Madam Speaker, we have been preparing for this for some time. As early as December, we hired 500 new employees to process passports. We opened three new processing centres around the country, and over the weekends we opened as many locations as possible to serve Canadians. In addition to that, over 300 Service Canada centres are processing passport applications for Canadians.
We continue to do more to alleviate this unprecedented level of demand for service.