Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House once again to present a passport petition from people in my riding. In fact, just before I came to the House I was speaking with a resident of mine who was trying to drive the 10 hours to a passport clinic for his daughter and had his car wiped out by a moose.
It raises the issue, which is in this petition signed by hundreds of people from the Timmins region, that since we do not have walk-in services anywhere in northeastern Ontario and we are dependent on passport services because we do represent a mining region where people do a lot of international travel, we are in a situation where our region has been unfairly left out of the national service because we need to have mail-in service and obviously the mail-in service is nowhere close to what we would see at a walk-in passport office.
Therefore, given the fact that it is between a 10 and 12 hour drive for many of my residents to get to a passport office, they are looking to work with the government. The petitioners are calling for a passport service that would support not just the people of northeastern Ontario but also northwestern Quebec.
I am very proud to speak to that issue today and to bring forward this petition.