Alberta to accept more citizenship documents for driver's licence renewal
Federal processing waits for citizenship certificates stretch toward three years, and Premier Danielle Smith says the province did not expect how many people the rule would hit.
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Albertans without a passport or citizenship certificate can now renew a driver's licence with every citizenship certificate the federal government recognizes, plus passports that expired up to one year ago, Service Alberta Minister Dale Nally says. Under the July rollout, people without the required documents could take a 60-day interim licence while they obtained them.
Spruce View resident Gaynor Jones lost her expired passport and citizenship papers after her husband died in 2024. She faces a federal wait of nearly three years for replacements. She wrote to her MLA and approached the government without a response, and says thousands of others are in the same position.
Premier Danielle Smith said her government had assumed Ottawa could process citizenship documents within 60 days. "We figured that (Ottawa) could process as efficiently as we can... So we thought 60 days was enough," she said. She admitted the province was caught by surprise at how many people the rule would hit, and said Alberta can process its own citizenship, birth or marriage certificates "within a matter of a couple of months."
Nally said about 1 per cent of Albertans used the interim licence in July and just over 2 per cent in August.
The federal queue has run for nearly three years. Smith said the province will "work with the federal government to try to accelerate" processing. No date has been set for that work, and the government has not given a count of affected Albertans beyond Jones's estimate of thousands.
