Skip to content
{ 2006 09 27 }

Baby Passports

I had to take the kids in to get pass­port pho­tos done today, since we’ll be trav­el­ling with them out­side of Canada. I found a local place with exper­i­ence in tak­ing pho­tos for dif­fer­ent coun­tries (Canada and New Zea­l­and); the require­ments are dif­fer­ent. For example, Canada wants a white back­ground for the pho­tos, while New Zea­l­and wants a light but not white back­ground. Both coun­tries expect pho­tos with eyes open and mouth closed and no vis­ible hands, so the pho­to­grapher put a cloth over the hand hold­ing the front of the baby. She kept turn­ing to look at me, or smil­ing at the pho­to­grapher, but even­tu­ally we were done. For­tu­nately there is an inter­sec­tion set of who’s allowed to sign the back of the pho­tos to say this is really the child in the photo (our fam­ily doc­tor); New Zea­l­and will allow any New Zeal­ander or one of a num­ber of pro­fes­sions to be a wit­ness (guar­antor of iden­tity), while Canada insists on the pro­fes­sions (doc­tor, account­ant, etc). One could won­der why people who engage in other pro­fes­sions aren’t con­sidered good enough to verify your iden­tity in Canada. Why not your employer, for example? And why is geoscient­ist on the list, but not phys­i­cist or com­puter scientist?

Posted by Lauren Wood on Wednesday, September 27, 2006, at 3:14 pm. Filed under General. You can post a comment, but trackbacks are closed.

{ 2 } Comments

  1. Malcolm Tredinnick | Sep 27, 2006 at 8:41 pm | Permalink

    Aus­tralia used to be sim­ilar to Canada, which was a real pain after I’d just moved inter­state a few years back, needed a renewal and did not have a suf­fi­ciently long rela­tion­ship with any doc­tor or law­yer or other approved per­son. For­tu­nately, they heard my men­tal anguish and changed it to any Aus­tralian pass­port holder who wasn’t related to you and had known you for five years — which has become much easier.

    I’m not sure that requir­ing some “tra­di­tion­ally hon­or­able” pro­fes­sional makes the pro­cess any less vul­ner­able than some­body who is will­ing to put down their own identi­fy­ing details and an “under pen­alty of per­jury” claim that they believe you are who you say you are. I mean that list of pro­fes­sion­als for Canada is pretty close to a list of indus­tries that have had major cor­rup­tion scan­dals in the last decade.

  2. Derek K. Miller | Sep 28, 2006 at 3:11 pm | Permalink

    I sus­pect it might also involve pro­fes­sions that have a cer­ti­fied, accred­ited pro­fes­sional body. Geoscient­ists have that (APEGBC — Asso­ci­ation of Pro­fes­sional Engin­eers and Geoscient­ists of B.C. — comes to mind), but phys­i­cists and com­puters sci­ent­ists don’t.

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *