A couple was surprised to receive confidential documents from a stranger in the mail. An uncommon problem, but which persists over time.
Posted at 1:05 a.m.
Updated at 7:00 a.m.
Chloe Bourquin
The Press
They were waiting for their daughter’s passport. But when they opened the Passport Canada envelope, Maxime Privé and his partner were surprised to find that of an unknown person, accompanied by her birth and marriage certificate.
“If we had been malicious people, identity theft would have been very easy to do with all these documents,” worries this young father of a 2-month-old baby. “It’s really not reassuring to know that such confidential documents can end up in anyone’s hands. »
Name, age, address: nothing was identical between the file of his daughter and that of this 33-year-old woman residing in Manitoba.
As soon as he realized the error, the couple went to Service Canada to make the documents confidential, he said in an interview with The Press. But the height of surprise: we let them leave with the documents, telling them that a procedure would soon be communicated to them to return them.
They could have kept them to send them back to their side. But no, they preferred to give them back to strangers. I think this is the most disturbing case in all of history.
Maxime Privé
It was last May 22. Ten days later, the documents still sat on her kitchen counter. The couple tried to find the owner of the passport on social networks to warn her, without success.
A situation that continues
Contacted by The Press On this subject, Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) said it took the situation “very seriously”. He acknowledges that “on rare occasions, we can have situations of human error. For example, documents may be inadvertently delivered to an incorrect address.” In this case, the person concerned is alerted and an internal investigation is opened to prevent this from happening again.
He also indicated that regarding the return of misdirected documents, normally, “procedures are in place to prioritize clients who go to an office.”
Similar Passport Canada errors were revealed in the media last year, when Quebecers were surprised to receive passports from people residing in Manitoba, Alberta, Ontario or British Columbia.
This is not a new problem: such cases were already making headlines in 2011. But these recipient errors seem to persist, more than a decade later.
An investigation by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada showed in 2021 that 64 passports had been reported to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) as having been misdirected, between 2016 and 2019.
“Comparing with the millions of passports and other passport-related communications sent each year, the error rate is well below 1%,” ESDC emphasized by email.
More secure solutions?
To prevent such errors from happening again and to better protect the personal information of passport applicants, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada recommends favoring options other than simple delivery by mail.
We therefore encourage IRCC to consider providing individuals with greater access to in-person passport delivery options, such as pickup at a location near them (with proof of identity required).
Excerpt from the report of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
Several countries in fact have stricter procedures, he mentions. In France, for example, the application for and collection of a passport must systematically be done in person. And if the applicant is unable to travel for medical reasons, an agent goes to their home to complete the procedures with them.
