I think that around the world, and particularly in similar countries to Canada, there's a great demand to travel. People were at home for two years, so now they're ready to get back out and see the world. The situation that we're experiencing in Canada is actually not unique, and other countries are also struggling with the increase in demand and passports that have expired over those past two years.
To put it into context, in Australia, they're recommending at least six weeks to apply before a passport. In Ireland, it's about eight weeks for mail-in service. New Zealand has an online system so it's a bit faster at 22 working days. In the U.K., they're saying up to 10 weeks to get a passport. In the United States routine processing is eight to 11 weeks, and in fact, their expedited processing is five to seven weeks. In Sweden, it's 27.7 weeks to get an appointment for a passport, and in France they actually don't tell you what the wait time is but to expect serious delays.
That's not to give any excuses or justification whatsoever. It's just that when you design a passport system in Canada or around the world, you do it in a way to maximize efficiency. Because passports typically are quite predictable, they're not really built for these massive surges. Even though we've taken a whole range of measures in terms of hiring an additional 600 staff, probably hiring another 600 staff and moving 600 internally, there is a huge demand right now.
The other thing I'll add on is that the Canadian passport is a document that has a lot of integrity. It's recognized around the world and it's a secure document. While we're able to expedite documents on an urgent basis, it has to go through a really rigorous process, because we need to ensure that integrity is maintained.
We're doing everything we can to speed it up, but we're, unfortunately, not out of line with many of our international counterparts.