The Canadian jihadi who murdered a soldier and stormed Parliament was a typical middle-class boy who turned to drugs and crime before converting to radical Islam — and finally snapped when he could not get a passport to travel to Syria, new reports said Thursday.

“I think the passport figured prominently in his motives,” Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner Bob Paulson said about gunman Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, who was shot dead Wednesday after he ran into Parliament with a Winchester 30-30 rifle.

“He was waiting to get it and there was an investigation going on to determine whether he would get a passport,” Paulson said.

Authorities initially believed Zehaf-Bibeau, 32, wanted to travel to Libya, where he may have had dual citizenship.

But the madman’s mother, Susan Bibeau, an immigration official for the Canadian government, told Mounties that her son planned to head to Syria, where ISIS cutthroats are fighting to establish an Islamic caliphate.

Paulson admitted that the gunman had been on authorities’ radar because of his radical views — but was not on a list of about 90 “high-risk” travelers compiled by the government.

“Had we known that he wanted to travel to Syria and … wanted to travel for criminal purposes, he would have been” put on that list, he said during a news conference in which police showed video of the suspect running into Parliament brandishing the rifle.

Paulson also said Zehaf-Bibeau was not connected to a terrorist attack Monday in Quebec in which another homegrown Islamist ran over two soldiers, killing one, before he was shot dead.

Also Thursday, Parliament Sergeant-at-Arms Kevin Vickers, who shot the gunman, was hailed as a hero by Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Tributes also poured in on Twitter for Vickers, who spent nearly 30 years with the Mounties.

“Bill C-633, the Kevin Vickers never pays for his own drinks in this country again Act,” Jim McGrath tweeted.

Meanwhile, those who knew Zehaf-Bibeau said he grew up in a good environment but developed into a rowdy teen and mentally unstable adult.

“The boy seemed to have had a very good upbringing. He had a good home base. He was involved in community things,” neighbor Janice Parnell told CTV.

But even his mother described him as a misfit in a statement to the Associated Press.

“[He] was lost and did not fit in. I spoke with him last week over lunch, I had not seen him for over five years before that,” said Bibeau.

“We are so sad that a man lost his life,” she said about Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, 24, a single dad who was killed while guarding the National War Memorial. “I don’t understand and part of me wants to hate him at this time.”

Zehaf-Bibeau’s stepfather, Libyan-born Bulgasem Zehaf, traveled to Libya in 2011 to fight alongside rebels battling the government.

Zehaf-Bibeau was raised in Laval, a suburb north of Montreal. He moved to western Canada to become a laborer, and converted to Islam after years of run-ins with cops, including 12 convictions, four of them drug-related.

He had recently stayed at an Ottawa shelter, where he told residents to pray because the “world is ending.”

NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said the department would send another officer to join the usual contingent of detectives in Canada to hunt for any ties between the terrorist and the Big Apple.