I’m in the process of getting my passport. I don’t currently have travel plans, but the fact that I can’t even go to Bottineau right now without the right documents is annoying. I could have obtained a Manitoba Enhanced Driver’s License (EDL) for less money, but it’s inability to be used as a travel document for anything but land and water crossings, and the fact I lose it if I move out of province, makes it less than ideal.
According to the Winnipeg Sun, as of August 31, 2012 the Manitoba EDL program had issued 18,821 pieces of I.D. since the program started in 2009/2010. Apparently the program cost about $14-million.
Manitobans are not exactly running to sign up for this thing. As a comparison, in 2011 57.47% of Manitobans had passports according to Passport Canada. Assuming that the population of Manitoba is the 1,208,268 as stated in Wikipedia, then that would mean that 694,392 Manitobans currently have passports. That means that the rate of passports use in Manitoba is over 36 times as high as EDL use.
An EDL costs $30 over and above your driver’s licence, $50 for the non-driver version, and you renew normally every 5 years. A Canadian passport on the other hand is $120 for 5 years or $160 for 10 years. So in 10 years you would spend $60 on an EDL and $160 on a passport. The passport obviously costs more, but it is a document that allows you to do more in the long run. I’m not sure why we spent $14-million to save 18,821 people a hundred bucks each, we should have just cut them a cheque if we were being realistic.
This brings me to another point. If the Government of Manitoba wanted to make travel documents cheaper for Manitobans, they should have just looked at subsidizing passports. Now that we have the option for a 10-year passport, the province could subsidize the 10-year option by $30 bringing it down to $130, which is only $10 more that the five year. Convince the federal government to toss in a another $10 and 10-year passports for Manitobans would be the document of choice.
Assuming that 10% of passport holders would apply of renew each year, that works out to about 69,440 Manitobans per year getting a Canadian Passport. At a subsidy of $30 per person, the cost of the program would have been just over $2-million per year. That’s seven years of a program for the same cost that would have benefitted 36 times more citizens of the province.
The EDL program just wasn’t thought out.
As an aside, another thing I find annoying is how you go about the process of getting a photo for your passport. It seems ludicrous to me that I have to go get a private photo, have it certified by a guarantor, and then send it in. In 2014 when every province has photo driver’s licences, why do you not have them pull your latest provincial photo onto your passport. This seems like a simple cost-saving, cost-sharing solution between the levels of government.
