I think the passport situation is a symptom of a federal bureaucracy that largely went into hibernation in 2020 and is struggling to regain its capacities like a coma patient who needs physical rehabilitation. The passport office is like an unused muscle that atrophied. The problem is that the Trudeau government has been reluctant to move on from pandemic measures, which means that they have had no interest in actually doing the work of adjusting to a public that's moved on already. I'm not sure they even have the capacity to do the work, but the first step in solving a problem is to recognize it exists.
It would be great if we lived in a country where the passport office sucked but everything else worked fine. But the passport office sucking story is just a tiny vignette about how increasingly everything sucks.
Politicians on the left are forever promising more and more benefits, while those on the right are forever promising lower and lower taxes. The hard grim reality though is that we are going to have to pay more taxes for fewer services. And getting there from here...
It seems more and more that every story about Canadian bureaucracy these days make me think about 'Brazil' and with that in mind: "That is your receipt for your husband... and this is my receipt for your receipt."
Excellent article! What worries me most about the debacle ate two things:
First, why do I have to send in my old passport with the application for a new one? That makes me kind of a stateless individual, with no way to get out of the country should the need arise. For months and months… with no notice when I can expect my passport to arrive.
Second: „ The government doesn‘t want you to travel“. Really?? Where do we live?
What country is this? The government obviously also doesn’t want me to see a doctor, as they have closed down the walk-in clinic and I wasn’t able to see a family doctor for more than five years.
They also don‘t want me to eat, as food becomes more and more unaffordable. So is living in my own small house. Or driving my car.
Thank you, Mr Trudeau, for making my life miserable. I hope you are enjoying your life in the spotlight and sumshine while tjhe ordinary people are suffering.
And then politicians are indignant and surprised that they are not being liked…
Government departmental plans, IRCC and ESDC/Service Canada, noted expected increase. So no surprise, just poor execution. As Matt noted, core federal responsibility, and failure undermines trust in government.
Why not let you keep your existing passport until the new one arrives? Then you can validate the new one just like a replacement credit card. And why use booklets with all the secure printing requirements etc.? The US has a passport card that you can use when driving in North America and there are enhanced DLs but you can’t use them on airlines they still want a booklet mainly for CYA reasons. Are there still countries where there is no electricity to electronic scanners to read ID documents? That used to be the reason for sticking with archaic paper formats.
It's maddeningly incompetent, and caused me much anxiety as I was passportless from January through April awaiting my renewal by mail. I don't quite understand how it's Trudeau's fault though. This is a problem in the bureaucracy, not the elected political level. The people responsible were there under Harper and will still be there after Trudeau is gone. Trudeau didn't put them there and can't get rid of them either. I haven't experience at the federal level but I've worked with the provincial government enough to know that the bureaucracy isn't necessarily any more responsive to its putative political masters than it is to the public it ostensibly serves.
"Canadians have a right to come and go from the country." Well - until last week that wasn't true. And it is still irrationally restricted for the unvaccinated (14 day quarantine) - and there are dark hints that these rules will come back in the fall for the 'unboosted' which includes me and a lot of other people. I guess section 6 of the Charter - "Every citizen of Canada has the right to enter, remain in and leave Canada." is merely aspirational for progressives.
What fascinates me about the Trudeau government is that (even before Covid) they were racking up record levels of debt - but with no new programs to show for it - and without any government functions being improved. If we were in the middle of a 90's style austerity session I could understand the passport situation - but why are we experiencing it now when the government has shown no concerns at all about spending money it doesn't have?
Reading this account reminded me of my passport renewal in 2014. I forget why I chose not to use the mail-in method: it would take too long, or perhaps the mail-in application had to be sent by courier or registered mail, so I thought, "What the hell, I'll just take it into a passport office".
After waiting awhile, we were called up to a booth where someone checked to see if we had all the docs., and then we were told to sit down and wait our turn to actually hand in the documents.
Yes, there were empty booths back then, too, and seemingly lackadaisical work habits with people vacating their booths for no apparent reason. After an hour or so, we left and did the mail-in thing.
