WHY SHOULD WE PAY FOR THIS?

Ottawa to pay for emergency passport costs in Lebanon evacuation

PAUL WALDIE
From Friday's Globe and Mail
December 14, 2007 at 3:52 AM EST

The federal government is providing one last benefit to thousands of Lebanese-Canadians who were evacuated from war-torn Lebanon last year - it's reimbursing their emergency passport fee.
The government evacuated 15,000 people, many of them dual citizens, during the summer of 2006 when Israel attacked Hezbollah positions in Lebanon. More than 2,000 evacuees had to get an emergency Canadian passport before they could leave.
This week, the government quietly adopted a regulation to reimburse any passport fees incurred by evacuees. The move was taken because "it is in the public interest to do so," the regulation notes.
The order "grants those Canadians who were evacuated from Lebanon during the period beginning on July 20, 2006, and ending on Aug. 21, 2006, remission of the fee paid or payable, and any interest payable on that fee, for emergency passports," said a notice in the Canada Gazette on Wednesday.
It's not clear how much the provision will cost. Canadians who live abroad have to pay $100 to obtain a passport, but in some emergency situations the fee can be paid later.
Figures released by Foreign Affairs show that the government issued 2,400 new passports in Lebanon that summer, most emergency passports. The evacuation cost $94-million in total.
John Chant, an economist at Simon Fraser University, said he couldn't understand the government's decision to cover the cost of the passports. "It does seem puzzling to me," he said yesterday.
In a study earlier this year for the C.D. Howe Institute, Prof. Chant recommended that non-resident citizens pay a much higher passport fee than resident Canadians.
An estimated 2.7 million Canadians live abroad. Roughly 1.7 million of them are believed to be permanent residents of another country.