My family and I have been spending a wonderful year in Paris. The city is beautiful, the weather is good and I’M ON HOLIDAY!!! I really find it scary to think that had we not already committed ourselves to Paris by last July, this experience might never have happened.
To settle in France for the year, we all had to obtain a visa from the French consulate of Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, which was located in Toronto. As is the custom in that country, the consulate’s website was totally inadequate and my father had to spend hours on the computer to establish whether or not my brother and I had to be present in the consulate for our visa attribution.
To cut a long story involving typically difficult French bureaucracy and bad information short, he ended up making the five hour trip to Toronto on his own, only to discover that my brother and I had indeed needed to be present.
You can imagine his fury: he called up my mom to tell her that he simply couldn’t face a year in this crazy country and that the family was better off spending its sabbatical somewhere else! I’ll say it again, had we not already committed, we might never have gone.
This whole story would have been a minor issue if there had been a consulate office in Ottawa, but the French government had decided to shut it down a few years earlier, cutting the total number down to five. But I can’t help to think that with time, the number of individuals and small businesses which will have gotten so fed up with the consulates that they will have given up on their plans of traveling or doing business in France will end up costing the French economy more than a few consulates.
Anyway, all of this to say that Canada’s Conservative government should not make the same mistake by closing 19 consulates across the world, including two in Japan and one in Milan.