I am reminded of a conversation I had with an inside postal worker in the 1980s -- he told me that if some newbie came on the job and was too productive, he was taken into the washroom and told the rules.
This is the state of government these days. It doesn’t work. And it won’t work until budgets are slashed and government becomes what government should only ever be: helping those who are unable to help themselves and provide basic necessities to help support society function. Get back to basics so stories like this cease to be the norm.
I renewed my US passport in Austin a few weeks back with no issue. Why is the apparent lack of staff more of a problem in Canada than in other countries?
Calgary is not nearly as bad, just FYI. The Harper gov't. reduced civil servant numbers over each term. The Trudeau gov't has increased civil Servan numbers over every term . Bureaucracy slows things down, unions make it even worse. If you can't get rid of the unions then privatize for best efficiency. By the way, privatizing just a few departments will have the predicted effect of some other departments picking up their socks. We have become complacent towards a poor work ethic and productivity in North America. The eastern half of the planet works twice as hard and will soon eat us for breakfast.
I work remotely for a US company, in a job that would normally have been filled by an American. So it’s a net new, high paying job that benefits the Canadian economy. Because I need to be flexible with travel, I am not in a position to just mail off my passport and wait for months for a new one to come back. Fortunately mine doesn’t expire for 3 more years, but the current situation at the Passport Office could have killed this amazing job opportunity for me. I used to think that the Passport Office was one of the best run departments in Canada, so it’s alarming how dysfunctional it has become. I’d really like to hear more from an insider about what’s happening. Are they understaffed? Did they have a lot of turnover in the last year? Are computer systems not working? Because right now the easy answer is that people have sat at home doing nothing for 2 years and forgot how to work. I usually hate that kind of cynical view, but we need answers if that’s not the case.
Ooops! You better hope your travel plans don't change because you just informed the Passport office (via your The Line Column), that you can't pick up the passports until after July 11th!! Now for sure they won't be available on July 6th!
I think the passport situation is a symptom of a federal bureaucracy that largely went into hibernation in 2020 and is struggling to regain its capacities like a coma patient who needs physical rehabilitation. The passport office is like an unused muscle that atrophied. The problem is that the Trudeau government has been reluctant to move on from pandemic measures, which means that they have had no interest in actually doing the work of adjusting to a public that's moved on already. I'm not sure they even have the capacity to do the work, but the first step in solving a problem is to recognize it exists.
It would be great if we lived in a country where the passport office sucked but everything else worked fine. But the passport office sucking story is just a tiny vignette about how increasingly everything sucks.
Politicians on the left are forever promising more and more benefits, while those on the right are forever promising lower and lower taxes. The hard grim reality though is that we are going to have to pay more taxes for fewer services. And getting there from here...
...is going to be kind of ugly.
It seems more and more that every story about Canadian bureaucracy these days make me think about 'Brazil' and with that in mind: "That is your receipt for your husband... and this is my receipt for your receipt."
Excellent article! What worries me most about the debacle ate two things:
First, why do I have to send in my old passport with the application for a new one? That makes me kind of a stateless individual, with no way to get out of the country should the need arise. For months and months… with no notice when I can expect my passport to arrive.
Second: „ The government doesn‘t want you to travel“. Really?? Where do we live?
What country is this? The government obviously also doesn’t want me to see a doctor, as they have closed down the walk-in clinic and I wasn’t able to see a family doctor for more than five years.
They also don‘t want me to eat, as food becomes more and more unaffordable. So is living in my own small house. Or driving my car.
Thank you, Mr Trudeau, for making my life miserable. I hope you are enjoying your life in the spotlight and sumshine while tjhe ordinary people are suffering.
And then politicians are indignant and surprised that they are not being liked…
What a sad, sorry state of affairs. I don’t think there’s one department in the federal government that works effectively
Government departmental plans, IRCC and ESDC/Service Canada, noted expected increase. So no surprise, just poor execution. As Matt noted, core federal responsibility, and failure undermines trust in government.
