A rural Manitoba family scheduled to travel Sunday to the Dominican Republic is feeling stressed and frustrated after waiting weeks for their passports only to be sent the wrong documents earlier this week.
When a package was delivered to Portage la Prairie, Man., by a courier service on Wednesday, the family was shocked to find out the three passports they were sent actually belong to a family from Ontario.
“Our jaws dropped. Our minds were blown,” said Kristen Harley. “I couldn’t believe it.”
Passport applications for her husband and two daughters were completed in person at the Service Canada location in Portage la Prairie, about 85 kilometres west of Winnipeg, in mid-October, and they were expecting them to arrive at the end of November.
The family contacted Service Canada to tell them what happened when they got the wrong ones, and Harley tracked down the woman from the Ontario family whose passports they received.
“She was shocked and at first, needed some clarification and wanted to make sure that I was legit and that I wasn’t some sort of scammer,” Harley said.
Harley thought her family’s passports were sent to the Ontario family, but that wasn’t the case.
“She got back to me right away and was very grateful that I had hers, but she had not received any passports,” Harley said.
She still doesn’t know how her Portage la Prairie-area family was sent the wrong passports and thinks the mishap raises serious privacy and security concerns.
“We’ve been contacting Passport Canada on a regular basis for the past month, and one of the first things you hear when you’re waiting on hold is that if your passport is lost or stolen, it’s imperative that you contact them to let them know due to the sensitive nature of the information on the passport,” Harley said.
The frustration for Harley and her family started before they received the wrong passports.
When Canada Post workers went on strike on Nov. 15, the family started getting worried about their travel documents arriving in time and contacted Service Canada.
Rural address, strike complicated delivery
They were told nothing could be done until 10 days before their departure date.
When the 10-day mark passed, they were told nothing could be done until five days before their trip.
Making matters worse, the family was told the passports would have to be delivered by Purolator due to the Canada Post strike. But because they live in a rural area, they were not able to receive a courier delivery.
With just seven days left before their trip, the family reached out to Portage-Lisgar MP Branden Leslie.
He started making calls to try to help.
“It is frankly unacceptable and it’s been a failure of government bureaucracy,” Leslie said.
A spokesperson for Employment and Social Development Canada, which oversees Service Canada, didn’t explain the error but said lost or misdirected passports are very rare.
“More than 99.99 per cent of the roughly 4.45 million passports issued in the 2023-24 fiscal year were delivered without issue,” the spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.
The Passport Program requires employees to confirm the mailing address on the envelope and the client’s name before sending the package, the spokesperson said.
ESDC said despite precautions, human error is still possible, and it investigates incidents like this to determine what additional measures could be put in place.
Service Canada eventually agreed to send the passports by courier to a relative’s address in Portage la Prairie.
The family was told Dec. 12 that the passports would arrive on Dec. 16.
They didn’t show up.
Finally on Wednesday, the family got the delivery — and it turned out to be the wrong ones.
“It’s just been a super-frustrating experience,” Harley said.
“We should be getting excited for our trip. It’s our first big family trip. We haven’t been able to get excited. We’re hardly packed, even though we’re supposed to be leaving on Saturday to Winnipeg.”
Too many passports
The ordeal took another turn when Harley’s husband drove to Winnipeg to return the Ontario family’s passports on Thursday.
He applied for emergency passports while visiting the downtown Winnipeg passport office to make sure they would get them in time for their trip on Sunday.
Later Thursday, their passports arrived in Portage by courier.
But because the family applied for emergency passports, the ones that were sent to them were considered no longer valid.
They were told they would have to make one more trip to Winnipeg to switch the passports they received by courier for the emergency versions.
By Friday afternoon, those instructions had changed. The family was told the passports they were sent Thursday are now valid for travel.
Harley said they’ve spent hours on the phone trying to figure out what happened and estimates the ordeal has cost them thousands of dollars in missed time at work and travel to Winnipeg.
“Some accountability would be nice for this pretty huge error,” she said.
It’s a passport disaster that has added extra stress to a Portage la Prairie family’s Christmas vacation. Not only were the documents delivered late, but once they arrived, it turns out they were the wrong passports.