My next question is for Mr. Edwards.
Just to give you a little bit of a heads up about where I'm from, I'm from northern Ontario. To get to a passport office is quite far.
I want to compliment your staff. They've been very cooperative. They've been very helpful. But they've also been overwhelmed and overworked. I think through no fault of their own the service has been lacking in the last, probably, nine months or so, ever since everything started picking up. It was like watching a train wreck happen in slow motion. Everything was just kind of happening. You knew it was coming; you just couldn't do anything about it. I couldn't, in any case. I was hoping someone at Passport Canada would have.
This is a quote I wrote down while you were speaking. You said that Canadians are expecting quality service at a reasonable price. You also mentioned expanding your reach to different regions. Again, I'm from northern Ontario. We don't have any passport offices. The nearest one is in Toronto, which is about three and a half or four hours away. Ottawa is about the same. To the west is Thunder Bay, which is about a 19-hour drive from where I am.
You talk about a reasonable price. Now, it costs money—in travel, in time taken off, in lost wages—when people have to get a passport done in a hurry or when they want to go to a passport office. Can you tell me what you're doing to improve that or what I can expect to see in my riding over the next little while? It's Nipissing—Timiskaming. It's in North Bay, Ontario, and in Haileybury, on the Timiskaming shores.