Ottawa: Federal Families, Children and Social Development Minister Karina Gould has said Canada’s passport applications backlog has been completely eliminated.
On Tuesday, Karina Gould said the service time for passport applications has reached the pre-pandemic standards.
After restrictions related to Covid-19 were lifted, the demand for getting passports issued or renewed witnessed a surge, leading to long queues outside passport offices. Even some Canadians had to wait overnight for their turns the next day.
Speaking on Tuesday, federal minister Karina Gould said, “In late January thanks to many months of extremely hard work from Service Canada staff all over the country, I was able to announce the backlog of passport applications had been virtually eliminated. At that time there were a small number of applications remaining in the backlog. Some of these were quite complex to process and not every application resulted in passport being issued.”
“Regardless of the situation, Service Canada staff worked to bring the numbers down and today, it is completely eliminated,” she announced in a media briefing.
On the occasion, the federal families, children and social development minister said starting March 21, if a Canadian applied for a passport and provided their email address, they can check the status of their passport application online.