Camping chairs, blankets and sleeping bags were all on display as hundreds of Montrealers hunkered down for the long haul to get a passport renewal on Thursday.
Some 350 people have been queuing outside the St. Laurent passport office for the past few weeks.
The line on Thursday snaked around the entirety of the Galerie Saint-Laurent shopping centre.
Most of the people waiting say they have been there hours before opening time and for many, it’s not their first time.
“You think at 2 a.m. you’ll be the first one but that’s not the case,” Didier Cyr said.
“We came here yesterday at 7:30 a.m. thinking an hour in advance was enough. the line already wrapped around the building.”
READ MORE: Anger, frustration after hundreds continue to camp out outside B.C. passport office
Corentin Labouré’s plane leaves the next day for France. He hopes to attend a family funeral.
This is his fourth attempt to get his passport. Desperate, he managed to get the first spot outside Service Canada’s office door after spending the entire night outside.
“Emotionally, it will cost me a lot. It is the funeral of my grandmother this weekend in France. It means a lot for me to attend,” Labouré said.
Mother Ophélie Beaumier Perras is also trying to get a passport for her newborn daughter, Soanne.
She says they applied for a passport in March and have not gotten a response since.
She and her daughter have been waiting on the sidewalk since 5 a.m. to get access to an emergency passport since her plane leaves on Saturday.
“I don’t know how long it’s going to take. I have our lunches,” she said.
“If necessary, I will come back tomorrow even earlier.”
Currently, the office is only accepting emergency cases with flights or travel plans scheduled within the next 24 to 48 hours. People are being told otherwise to come back closer to the date of travel.
READ MORE: Scores of people camp overnight for passport renewal as long lines, service delays continue
Service Canada has been experiencing an “unprecedented volume of applications” whose processing has been delayed by in-person capacity limits set during the pandemic, it said in a news release last month.
“Service Canada has hired 600 new employees specifically to support the processing of passport applications, and has opened more dedicated passport intake counters in over 300 Service Canada Centres,” it said in the release.
Other measures include the opening of new processing hubs, the adoption of new workload management and processing technology, and the addition of Saturday hours in select centres.
Federal passport service standards are 10 business days for processing if applying in-person at a Service Canada Centre Passport Services office, and 20 days if applying at a Service Canada Centre or by mail.
While processing times are longer than before the pandemic, Service Canada said 98 per cent of Canadians who apply in-person at a specialized passport office receive their passports in less than 10 business days. It added that 500,000 applications were received in March and April alone.
With files from Elizabeth McSheffrey
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