While Canadians are finally breathing easier with the return to normal of passport services, Americans continue to endure a “nightmare zone” of unprecedented and excruciating delays in order to update their travel documents, suggesting that it truly is greener for Canadians on this side of the fence.
South of the border, the post pandemic-fuelled backup of US passport applications has smashed into a wall of government bureaucracy – with too few humans to handle the load. The result, say frustrated travellers in the US is a maddening pre-travel purgatory defined, at best, by costly uncertainty.
So grim is the outlook that US officials aren’t even denying the problem or predicting when it will ease. They’re blaming the epic wait times on lingering pandemic-related staffing shortages and a pause of online processing this year. That’s left the passport agency flooded with a record-busting 500,000 applications a week. The deluge is on-track to top last year’s 22 million passports issued, the State Department says.
With family dreams and big money on the line, passport seekers describe a slow-motion agony of waiting, worrying, holding the line, refreshing the screen, complaining to Congress, paying extra fees, and following incorrect directions. Some applicants are buying additional plane tickets to snag in-process passports where they sit – in other cities – in time to make the flights they booked in the first place.
Concerned travellers have been asking for answers and then demanding help, including from their representatives in the House and Senate, who widely reported at hearings this year that they were receiving more complaints from constituents on passport delays than any other issue.
The US secretary of state had an answer, of a sort.
“With COVID, the bottom basically dropped out of the system,” Antony Blinken told a House subcommittee March 23 – when the state department was estimating wait times for regular passports of up to 13 weeks. When demand for travel all but disappeared during the pandemic, he said, the government let contractors go and reassigned staff that had been dedicated to handling passports.
Around the same time, the government also halted an online renewal system “to make sure that we can fine tune it and improve it,” Blinken said. He said the department is hiring agents as quickly as possible, opening more appointments, and trying to address the crisis in other ways.
Passport applicants lit up social media groups, toll-free numbers, and lawmakers’ phone lines with questions, appeals for advice and cries for help. Facebook and WhatsApp groups bristled with reports of bewilderment and fury. Reddit published eye-watering diaries, some more than 1,000 words long, of application dates, deposits submitted, contacts made, time on hold, money spent and appeals for advice.
The number of Americans holding valid US passports has grown at roughly 10% faster than the population over the past three decades, according to Jay Zagorsky, an economist at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.
After passport delays derailed his own plans to travel to London earlier this year, Zagorsky found that the number of US passports per American has soared from about three per 100 people in 1989 to nearly 46 per 100 people in 2022. Americans, it turns out, are on the move.
“As a society gets richer,” says Zagorsky, “the people in that society say, ‘I want to visit the rest of the world.’”
At US consulates overseas, the quest for US visas and passports is almost unfathomable.
On a day in June, people in New Delhi could expect to wait 451 days for a visa interview, according to the website. Those in Sao Paulo could plan on waiting more than 600 days. Aspiring travellers in Mexico City were waiting about 750 days; in Bogota, Colombia, it was 801 days.
Tales from the trenches
Back in the US, Marni Larsen of Holladay, Utah, stood in line in Los Angeles on June 14, in hopes of snagging her son’s passport. That way, she hoped, the pair could meet the rest of their family, who had already left as scheduled for Europe, for a long-planned vacation.
She’d applied for her son’s passport two months earlier and spent weeks checking for updates online or through a frustrating call system. As the mid-June vacation loomed, Larsen reached out to Sen. Mitt Romney’s office, where one of four people he says is assigned full-time to passport issues were able to track down the document in New Orleans.
It was supposed to be shipped to Los Angeles, where she got an appointment to retrieve it. That meant Larsen had to buy new tickets for herself and her son to Los Angeles and reroute their trip from there to Rome. All on a bet that her son’s passport was indeed shipped as promised.
“We are just waiting in this massive line of tons of people,” Larsen said. “It’s just been a nightmare.”
They succeeded. But not everyone has been so lucky.
Miranda Richter applied in person to renew passports for herself and her husband, as well as apply a new one on Feb. 9 for a trip with their neighbours to Croatia on June 6. She ended up cancelling, losing more than $1,000.
Her timeline went like this: Passports for her husband and daughter arrived in 11 weeks, while Richter’s photo was rejected. On May 4, she sent in a new one via priority mail. Then she paid a rush fee of $79, which was never charged to her credit card. Between May 30 and June 2, four days before travel, Richter and her husband spent more than 12 hours on the national passport line while also calling their congressman, senators, and third-party couriers.
Finally, she showed up in person at the federal building in downtown Houston, 30 minutes before the passport office opened. Richter said there were at least 100 people in line.
“The security guard asked when is my appointment, and I burst out in tears,” she recalls. She couldn’t get one. “It didn’t work.”
Canada
Meanwhile in Canada, wait time for regularly passports has returned to with Ottawa having declared as of January that passport delivery has returned to pre-pandemic processing times and that Service Canada is in fact exceeding its delivery standard for most applications (20 days for regular and 10 days for express service).
(Ed. note: After applying in person for regular service at a Passport Office in Brampton, Ont. in early June, with a wait time of about 45 minutes, our document arrived earlier than forecast and without incident about two weeks later).
Last summer, Ottawa hired hundreds of additional workers at Service Canada to process the backlog and has introduced further improvements to service offerings over the past several months that it says will enable it to handle the first wave of renewals for passports with a validity of 10 years, which has started this month (July).
Additionally new 10-day passport service sites across Canada have been opened in such cities as Prince George, BC; Lac-Mégantic, Que.; and Timmins, Ont., bringing the number of sites in smaller population centres to 20.
Ottawa further points out that for the past several months, Canadians have been able to get real-time updates, 24-hours a day, on the processing of their applications through the online Passport Application Status Checker, which has led to shorter wait times when contacting the Passport Call Centre. Since the launch of the service on March 21, there have been over 700,000 visits to the online status checker website.
“By eliminating the backlog, offering 10-day service at additional locations, creating an online status checker, and rolling out online passport renewal services, Service Canada is making it even easier for Canadians to get their passports when they need them,” said Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, Karina Gould, who added, “We will continue to take important steps to modernize the passport system and provide the service Canadians deserve.”
Fast facts
• From April 2022 to March 2023, the Government of Canada issued 3,346,223 passports.
• For the 2023-24 fiscal year, between 4.3 and 4.9 million passports are forecast to be issued.
• Since April 1, 2023, the Government of Canada has issued 745,401 passports.
• Since Aug. 15, 2022, the 20 Service Canada Centres offering 10-day passport service have processed over 103,000 passport applications.
• The Government of Canada announced a return to a steady state for the Passport Program on Jan. 24, following major challenges related to, and exacerbated by the changing circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic.