Senator Housakos: — or was Minister Gould throwing you under the bus for your mismanagement?

Hon. Leo Housakos: Minister, the delays, long lineups and shockingly poor service that Canadians are currently subjected to while simply trying to obtain or renew a passport are completely unacceptable. Just this morning, I went to Galeries St-Laurent, my local mall that houses the Canadian passport bureau. There was a lineup of Canadian taxpayers for blocks and blocks. They were there with their lawn chairs and umbrellas, waiting hours on end to fill out passport applications and then having to wait for months before they receive their passports. Anyone watching the scene would not believe they were in Canada; they would think they were in some banana republic.

Two weeks ago, your colleague Minister Gould blamed your department for this mess by not anticipating that the demand for passports would be high. She told the House committee:

One thing that’s a bit of a challenge for us is that Service Canada doesn’t do the forecasting. IRCC does the forecasting, and the original forecast for this year was for about 2.4 million passports, which gets us into the ballpark of where things were prepandemic.

Minister, do you accept this criticism from your cabinet colleague that your forecast for the demand for passports was completely inadequate —