Why not let you keep your existing passport until the new one arrives? Then you can validate the new one just like a replacement credit card. And why use booklets with all the secure printing requirements etc.? The US has a passport card that you can use when driving in North America and there are enhanced DLs but you can’t use them on airlines they still want a booklet mainly for CYA reasons. Are there still countries where there is no electricity to electronic scanners to read ID documents? That used to be the reason for sticking with archaic paper formats.
It's maddeningly incompetent, and caused me much anxiety as I was passportless from January through April awaiting my renewal by mail. I don't quite understand how it's Trudeau's fault though. This is a problem in the bureaucracy, not the elected political level. The people responsible were there under Harper and will still be there after Trudeau is gone. Trudeau didn't put them there and can't get rid of them either. I haven't experience at the federal level but I've worked with the provincial government enough to know that the bureaucracy isn't necessarily any more responsive to its putative political masters than it is to the public it ostensibly serves.
"Canadians have a right to come and go from the country." Well - until last week that wasn't true. And it is still irrationally restricted for the unvaccinated (14 day quarantine) - and there are dark hints that these rules will come back in the fall for the 'unboosted' which includes me and a lot of other people. I guess section 6 of the Charter - "Every citizen of Canada has the right to enter, remain in and leave Canada." is merely aspirational for progressives.
What fascinates me about the Trudeau government is that (even before Covid) they were racking up record levels of debt - but with no new programs to show for it - and without any government functions being improved. If we were in the middle of a 90's style austerity session I could understand the passport situation - but why are we experiencing it now when the government has shown no concerns at all about spending money it doesn't have?
Reading this account reminded me of my passport renewal in 2014. I forget why I chose not to use the mail-in method: it would take too long, or perhaps the mail-in application had to be sent by courier or registered mail, so I thought, "What the hell, I'll just take it into a passport office".
After waiting awhile, we were called up to a booth where someone checked to see if we had all the docs., and then we were told to sit down and wait our turn to actually hand in the documents.
Yes, there were empty booths back then, too, and seemingly lackadaisical work habits with people vacating their booths for no apparent reason. After an hour or so, we left and did the mail-in thing.
I am reminded of a conversation I had with an inside postal worker in the 1980s -- he told me that if some newbie came on the job and was too productive, he was taken into the washroom and told the rules.
This is the state of government these days. It doesn’t work. And it won’t work until budgets are slashed and government becomes what government should only ever be: helping those who are unable to help themselves and provide basic necessities to help support society function. Get back to basics so stories like this cease to be the norm.
I renewed my US passport in Austin a few weeks back with no issue. Why is the apparent lack of staff more of a problem in Canada than in other countries?
Calgary is not nearly as bad, just FYI. The Harper gov't. reduced civil servant numbers over each term. The Trudeau gov't has increased civil Servan numbers over every term . Bureaucracy slows things down, unions make it even worse. If you can't get rid of the unions then privatize for best efficiency. By the way, privatizing just a few departments will have the predicted effect of some other departments picking up their socks. We have become complacent towards a poor work ethic and productivity in North America. The eastern half of the planet works twice as hard and will soon eat us for breakfast.
Honestly, it feels like the government has checked out and everything is sort of being 1/2 assed run by the bureaucracy that is left.
I work remotely for a US company, in a job that would normally have been filled by an American. So it’s a net new, high paying job that benefits the Canadian economy. Because I need to be flexible with travel, I am not in a position to just mail off my passport and wait for months for a new one to come back. Fortunately mine doesn’t expire for 3 more years, but the current situation at the Passport Office could have killed this amazing job opportunity for me. I used to think that the Passport Office was one of the best run departments in Canada, so it’s alarming how dysfunctional it has become. I’d really like to hear more from an insider about what’s happening. Are they understaffed? Did they have a lot of turnover in the last year? Are computer systems not working? Because right now the easy answer is that people have sat at home doing nothing for 2 years and forgot how to work. I usually hate that kind of cynical view, but we need answers if that’s not the case.
Ooops! You better hope your travel plans don't change because you just informed the Passport office (via your The Line Column), that you can't pick up the passports until after July 11th!! Now for sure they won't be available on July 6th!