Canada visa application, married couple sending together passports in the US to NY center

Question

My wife and I applied for a Canadian tourist visa overseas (Algeria). We are currently in the US visiting our daughter in Texas, and we received a letter from the IRCC informing us to send our passports for visa collection.

1: Can we collect the visa in the US, not Algeria?

2: If yes to the above, is the “Package Transmission Fee of $21.70 USD” for EACH passport? Or should we submit both passports (my wife’s and mine) and only pay 1 x 21.70$? Note that we made the online visa application on the IRCC together, but my wife was the primary applicant when we created the IRCC online account and filled out the forms. (Although I’m not really sure how they treat this on the IRCC side).

3: We plan to send everything with USPS since we are in Texas. Do we send 1 envelope with both passports and documents inside? Along with 1 USPS envelope for the return? Or 2 envelopes (one for each passport) to send the documents to NY and 2 envelopes to return each passport? (It does not make sense to me to send 2 envelopes, so I am asking). Thank you all for your help.

Answer 1

In this answer the list includes one return envelope per passport.
As this answer is mostly information they got from the customer service agent in chat on 05-Aug-2022 I feel it is trustworthy and up to date in late 2023.

From that chat I get the impression that you can send in your passports together in one envelope.

The reason they require two return envelopes is that they may choose not to send the passports together, from other questions here I have learned that it is not uncommon for passports to be sent back on different dates.
This may be simply them getting separated after the decision or it may be that the decision takes longer for one than for the other and they return the passport as soon as possible.

Whatever the reason, as they require an approved method to return each passport separately they are not set up to keep passports together.