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I have a brand new Philippine passport. All of the pages are crisp and my bio page is perfectly fine. On Sept 1, returning to Canada from the US (I have a Canada Permanent Resident card), an Immigration officer in Canada removed the stapled i94 paper attached to my passport as I need to surrender it. The next day, upon checking, I noticed a little rip or nick on the edge of one of my passport pages (page 15) where an admittance stamp was, but it was not torn. I guess he did not use staple remover.

This coming Monday, I will be flying to Paris with my husband departing from Toronto. So, I have no time to renew. I want to know if my passport is not considered damaged for as long as overall passport and the bio page are intact and good condition? Will this be acceptable to France border upon arrival, within Schengen areas and Canada too upon return?

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You don't need to replace the passport because of that. Here are the real problems which makes that necessary:

  1. Something is not well readable on the main page where the photo and all data is. Usually they laminate it and so this is really, really hard to do. You'd need to break the laminate seal first and then get water under it.
  2. A piece gets torn out which makes it questionable which number that page is. Often they have multiple markers on a page to make it harder to just willy-nilly sneak in a replacement page so even if one of those goes missing, it's passport replacement time.
  3. A large enough piece goes missing that it might have been a stamp.

Basically, your data and history should be intact.

Tears from badly removed staples, normal wear and tear along the edges, these are fine. The stamp pages of my passport from my "digital nomad" years by the end looked like a small animal nibbled the edges. Heck, a very good friend of mine put her passport through a washing machine and it was still fine, I know because we went together to the CBSA office in downtown Vancouver to check and they said it's OK.

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    I would add: damages on the binding part (suspect of inserting or removing pages: it is easy to find empty pages [from stolen passports]). And in general not only "not readeable photo", but damages near the photo, which can create suspects that photo was changed. [biometric data helps, but it could be a sign that passport is used improperly, banks cannot read biometric data]
    – Giacomo Catenazzi
    Sep 6, 2019 at 7:48
  • @LadyTiara you could accept one of the answers if they were useful to you.
    – chx
    Sep 7, 2019 at 1:48
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I've had a multitude of random things (including I-94s) stapled into and removed from my passports over the years. There has never been the slightest problem with minor damage to the passport (yes it happens) because of these actions. Enjoy your trip!

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