Government opens passport pick-up services in Montreal's West Island to reduce delays

Feds scrambling to cut wait times for passports Montrealers have been in line for days waiting to get into a passport office, Ottawa says it’s trying to reduce the wait times.

Montrealers can now collect their passports at the Pointe-Claire Service Canada centre in the West Island following weeks of extreme delays at offices across Quebec.

Employment and Social Development Minister Karina Gould announced Monday that five more Service Canada offices will start offering passport pick-up services.

"As we work to reduce the backlog and bring service standards back to normal, we will take every measure we can to make the experience better for Canadians and make our services more accessible," she said.

Standard and express pick-up is now available inside the Fairview Pointe-Claire Shopping Centre, while urgent services are offered in other Montreal-area offices for those who need a passport in less than two days.

"Clients requiring an urgent passport application (24-48 hours) are invited to go to Guy-Favreau, Laval or St-Laurent since the Pointe-Claire office does not have a printer to produce passports on site," said Mila Roy, spokesperson with Employment and Social Development Canada.

Additional pick-up locations in Canada have also been announced in the Greater Toronto Area (Whitby and Brampton), Ont., Calgary, Alta. and Richmond, B.C.

"Opening these new pick-up locations will also help reduce line-ups at other offices in bigger cities," the minister added.

In June, as many as 150 people lined up for hours at Montreal's Guy-Favreau Complex every day to collect their passports, with some camping overnight to avoid missing their flights.

Despite the delays, the Pointe-Claire office did not offer pick-up services last month.

"In June, our priority was to better manage the line-ups and put in place a strategy to increase our in-person services to meet client demands. It was not the pick-up requests that were responsible for most of the long lines, but the urgent requests (24-48 hours)," Roy explained.

Since April, Service Canada has issued more than 600,000 new passports, potentially a result of easing COVID-19 measures and a renewed demand for air travel.

The demand for new passports is still high across Canada, resulting in 7,076 hours of overtime among staff members in just one week, between July 11 and 17.

Over the same period, the average call centre wait time reached 56 minutes.

As of 9:30 a.m. Thursday, the estimated wait time at the Pointe-Claire passport office is two hours and 30 minutes. The office is open for passport pick-ups and all other inquiries from Monday to Friday, between 8:30 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.