@JoshuaDoerksen - For the taxes I pay any government employee who can't produce a passport in 45 seconds deserves the chair

Your taxes have never paid to get a passport in 48 hours.

— your name (@JoshuaDoerksen) August 15, 2022

Much like Shiny Pony, Josh believes in the wonder that big government can do.

Yet for all they talk about how much they love big government, they can't seem to reconcile that with the fact that they really really suck at it.

Surprisingly absolutely nobody, last summer as the world began to remove Wuhan Flu restrictions based 100% on the incontrovertible science (which hadn't changed) and absolutely 0% nothing to do with the noble Freedom Convoy who stormed Ottawa and inspired the world to demand action, people around the globe decided two full years was enough practicing for 15-minute cities and they would like to go out and see this great big exciting planet again.

The problem was, of course, most people only renew their passports for 5 year intervals and nobody was interested in paying to renew it while it was useless as a result of the sort of Viro Fascism that these same incompetents engaged in. As a result, there was a surge of passport applications and renewals that began last spring (again, totally randomly, immediately in the wake of the Freedom Convoy). Everybody in the world knew this was going to happen and everybody took action to deal with the looming cris...haha, just kidding.

Public Service Canada still was letting everybody work from home, with all the hard nosed dedication to completing their day to day tasks such a lifestyle encourages. No additional resources were devoted to dealing with passport demand spikes.

Every country saw a spike last year, and some like the UK still had longer waits despite taking efforts to relieve the pressure. Of course seeing how Rat Bastard 2.0 was still denying the unvaccinated their human right to travel at that time, Canada should have seen less demand than other countries. Israel devoted extra resources but then shunted them away to Ukrainians fleeing the police action ongoing in that country. Canada ended up looking more like Bhutan, who ran out of passports last summer, than Germany, who saw their passport wait rise from 10 days to...18 days...

Germany seems to be the only country to learn from what happened to the Americans in 2021, when their passport offices saw strain and then again resources applied to fix the problem.

Now while Josh is correct that we never had 48 hour passport service, this is disingenuous (a phrase that we use about 83 times a month to describe a leftists' argument): the whole reason for the 48 hour emergency service was to expedite requests that were so backlogged that people applied for a passport months in advance (long before the official 6 1/2 weeks) and then 48 hours ahead of their flight still hadn't received it.

The "garbage service" whose honour Josh was leaping to defend after it was so brutally impinged in the earlier thread was of course the situation that led to a situation where 48 hour emergency passport processings were being held.

I noted earlier that Canada was looking a lot like a third world country than a first world one with the passport troubles. While you may try to defend the situation by pointing to America or Israel or Germany or Israel, we go back to where we started this all off:

Canadians are raped by confiscatory taxation that's supposed to prevent all of this!

The tax burden of Canadians is justified by scumbags on the left because of all that the benevolent government does for us. While Canada isn't the highest taxed realm in the OECD, adjusted for rising government debt and the size of the public sector^† would make us pretty close.

^†Curiously, despite being a known issue, there isn't really any literature or studies that compare the taxpayer burden in this fashion. Let's say 50% of your population are government workers. Therefore even though your income tax may claim to only collect 46% of your revenue, 23% of that isn't really income revenue, as it's already been collected from the actual economy and paid out to the government worker (and their negative value). Conversely, diverting tax revenue away from individuals in the form of taking on debt is a shell game that can artificially lower income tax revenue (while it does actually lower actual revenue in a given year, the economy as a whole is too smart to fall for it and shrinks as a result of business awareness of the looming threat).

Norway (7 weeks wait due to backlog, half a week longer than the Canadian "normal") is similarly a highly taxed country but at least in return for that money being stolen from the hands of hardworking Norwegians they get a passport in return.

Also, I'm not sure that "other countries tax you through the nose and then screw this up" is exactly the best defense. It might make people realize there's a systemic and institutional issue at play here, and demand change accordingly. Indeed during the Harper government, Canada actually did a lot to speed and simplify the passport process: in a typical year you could renew within minutes and hold your new passport within days. In other words, we started from a better position than many other countries, and in 2022 we threw that advantage entirely away.

Part of the problem, indeed, was that passports continued to expire during the period the Canadian state made them worthless. In the same way the USA has extended green cards, why couldn't the Canadian government have done the same with passports? Send a mailout to every person whose passport expired between March 2020 and December 2022 and give them a special option to one-click receive a new (free) passport that didn't expire until December 2022: after which they would need to renew using the standard pay-up methodology. I didn't let my passport lapse, you Viro Fascists denied it to me: why am I on the hook for this?

As the post title noted, if the Canadian government insists on holding all the power, then they either execute their duties in a reasonable manner, or reasonable people are perfectly justified in performing their own executions.