Public Service Alliance of Canada BC

source: Vancouver Sun, Friday, May 04, 2007

What is it going to take for the managers at Passport Canada to get their act together? Furious people waiting in endless lines, angry letters and phone calls to Passport Canada staff and to newspapers, and media reports and editorials so far seem to have had little effect.

• Related: Passport Offices - Not enough staff, computers, to meet demand

The lineups continue, as does Passport Canada’s practice of telling people that they’re not going to be seen after they’ve waited hours in the cold and rain. In fact, the agency’s arrogance has reached new heights in the past few weeks.

Consider, for example, The Vancouver Sun’s attempts to find out merely who’s in charge of the Vancouver office. Calls to the offices of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay and Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day failed to yield an answer.

Letters and phone calls to Passport Canada CEO Gerald Cossette went unreturned, which suggests he has no interest in serving the public or taking responsibility for the mess he’s created. And Ottawa-based Passport Canada representative Fabian Lengelle told a reporter that he wasn’t sure whether he should release the name of the person in charge in Vancouver. Now that’s hardly the right attitude for a government agency that’s supposed to be serving the public.

Ultimately, it took a tip from the public for The Sun to learn that Hal Hickey is the director of Passport Canada’s western region. Naturally, Hickey couldn’t be reached for comment.

Perhaps these men are hiding because they don’t have a clue as to what they’re doing. After all, there’s plenty of evidence to show Passport Canada’s negligence. It’s now been more than three months since the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative — which requires Canadians travelling by air to the U.S. to present a passport — went into effect. That should have been more than enough time for the agency to have resolved the continuing problems.

In fact, Passport Canada had a lot longer than three months to prepare for the increase in passport applications. Auditor-General Sheila Fraser warned the federal government in mid-2006 that the agency wasn’t ready for the increase in applications. Naturally, nothing was done — which has led to the current crisis.

Despite Fraser’s warning, Passport Canada doesn’t even seem willing to admit its negligence. Lengelle, who to his credit is one of the few officials willing to even speak to the media, denied that the agency was unprepared, allowing only that it was “under-prepared.”

However Lengelle wants to spin it, Passport Canada officials were and are negligent, and were and are arrogant. Since they seem unable or unwilling to resolve the problem — and unwilling to even respond to public inquiries — it’s high time that we hear from Peter MacKay or Stephen Harper on this matter.

Even more so, it’s time they dealt with the officials at Passport Canada, the public servants who have little interest in serving the public.