Some passport seekers forced to camp outside service centres amid backlogs

Kelly Potter Scott has been looking forward to taking her 10-year-old daughter across the Canadian border for the first time for a girls' getaway in Upstate New York in a couple of weeks.

But as she spent hours waiting outside a Toronto passport office, Potter Scott said she had to trust an official's assurances that her daughter will have her documents for the weekend trip with family and friends.

"If we don't get it, my daughter just won't be able to come with us, which will be unfortunate," Potter Scott said. "Fingers crossed, we get it in time."

She was among dozens of people in a line that stretched down the block Wednesday, some toting fold-up chairs as they shuffled toward the door to submit their passport applications.

Some aspiring travellers expressed concern that their summer vacation plans could be scrambled as pent-up pandemic wanderlust fuelled a backlog in passport processing times.

Officials have been bracing for a rise in passport demand with the relaxation of COVID-19 border measures, bringing on 600 new employees to help sort through the influx of paperwork. Last month, Service Canada reopened all passport service counters across the country, and additional counters have been added at more than 300 centres.

Surge in passport demand 'outstripped capacity'

But as many Canadians look to venture abroad after more than two years of pandemic-restricted travel, some passport seekers say they've been forced to camp outside service centres or reschedule trips because of the bureaucratic bottleneck.

It seemed to catch federal officials by surprise.

"The fact of the matter is that while we were anticipating increased volume, this massive surge in demand has outpaced forecasts and outstripped capacity," Families, Children and Social Development Minister Karina Gould told a parliamentary committee on May 30.

"We know many people have been put in very difficult circumstances. And that is why I have directed officials to work as hard as possible to meet the demand."

Between April 1, 2020 and March 31, 2021, Service Canada issued 363,000 passports as services were limited to urgent travel cases.

But as the world has reopened, demand has skyrocketed. Between April 1, 2021 and March 31, 2022, nearly 1.3 million passports were issued.

Since April, more than 317,000 passports have been handed out, and the federal forecast for 2022-2023 is between 3.6 million and 4.3 million applications.

Based on projections from last week, 75 per cent of Canadians who apply for a passport receive one within 40 working days, a spokesperson for Employment and Social Development Canada said in a statement. Ninety-six per cent of those who submit an application in-person at a specialized site receive a passport within 10 working days.

Nadia Elsayed in Oakville, Ont., said she mailed her infant daughter's passport application in early April, indicating a tentative travel date of late May.

Elsayed waited for the envelope to arrive in her mailbox as that date came and went. With passport services not picking up the phone, she turned to her member of Parliament, and found out that her daughter's documents were sitting in a stack of other applications in Gatineau, Que.

She arranged to have her daughter's application sent to another office in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga. Officials told her they'd aim to have the passport ready 48 hours before her family is set to travel to the United States this month, Elsayed said, but that's cutting it too close for comfort.

"It still feels a little bit up in the air, to be honest," she said. "It just feels like we're kind of hanging on and just hoping that things turn out."