Wait times for passports decreasing in Saskatchewan

The wait time to get a passport is becoming a lot shorter for Saskatchewan residents, according to the federal government.

Karina Gould, the federal minister of families, children and social development, joined the Greg Morgan Morning Show on Monday to discuss how long it’s taking for someone to get a new passport in the province.

She says after what were a turbulent few months, the wait time for getting a passport in person in the province is down to 10 business days.

“The situation is a lot better than it was a month ago,” she told guest host Kevin Martel. “In Regina and Saskatoon, if you go to a passport office, you’ll be served that same day and you can get your passport within 10 business days.”

However, she mentioned the biggest issue officials are still seeing involves those sending in their passport application by mail.

“If you’re sending it in the mail, you’re looking at probably a three-month turnaround time to get your passport,” Gould explained. “I really recommend if you can to get to a passport office, because we don’t really see big lineups in Regina and Saskatoon like we do in other places across the country.”

Gould said the government has hired more passport officers over the last several months to help combat the backlogs piling up across the country. She suggested it’s important that wait times are reduced to protect the integrity of the Canadian passport and the value it holds to citizens.

“Passports are our Canadian citizenship in document form,” she stated. “We’ve hired hundreds of new people and hundreds of new people are processing and printing passports to really tackle this backlog.”

The reason for backlogs had to do with just how many people wanted to travel as the COVID-19 pandemic eased.

“I think we knew that people wanted to travel and we expected an increase, but we didn’t anticipate it would be nearly as big as it was,” she said.

“If we go back to February or March, most economists expected it would take three years before travel recovered fully to pre-pandemic times, but we’re actually already there. People are travelling at the same rate as they were in 2019, so we were not anticipating just how big the desire would be.

“We’ve learned a lot of lessons from this, and we can’t let this happen again.”