Mr. Speaker, in addition to the 500 new employees at Passport Canada, we have taken significant steps to deal with this surge.
I fully sympathize with the frustration felt by Canadians. We have a situation where we are getting as many as 18,000 applications a day. We have taken steps, including nighttime shifts, overtime, hiring new employees and having national blitzes on the weekends.
The officials at Passport Canada are working extremely hard to deal with this. We are taking more passports in at Service Canada locations around the country. We are continuing to work extremely hard to find new, efficient ways to deal with the situation at Passport Canada.