Filipino community demands upgrade of Alberta consular office

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MANILA — A Filipino community in Canada is demanding for an upgrade of the honorary consular office in Alberta citing complaints of the office’s poor service quality.

Marco Luciano, director of Migrante Alberta expressed his frustrations over the poor service quality of the office run by volunteers.

“It’s really a reflection of the frustration our community, particularly the Filipino community,” said Marco Luciano, the director of Migrante Alberta, an organization that supports temporary foreign workers.

The consular office in Edmonton runs for only four hours a day, three days a week.

The office, being an honorary consular office, also has no power to issue passports — something that most Filipinos in the area complained about.

“Currently the Filipinos here need to go to Vancouver to spend hundred of hundreds of dollars just to get a passport, a $69 passport,” Luciano said as quoted in the same report.

About 100,000 Filipinos living in Alberta travels to the nearest consular office located in Vancouver to get their passport.

“Some people from Fort McMurray or the North, outside of big cities and Edmonton need to travel very, very far and when they get here there’s no office or they’re closed without notice.”

“We need a better consular service in Alberta immediately in the light of the recent removal of  temporary foreign workers,” he added.