Article content
Nothing is as Canadian as appointing a task force to deal with a problem as opposed to fixing it and on Saturday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did not disappoint.
Article content
Wrapping up his meeting with Commonwealth leaders in Rwanda and heading for a meeting of the G7 in Germany starting Sunday, Trudeau announced a new task force to figure out why it’s taking so long for the government to process passport and immigration applications.
“We know service delays, particularly in recent months, are unacceptable,” Trudeau said in a statement.
Ten members of the Trudeau cabinet, plus three ex-officio cabinet members — plus even more ministers seconded to the task if necessary — “will drive action to improve the processing of passports and immigration applications by identifying priority areas for action and outlining short- and longer-term solutions, with a focus on reducing wait times, clearing out backlogs and improving the overall quality of services provided to Canadians.”
Article content
Given the Trudeau government’s performance on pretty much every file it touches, Canadians currently camping out at passport offices and lining up at 3:00 am in the faint hope of obtaining or renewing one may be somewhat skeptical about this latest news.
But on the bright side, it’s at least a step up from Transport Minister Omar Alghabra’s unforgettable observation last month that massive line-ups at major Canadian airports such as Toronto’s Pearson were not the result of staff shortages or vaccine mandates, but because passengers had forgotten how to line up since the start of the pandemic two years ago.
“Taking out the laptops, taking out the fluids — all that adds 10 seconds here, 15 seconds there,” Alghabra told reporters at the time.
In defense of our fellow Canadians, we would argue that even before the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020 and made everything much worse, Canadians were already experts at lining up.
For health care, for example, whether waiting hours in emergency rooms to be seen by a doctor or enduring some of the longest medical wait times in the industrialized world for operations, tests and treatments.
Given that health care is a joint responsibility of the federal and provincial governments, perhaps a joint federal-provincial task force can fix that, although we doubt it.