Yes, I am now legal to travel outside the country again! I have a shiny new Canadian passport that doesn’t expire until the twenties.
The new passport is actually quite beautiful inside; each page has a different engraved background picture, and there’s quite a lot of colour as well. It even came a week earlier than the expected ship date on the order receipt. Government efficiency!
I got the passport just in case I get a job offer outside the country after I graduate. Which far-flung Doper shall I [del]annoy[/del] visit first*?
[sub]*Assuming sufficient time and money for travel–a big assumption right now.[/sub]
Congrats. My passport is perhaps my most treasured possession; it lets me go anywhere-ish. Well, anywhere that’s not Cuba, and maybe I need to get a visa first, but close enough.
I figured that halving the amount of renewal hassle was worth an extra $40.
My friend was just saying that children need passports at birth, but that they don’t get updated any more frequently than normal, which means that her three-year-old still has a baby pic in her passport. I would have thought that that might cause problems, but apparently not.
I, also, renewed my passport in 2011. I don’t recall hearing anything about a 10-year passport being an option, at the time. I wonder if this is a fairly recent change.
They should have had the people who did the new passport artwork do the new banknote artwork. My only beef with the new banknotes was that the artwork was too monochrome.
How long did it take? I think it is still a fair bit more expensive than a 10 year US passport. I have never gotten a Canadian passport. Partly because I am reluctant to mail in my citizenship card and they will hassle me if I try to return to Canada without it.
I submitted and paid for the application in person at a passport office on Jan 22nd; I received it in the mail (Expresspost) today, Jan 30th.
Granted, that was the second time I’d been to the passport office; the first time, they said that my birth certificate was too damaged to be accepted, so I had to get a new one from the Ontario government, but once that was done, I had no problems.
Thanks! Another visit to you guys in Montréal is definitely on the list.
I’d suggest coming out west. You won’t need your passport (well, I’m close enough to the 49th that you may want to bring it anyway–Montana’s Glacier National Park isn’t far away), but we’d like to see you out here someday.
