Passport delays, BoC annual financial system review : In The News for June 9

Officials have been bracing for a rise in passport demand with the relaxation of COVID-19 border measures, bringing on 600 new employees to help sort through the influx of paperwork. Last month, Service Canada reopened all passport service counters across the country, and additional counters have been added at more than 300 centres.

Still, some passport seekers say they’ve been forced to camp outside service centres or reschedule trips because of the bureaucratic bottleneck that seemed to catch federal officials by surprise.

“The fact of the matter is that while we were anticipating increased volume, this massive surge in demand has outpaced forecasts and outstripped capacity,” Families, Children and Social Development Minister Karina Gould told a parliamentary committee on May 30.

Between April 1, 2020 and March 31, 2021, Service Canada issued 363,000 passports as services were limited to urgent travel cases.

But as the world has reopened, demand has skyrocketed. Between April 1, 2021 and March 31, 2022, nearly 1.3 million passports were issued.

Since April, more than 317,000 passports have been handed out, and the federal forecast for 2022-2023 is between 3.6 million and 4.3 million applications.

Based on projections from last week, 75 per cent of Canadians who apply for a passport receive one within 40 working days, a spokesperson for Employment and Social Development Canada said in a statement. Ninety-six per cent of those who submit an application in-person at a specialized site receive a passport within 10 working days.

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Also this …

The Bank of Canada will outline what it sees as the key vulnerabilities and risks to Canada’s financial system later this morning.

The central bank’s annual financial system review comes as decades-high inflation rates are straining deeply indebted households following a significant run-up in the real estate market.

The Bank of Canada has been raising interest rates to try to curb inflation, which is also increasing the carrying costs of mortgages.

Last year’s review focused on the intensification of household vulnerabilities from the housing market, while at the time the bank still expected inflation to peak near three per cent last summer before easing later in 2021.

Inflation has instead intensified, in part due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with Statistics Canada saying inflation hit 6.8 per cent in April driven up largely by higher food and shelter prices.

A Bank of Canada survey on the financial system released on Monday found that the chance of a shock that could impair the financial system had increased from last fall because of increased geopolitical risks, the withdrawal of monetary policy support, and higher inflation.

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And this too …

It’s an itinerary worthy of Hollywood: the governor of California, the man who runs Google and the president of the United States.

Day 2 at the Summit of the Americas is shaping up to be a busy one for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

After he meets with President Joe Biden and holds a news conference with Gov. Gavin Newsom, Trudeau will take in the summit’s first leader-level plenary.

He’s also meeting with the president of Argentina before sitting down with Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company.

On Wednesday, Trudeau spent the day talking to Latin American and Caribbean leaders about helping their countries achieve their sustainable development goals.

Goldy Hyder, president and CEO of the Business Council of Canada, says today might be the day to put Canada’s own needs on the table.

“The world is changing … and as a response, new alignments are taking shape,” said Hyder, who wants Ottawa to get more assertive with the U.S. on bilateral issues. Supply chains are changing in real time, thanks to the lasting impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and governments are realizing that the private sector has a key role to play, he added.

Canada should be asking, “How are we going to partner? How are we going to address climate change? What are we going to do about supply chain integrity?” Hyder said.

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What we are watching in the U.S. …

WASHINGTON _ The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol will hold the first in a series of hearings laying out its initial findings Thursday night, a highly anticipated look at evidence the panel has been gathering for the last year.

With the televised hearings, the seven Democrats and two Republicans on the nine-member panel hope to grab the attention of the American public and drive home the sheer violence of that day in 2021, as some have attempted to downplay the attack.

And they plan to use the more than 1,000 interviews they have conducted to spotlight people who played pivotal roles in the siege _ and to show that it was a deliberate, unprecedented attempt to block the certification of Joe Biden’s victory.

The committee will sort through the mountain of information it has collected into different hearing topics, from domestic extremism to security failures to what former President Donald Trump was doing in the White House that day as hundreds of his supporters brutally pushed past police and forced their way into the Capitol.

Thursday’s prime-time hearing will be both an overview of the investigation and a preview of the hearings to come.

It will also look at domestic extremism, with testimony from British filmmaker Nick Quested, who recorded members of the far-right Proud Boys as they stormed the building, and Caroline Edwards, a U.S. Capitol Police officer who was one of the first people injured in the riot as the Proud Boys and others pushed past police.

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What we are watching in the rest of the world …

BERLIN _ Investigators are trying to make sense of “confused” statements by a man who drove into a school group in Berlin in what appears to have been a deliberate rampage, the city’s mayor said Thursday.

Wednesday’s incident on a popular shopping street in the centre of the capital left one woman dead, a teacher with the school group from central Germany, and six people with life-threatening injuries. Another three were seriously injured.

The driver, a 29-year-old German-Armenian who lives in Berlin, was detained swiftly after his car came to a halt in a shop window. Berlin Mayor Franziska Giffey said that, by Wednesday evening, authorities had determined that it was an “amok act by a really seriously psychologically impaired person.”

She told public broadcaster RBB Inforadio that investigators are working to determine the context and what if anything else influenced him. They are also “trying, with the help of a language mediator, to find out more from the partially confused statements he is making,” she added.

Berlin’s top security official, Iris Spranger, said on Wednesday that posters were found in the car “in which he expressed views about Turkey.” But she said there was “no claim of responsibility.”

Giffey said authorities don’t yet know whether the posters have any connection to Wednesday’s incident.

The car plowed into pedestrians close to the site of a 2016 attack in which an Islamic extremist drove a commandeered truck into a Christmas market, resulting in 13 deaths. Giffey said Wednesday’s crash “reopens deep wounds and traumas” associated with that event.

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On this day in 1973 …

“Secretariat” became thoroughbred horse racing’s first Triple Crown winner in 25 years. New Brunswick-born jockey Ron Turcotte rode “Secretariat” to an incredible 31-length victory in the Belmont Stakes.

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In entertainment …

NEW YORK _ The Jennifer Lopez documentary “Halftime” kicked off the 21st Tribeca Festival, launching the annual New York event with an intimate behind-the-scenes portrait of the singer-actor filmed during the tumultuous year she turned 50, co-headlined the Super Bowl and narrowly missed out on an Oscar nomination.

The premiere at the United Palace in Washington Heights served as an appropriate opener for the Tribeca Festival, which has jettisoned “Film” from its name to better reflect the wide array of concerts, talks, television premieres, podcasts and virtual reality exhibits that increasingly fill its busy live-event schedule alongside movies.

This year’s festival, running through June 19, will trot out plenty of big personalities, from Al Sharpton (the subject of the festival-closing documentary “Loudmouth”) to Taylor Swift (who will sit for a talk with filmmaker Mike Mills about the 2021 short film she directed), to fill some of Manhattan’s biggest theatres.

There will be reunions (Michael Mann’s “Heat”) and directorial debuts (among them Ray Romano’s “Somewhere in Queens”).

But after a scuttled 2020 edition and a largely outdoor 2021 festival timed to New York’s initial pandemic cultural reopening, Tribeca has turned to Bronx native Lopez, whose hits include “Let’s Get Loud,” to bring Tribeca all the way back.

“Halftime” director Amanda Micheli hopes the documentary, premiering June 14 on Netflix, presents a new _ sometimes vulnerable, often resilient _ side to its famous subject.

For the documentary, Micheli assembled footage shot in late 2019 and early 2020 by Lopez’s team and others, as well as some 1,000 hours of archival footage. In the time span covered in the film, Lopez was starring in and producing the acclaimed drama “Hustlers,” winning her Oscar buzz, and she was tapped to perform in the 2020 Super Bowl with Shakira.

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Did you see this?

OTTAWA _ Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada needs an emergency mechanism to respond quickly to humanitarian crises, according to a new report from the special parliamentary committee on Afghanistan.

That would include allowing the minister to lift biometric requirements, introduce special visas, establish refugee sponsorship programs, and establish air gateways if needed.

The committee’s report makes 37 recommendations following a study of what happened after the Taliban swept into power in Afghanistan in August 2021, causing chaos at the Kabul airport as people tried to flee the country.

It calls on Canada to waive biometric and documentation requirements for Afghans who were involved with the Canadian Armed Forces and for the family members of former interpreters, and to improve access to biometric collection sites in neighbouring countries.

Canada has been criticized for failing to act quickly enough to get people out of the country, and for failing to keep its promises to resettle tens of thousands of vulnerable people in the months since the Taliban took over.

The special committee says Canada needs to be able to “surge resources” and reallocate personnel to embassies and departments in response to future crises.

It also calls on the government to establish a team to bring Afghans to safety that includes the Department of National Defence, and hire more staff at IRCC to process applications for special immigration programs for Afghan nationals.

Canada has promised to resettle at least 40,000 Afghans, prioritizing those who helped the Canadian Armed Forces or the government during the war that began in 2001. So far more than 14,600 people have arrived in Canada.

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This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 9, 2022.

The Canadian Press

by Canadian Press

Passport delays, BoC annual financial system review : In The News for June 9

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