Alex Laferrière was so frustrated by the treatment that he, his wife and young son received from Air Canada when his flights were delayed last July that he filed a complaint before the airline regulator.
But it was even more disturbed to know that the Canadian transport agency (CTA) has an accumulation of complaints, more than 87,000, and that its case could take more than two years to resolve
“I thought, are you joking?” Laferrière said, from his home in Sturgeon Falls, Ontario. “That delay is completely unreasonable.”
And now, the new data obtained under access to information and provided to go to public show that the backlog could drastically increase, up to 45 percent by 2028.
“That is absolute nonsense,” said Laferrière. “The system seems broken.”
An aerial passenger defender agrees and blames long delays in the CTA method of awarding the complaints.
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“The system is too complicated,” said Gábor Lukács, founder of Air Passenger Rights. “It requires an unreasonable amount of resources to treat each complaint.”
The CTA is an independent and quasi -audicial agency that informs the Parliament through the Minister of Transportation Chrystia Freeland.
A Freeland spokesman said in a statement that the waiting list “must be addressed” and that the government is working to improve the protections of aerial passengers.
The data on the order portfolio were obtained through access to information by the public policy researcher Ken Rubin, who asked the CTA to project the number of complaints that passengers will present in the next three years.
It provided low, medium and upper rank projections by 2025-26, 2026-27 and 2027-28, based on the forecast made in May 2023.
Look | Long delays in CTA:
In an email to make public, a spokesman said that the projections were, in part, “based on volumes of historical complaints”, but that the number of complaints “has continued to increase year after year”, so the predictions could be low.
The use of the prediction of the best case, which supposes that the number of complaints filed drastically and the CTA continues to close them at its most recent rate, the accumulation could decrease to 63,763 by 2028.
But the volumes of complaints have increased since the CTA made its prognosis.
Using the worst projections, by 2028 the accumulation could reach 126,000, an increase of 45 percent.
That means that unhappy passengers could be waiting for more than three years for a decision.
“Work in customer service in a credit cooperative,” said Laferrière. “If I told someone who had to wait 36 months for a mortgage, that would not be acceptable.”
What is causing the request for orders?
Lukács says that the problem is that complaints about flight interruptions are widely classified into three groups: situations within the control of the airline, situations within the control of the airline but required for safety and situations outside the control of the airline.
“We have an unnecessary and disproportionately complex regime,” Lukács said. “What requires an extraordinary amount of evidence and a disproportionate amount of judicial time to decide if compensation is due.”
Lukács advocates adopting the European Union system, where airlines can only avoid paying compensation in “extraordinary circumstances”, which do not include maintenance, many security problems and personnel shortage.
“In the vast majority of cases, eligibility becomes a very fast administrative task that people with very basic training can do,” Lukács said.
Call for tougher sanctions
The other problem, says Lukács, is the lack of pronounced penalties when airlines refuse to compensate for passengers who are clearly due to compensation and are then forced to present the CTA.
In an example informed on the Lukác Passenger Facebook page rights of the passengers, the flight of a Westjet passenger was delayed for seven hours, but the airline denied its compensation, claiming that it was a security problem.
When the CTA investigated and requested evidence, the airline did not provide any and finally paid the $ 700 owed under the regulations for the protection of aerial passengers.
“There is no incentive for the airline to pay a legitimate claim perfectly valid under the rules,” Lukács said. “Even when the airline has no evidence to support its position, they will only refuse to pay because most passengers may not have resistance to follow their case.”
Laferrière says that he meets four other people who experienced the same flight delays as his family, but none filed CTA complaints.
“Everyone said: ‘Good luck. We are not going to waste our time with this,'” he said.
Any sanction “must ensure that it becomes less profitable to break the law to comply with the law,” Lukács said. “The purpose is to encourage compliance.”
Slow to implement the cost recovery scheme
In 2023, the Federal Government asked CTA to implement a cost recovery mechanism, which would force airlines to contribute to the cost of the complaint resolution process.
The CTA proposed to charge the airlines $ 790 for each complaint eligible closed by the agency.
Lukács says that the penalty should be significantly greater, but only to pay when “it is discovered that the complaint has at least some merit.”
The cost recovery plan has not yet been implemented, despite the president of the CTA and the CEO of France Pogeot, he says that one would be in place at the end of last year.
A CTA spokesman said there is no established date for the rate to promulgate.
Since the CTA began to consult the proposal last September, Westjet has met with several government officials at least 17 times to discuss, among other things, the “proposals for cost recovery” of the CTA, as shown by the lobbying records.
Air Canada has also pressed government officials more than 20 times since the past fall, but their monthly lobbying reports are less specific than Westjet, listing only “transport” or “policies, legislation and regulations related to aviation” as the issues were discussed.
Two years ago, Ottawa designated almost $ 76 million to improve the complaint resolution process, however, the accumulation has increased constantly.
The government is in the process of updating the regulations, but Lukács says that the proposed changes will define the vast majority of delays and flight cancellations as “exceptional circumstances”, so compensation is not due.
“It is a brand change the same old broken system,” Lukács said.
Until that happens, Lukács does not recommend frustrated aerial passengers to resort to the CTA; Instead, it encourages them to file complaints in small claims courts.
Laferrière says, although it has been almost a year since he filed his complaint with the CTA, he will do it, curious to see when his case will be heard.
He says he is “frustrating” to see the dollars of taxpayers to finance an agency that does not seem responsible.
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