News: Passport Offices - Not enough staff, computers, to meet demand
Published by Patrick April 24th, 2007 in News / OpEd, Treasury Board Tags: nat, news, public-services, sinclair.
Kent Spencer, The Province, Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Canadians should brace themselves for long passport waits “for months” to come, says a spokeswoman for the workers who process passport applications.
“There is no end in sight,” Kay Sinclair, Vancouver-based vice-president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, said yesterday.
“I’m told the situation could last for months. Employees could be asked to work all summer to keep up with demand.”
A backlog of applications has developed since the U.S. required all passengers arriving in the U.S. by air to carry passports starting Jan. 23.
About 2,000 PSAC members have been working overtime on weeknights and weekends to process applications, said Sinclair. Printers are running 24 hours a day.
“The job is really stressful,” she said. “Sometimes the public have taken out their frustrations. There’s pressure in terms of [not] taking breaks and holidays.”
An official at the Foreign Affairs office in Ottawa, which issues passports, could not say when all-day lineups will end.
Up to 100 people with blankets have been lining up outside the Sinclair Centre in Vancouver, starting at 4 a.m. each weekday.
“We’re hoping demand has peaked,” said Andre Lemay of Foreign Affairs. “We knew there would be a surge in demand, but not this much. Waits are much longer than they should be.”
Lemay said the department took “appropriate steps.” About 250 additional employees have been hired, but not yet trained, for passport offices across Canada. There are plans to hire 250 more.
He said manpower isn’t the only problem. “You’ve got 10 computers and 30 people waiting to use them.”
Simon Fraser University labour professor Mark Leier said relying on overtime to get the job done is bad management.
“People get exhausted,” he said. “It has a human cost. Managers are told to increase the output but they don’t get the resources. It translates into cracking the whip. Lots of employers don’t care about the human cost.”
Bruce Cran of the Consumers’ Association of Canada said Foreign Affairs needs to fix the problem in a hurry. “It’s a pretty horrific situation. You can expect this in a third-world country, but in Canada it is unacceptable,” Cran said.
“People with ill health stand in line like everyone else. Officials feel everyone should be treated equally. That’s not Canadian.”
Cran, Vancouver-based president of the national advocacy group, said the wealthy are being favoured.
“People with money can pay $50 for someone to stand in line [for them]. I saw one guy asking $10 to wait during toilet breaks. He had a map showing nearby washrooms.”
A national consumers’ survey found lineups at passport offices were bad everywhere, but Cran said Vancouver’s Sinclair Centre was probably the worst.
“Surrey’s quite a shambles. The best of the three in the Lower Mainland may be Richmond,” he said.
Last week, the association tried to call Passport Canada every day for four hours. No connection was made. Passport Canada admits to “dropping” 124,000 calls a week.