I actually had made an appointment with them, but it's a pain to do the renewal there (hard to get an appointment, 20+ minutes of multiple security checks to get in the door, and they require you to show up with some very special flavor of prepaid Canada Post envelope to send the new passport… they won't just put it in the regular mail, even though the main State Dept offices will 🤷🏻‍♂️).

I was going to renew my passport at the consulate anyway, in hopes of getting it back faster, but then the night before the appointment they sent me an email urging me to renew by mail, and claiming that it would be just as fast.

Do you think the consulate is being misleading about this, in order to reduce their local workload? Would it actually have been a lot faster if I had gone to the consulate?