Thank you, Madame Chair.
I appreciate all the comments raised before, and I recognize the progress that's been made by Passport Canada. I know in my own constituency we've noticed the processing times have certainly been reduced significantly from when we first met the challenge a year ago today. I think we're hearing from our constituents that the average wait times have gone from three or four months to three or four weeks.
But there are still some frustrations—and I'll use this opportunity to raise some of them—that there really are different levels of service. I heard the concerns about remote areas of the country and rural areas, but I think that concern also exists in mid-size to small towns. In my riding in the city of Barrie, there are 135,000 people, and I know that cities of that size also face similar frustrations. If folks are not going to do it at their MP's office, they're going to have to drive to the closest major urban city, which for us is Toronto. And many people, who work at jobs that restrict their ability to take an afternoon or a day off, find renewing their passports very frustrating.
I asked my office staff, who deal with passports.... We probably get about a hundred requests a week for passports, so it's one of our number one issues that we face from constituents. One of the concerns my office staff have is that Passport Canada has discontinued that MP helpline, which they could call to speak to a live person. I was told that now it's just an answering machine, but they said it was very helpful previously.
Could you start off by letting me know why that service was discontinued, and what hope there is that it will start up again?