Rivera, who will likely have to rebook his trip once he knows when he’ll actually have a passport to travel with.
April Lawrence
