Mr. Speaker, the member opposite and his colleague from Vancouver may like to grandstand in front of the media and spread misinformation about the facts but the reality is that Passport Canada has hired 500 more employees to deal with the issue of backlog. In fact, we have increased capacity and output by over 40%.
Faced with an avalanche of passport applications of over 20,000 a day for a period of time, we are now dealing with that backlog, eating into the capacity by the professionalism, hard work and overtime hours of officials at Passport Canada. This issue is coming in hand.