Mansour, a kindergarten teacher from Île-Perrot, Que., and her husband Bachir Malha, an electrician, posted those documents at the Service Canada passport center on April 20, well in advance of their planned trip to Disney World later this year. month. Now the $4,000 trip they had been saving up for is just weeks away. the plane tickets are paid for and Mansoor has yet to receive the passports or any information on when she will get the children’s birth certificates back. “We sent it early to avoid all that,” Mansour said. “It’s my summer vacation. We look forward as teachers to not chasing paperwork or waiting hours in line.” Mansour is far from the only Canadian who mails personal documents for passport applications or renewals and has not returned them — sometimes even after waiting hours in line to pick up their valid passport at the office. Natasha D’Onofrio recently got her five-month-old son Nico Amato’s passport after sending all the necessary documents on May 9, but Service Canada still hasn’t returned the baby’s birth certificate. He needs to have it back in time for his baptism in August and may need to contact the province to issue a new one. D’Onofrio said getting through to Service Canada to ask for the certificate to be returned was a time-consuming chore in itself. “Having to get in touch with them is a nightmare,” said D’Onofrio, after spending a day repeatedly calling Service Canada’s hotline for information about her son’s record. “I managed to get through, but… it would have been impossible for me if I didn’t have someone to watch the baby,” she said. Natasha D’Onofrio got her five-month-old son Nico Amato’s passport, but she’s still waiting for Service Canada to return his original birth certificate. (Submitted by Natasha D’Onofrio) The average wait time to reach the call center for the week ending July 3 was 51 minutes, according to Service Canada, which received more than one million calls during that period.
Passport applications continue to flood in
Passport applications and related documents mailed to Quebec would have gone to the processing and printing center in Gatineau, says Élaine Chatigny, Quebec regional director for Service Canada. “There are no more unopened applications. There is no closed mail,” Chatigny said. “Everything has been scanned or is in the process of being scanned.” The easing of travel restrictions and the fact that early in the pandemic, Service Canada was not processing passport renewals for anyone without imminent travel plans, has led to a monumental backlog of applications awaiting processing. With more than 750,000 passport applications since April clogging up the system, many are standing in line for days at Service Canada centers to get theirs faster. That was the scene at Montreal’s Guy-Favreau complex late last month. (Charles Contant/CBC News) Since April, Service Canada has received more than three-quarters of a million passport applications and expects to receive a total of 4.2 million passport applications this fiscal year. The department could not confirm how many applicants are waiting to get back the documents they had to submit to get their passports. The best way to retrieve their documents, Chatigny says, is to go to the local passport office and describe their situation to an officer. “Either we’ll see a passport officer right away that day or we’ll take the information … and we’ll go into the system and someone will call that parent to clarify the situation,” he said. “Each situation is slightly unique, but this is generally the best approach for people to get their passport or stop the process and get their child’s birth certificate.” If Service Canada does not process complete applications within nine weeks, for people whose travel plans are more than 45 days away, it will not charge transportation and pickup fees, a department spokesperson said in an email.
For children heading to the US, the birth certificate may be sufficient
Continued processing delays and uncertainty about when documents will be returned have also put parents traveling with children to the US in a double bind. Canadians under the age of 16 traveling to the United States by land or sea can enter the country without a passport as long as they present a valid birth certificate or Canadian citizenship card. Many people don’t know that, however, Chatigny said — and that’s also contributed to the high volume of passport applications. Knowing now that her children, ages nine and 11, do not need a passport to enter the U.S. if the family crossed the border by car is a small consolation for Mansour, as she sent in their birth certificates several years ago. since two months and already bought them. air tickets. “I just felt very desperate that we might have to cancel the trip or spend even more money when we could have just jumped on the plane,” she said.
