Passport Canada - Astounding Incompetence

Part of our interesting weekend was visiting Trail to stand in the Passport Canada "clinic" line for 5 hours. This excitement was reported on The Clothesline, so I'll restrain my comments to a rant about how incompetent Passport Canada is in their "management" of the increased demand for passports.

First, let's not hear any whining about new requirements by the USA in the aftermath of 9/11. Those changing regulations have been known about for several years and there's been lots of time for Passport Canada to adapt to the new reality: many more Canadians applying for passports. Perhaps if their bureaucracy moved faster than a large boulder rolling uphill....

When we were told on Friday that they wouldn't be able to accept any more applications that day, there were several hundred people still standing in line, where many of them had been for 5 hours. The minion sent to deliver the bad news had the poor judgement to suggest that one option was to deliver the application in person to a Passport Canada office somewhere in the Lower Mainland (Surrey, Richmond, etc). Obviously this person didn't realize how far it really is (and how costly) to drive from the Kootenays to Vancouver.

Passport Canada further demonstrated their ineptness in the way they ran the clinic. Why was it necessary for people to stand in line for up to 5 hours just to find out that they wouldn't be served?

Quite frankly, I don't believe Passport Canada has any idea of the real demand and need for passports nor do I think they have any real idea how to deal with the demand. I might suggest that maybe they don't even care. In a province as big as BC, it's completely asinine that no Passport Canada offices exist outside of the Lower Mainland.

The passport office estimates that the delay for processing a mail-in application is about 8 weeks. One of our neighbours waited over 12 weeks last spring. Does Passport Canada not understand how to deal with a larger number of applications? They'd be out of business if they had to exist in a competitive world. Perhaps they don't understand the phrase "hire and train more employees".

I think it's time for the Government and Passport Canada to get off their collective derrieres and deal with this problem. Canadians deserve better service and more and more of them are demanding better service. It's about time we received that service.