Had any issues with getting your Canadian Passport? I recently put my passport through the wash and it got some water damage. As a penance, I knew that I would have to jump through some hoops. I dutifully competed the forms, got the pictures and headed off to the Surrey passport office. 9:00 am arrive a passport office Surrey. 10:00 am after an hour waiting (not bad actually), I got up to a clerk to process my forms. After a couple of minutes: Oh, there seems to be a problem with your documents, sir. What is wrong? Well, you now need to have a Citizenship Certificate that has the same name as your passport. The name change document and old Citizenship Certificate dont work any more. You can apply on line for a new one. [you see I was born in Hong Kong and became Canadian when I was 8, I changed my name from DEath to DEith in 1990] When did that happen? October. So, what you saying is that even though I have been a citizen of Canada since 1972, and have had countless passports and recently applied for a passport, which is in front of you, I cant get a new passport without getting a new Certificate of Citizenship? Yes, sir. I would like to speak to you supervisor, please. Enter supervisor, rinse, repeat, but with the lovely addition: And, sir, it is taking up to six months to process new Citizenship Certificate and you cant get a fully renewed passport without it. After muttering something about bureaucratic nonsense, unfairness, unreasonableness and the basic injustice of the modern age, I left...with nothing. 12:00 noon After getting home, I turned on the computer to get my Certificate. Online application...should be no problem, right? 6 page PDF that must be filled in (including information about parents and grand-parents - prompting an embarrassing call to my mother to get the spelling of her middle name and the year of my dads birth), two forms of ID, the original certificate and another set of passport pictures. All to be mailed in to a center somewhere deep in the Maritimes...and a $75.00 fee. 3:26 pm Grrr....form is filled out, online payment is made $75, new pictures are taken at the drug store and attached $20, Canada Post express mail $18.50... 4:00 pm finally home and grumpy as hell...realization that I still do not have a passport coming after an entire day and over $100...and there is no guarantee that I am going to get one in time for SXSW. 4:02 pm it suddenly occurs to me that every woman who (a) got married and changed their name, and (b) was not born in Canada, will now have to go through exactly what I just went through. What if a widow has been married for 50 years, Canadian for 40 of those years and does not have her marriage certificate from the old country? Is she SOL? Does this new policy seem completely discriminatory against women? I am not impressed... So, do you think things like this are going to happen less or more often in Canada with new immigration rules? Do you think that every day Canadians are being punished?
Posted on: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 03:12:55 +0000