Canada’s 1940 USA-Only Passport | Passport-Collector
Canada Passport for USA Travel Only: The 1940 Emergency Document That Changed Border Crossing
A woodworker from Ottawa named Thomas W. Metcalfe carried an eight-page passport in October 1940 that most travelers today would never recognize as one. It wasn’t meant to take him to Europe or anywhere overseas. It existed for a single purpose: getting him across one specific border, into the United States, and back. That narrow, single-country mandate tells you almost everything about how fast Ottawa had to move that year, and why.
Washington’s June 1940 Ultimatum and Ottawa’s Scramble to Comply
On June 6, 1940, the US government announced that Canadians would need passports and visas to enter the United States starting July 1 of that year, a deadline that gave Ottawa less than a month to respond. Reacting to the security anxieties of a continent watching the war in Europe unfold, Washington closed a border that Canadians had crossed freely for generations. Ottawa’s response was immediate: the passport staff expanded to 113 employees, additional issuing offices opened, and officials created a special eight-page passport designed exclusively for travel to Canada’s southern neighbor. This wasn’t a redesign of the standard Canadian passport. It was a purpose-built emergency document, and it’s exactly the kind of artifact that makes wartime bureaucracy fascinating to collectors: a government improvising a new category of identity paper in a matter of weeks.
The French Revolutionary Roots of the Modern Passport
The modern passport system, including the one Canada built in 1940, descends from control measures France introduced during its Revolution. Long before any passport regulated international travel, documents granting permission to move within or beyond a political entity already existed, but the first systematic use of passports began in Revolutionary France as a policing tool to track movement inside the country. The revolutionary assembly later required merchants and foreigners to obtain passports from local districts or from ambassadors of their home countries before leaving France. Even then, the measure was contentious. Some members of the assembly viewed the passport as inherently repressive, and history has largely vindicated that suspicion: as late as the 1940s, married women in Canada could not hold their own passports and instead had to appear, like children, in their husband’s document. A passport has rarely been a neutral piece of paper, and its politics show up as clearly in who was denied one as in who carried it.
World War I and the End of Passport-Free Travel
World War I is the true origin point of the passport regime we live under today, closing off a prewar movement that had been pushing in the opposite direction. Before 1914, serious international discussions were underway about eliminating passports altogether. The war’s outbreak reversed that momentum entirely: the United States and the United Kingdom, among others, dramatically tightened documentary requirements, and Britain went so far as to require citizens to carry identity cards. The infrastructure of twentieth-century border control, visas, exit permits, the entire apparatus, traces back to this wartime pivot rather than to any single peacetime policy decision.
Before 1862: When Canadians Crossed Freely
Canadians needed no passport at all to travel to the United States before 1862, a freedom tied directly to their status as British subjects. Travel to Europe was a different matter: a Canadian heading there needed a British passport issued by the Foreign Office in London. Those who weren’t British subjects by birth could still enter the United States using a certificate of naturalization, issued locally by Canadian mayors, mostly for the practical purpose of qualifying to vote in municipal elections. It’s worth sitting with that contrast for a moment: the US-Canada border, now one of the most heavily documented in the world, was once entirely open, while the transatlantic route required more paperwork than the trip next door.
The Governor General’s Letter of Request
The American Civil War forced the first real system of Canadian passports into existence, born out of Washington’s demand for more reliable identification from people living north of the border. In 1862, Governor-General Viscount Monck introduced a centralized issuing system, and for the next fifty years a Canadian passport was, quite literally, a letter of request signed by the Governor-General. Records are thin from the years just after Confederation, since so few of these letters were issued: the Secretary of State’s financial statements from 1878 record annual passport revenue of exactly $50, and since each passport cost $1, that tells us precisely fifty were issued that year. Annual revenue held between $35 and $50 for several years afterward, meaning Canada was issuing something like three or four dozen passports a year during this period, a volume that makes surviving examples from the era genuinely scarce.
