More bone-headed bureaucracy

Re Some immigrants face ‘unreasonable’ hurdles with OAS, critics say, April 14

It is not only immigrants who are affected. It took more than a year for me to be approved for OAS. I was born in Canada, but spent two periods out of the country: a few years living in England after I graduated, and two years working for the UN in Vienna. I duly noted these absences in my application.

A form letter came back saying that my application couldn’t be approved and that I needed to send supporting documentation. When I phoned them, they asked me to send old passports. Who keeps old passports for 40 years? And why didn’t the passport office advise me to keep them? Not our problem, they said.

What else can I provide? How about old boarding passes? (Here I laughed down the telephone.) Or you can have a friend or relative swear that you left and returned on the dates stated. By that point I was speechless.

In the end, I documented everything I had done — the correspondence, the telephone calls — sent it all back to them and copied everyone I could think of, then persisted through followup calls. Nobody should be subjected to this kind of cynical boneheaded bureaucracy, overseen by civil servants easily bright enough to know how absurd and insulting the whole thing is, but unwilling to make or to demand the changes needed.

Keith Weaver, Toronto