From Single Sheet to Bilingual Booklet
Canada’s passport evolved from a stamped single sheet into the multilingual booklet format collectors recognize today through a series of international conferences. In the earliest years, passports were single-sheet certificates authenticated with an official seal, and in 1915 Canada adopted the British form, a ten-section single sheet folder printed only in English. International passport conferences held in 1920, 1926, and 1947 reshaped the document from there. The 1920 conference recommended that all countries adopt a booklet-style passport, which Canada implemented in 1921, and a further recommendation that passports appear in at least two languages, one of them French, produced Canada’s first bilingual passport in 1926. That same 1920 conference recommended passports be valid for a minimum of two years and ideally five, though Canada had already been ahead of the curve since 1919, issuing peacetime passports valid for five years with an option to extend for another five.
Mail-In Applications and the James Earl Ray Case
Between 1947 and 1970, the only way to get a Canadian passport was to mail an application to Ottawa, a system built on trust that would eventually break under its own leniency. Requirements were minimal at the time, and applicants who claimed to have been born in Canada weren’t required to provide proof. Rising numbers of lost and stolen passports pressured the government to tighten these requirements within a few years, but the case that forced the issue was James Earl Ray’s use of a fraudulently obtained Canadian passport to escape after assassinating Martin Luther King Jr. The 1969 Royal Commission on Security responded by recommending far stricter application standards and by backing a plan to open dedicated Passport Canada offices across the country for in-person service. Three such offices opened in 1970, in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, and that network has since grown to 34 offices processing more than 70 percent of the over 4 million Canadian passports issued annually, based on 2014 figures.
Machine-Readable Zones and the Road to the ePassport
Canada modernized its passport twice more before the end of the twentieth century, first with machine-readable technology and later with a fully digital identification page. Machine-readable passports arrived in 1985 to meet International Civil Aviation Organization standards, introducing a smaller format that laminated the bearer’s photograph and personal information directly into the document and repeated key data in a scannable zone at checkpoints. Additional security features followed in 1991, and a redesigned passport arrived in 1993 with new anti-replication and anti-alteration measures. Canada has continued to participate actively in ICAO conferences to stay ahead of forgery techniques, a pattern that reflects a genuine international leadership role in passport design and processing rather than mere compliance. At the turn of the century, Passport Canada introduced a digitally printed bearer photo embedded into the identification page, holographic imagery, and a second hidden photo visible only under ultraviolet light, rolling this passport out domestically in 2002 and abroad in 2006. On July 1, 2013, Passport Canada began issuing the ePassport, embedding an electronic chip in the booklet for stronger protection against fraud and tampering. For a fuller account of these developments, the Library and Archives Canada genealogy resource on passports is worth consulting directly.
Thomas W. Metcalfe’s 1940 Passport: The Document Itself
The passport in my collection was issued to Thomas W. Metcalfe, a woodworker from Ottawa who was born in Bristol, England, in 1901. It’s printed in English and French, runs eight pages, and was issued on 28 October 1940, valid for one year, matching exactly the emergency format Ottawa rolled out that summer for southbound travel only. Attached to it is a Nonresident Alien’s Border Crossing Identification Card, the companion document the US required alongside the passport itself. Together, the two pieces capture a very specific and short-lived moment: a bureaucracy responding in real time to a border that had just, for the first time in generations, stopped being open.
From its origins as a simple letter of safe conduct to its current form as a chip-embedded ePassport, the Canadian passport has always tracked the anxieties of the moment it was issued in, whether that moment was a revolution, a world war, or a single month in the summer of 1940 when the world’s longest undefended border suddenly needed paperwork. If you’re building your own collection of documents like this one, my guide to starting a vintage passport collection the right way is a good next stop. And if you want to see the rarest Canadian passport in my archive, the special passport issued for the 1936 Vimy Pilgrimage is worth your time.
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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