(Ottawa) At the rate at which the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) is processing complaints received under the Air Travelers Charter, passengers who feel aggrieved should be patient and plan for the “up to a year and a half” before seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
The number of complaints has “quadrupled” since the first iteration of the Air Passenger Protection Regulations came into effect in 2019, officials from the regulatory body, which is also an administrative tribunal, explained on Monday. an appearance before the transportation committee in Ottawa.
“In 2021-2022, we handled 15,000 complaints, more than triple the number of complaints we handled annually before the settlement and the pandemic,” first noted Michelle Greenshields, head of the general management of the settlement. of CTA Disputes, in his opening remarks.
Questioned by the Bloc’s spokesperson for Transport, Xavier Barsalou-Duval, who wanted to know the number of untreated complaints, Ms.me Greenshields said it stands at 30,000, 80% of which have been received since 1er April 2022. Complaints are handled “with the resources we have”, she added.
The number of complaints, which had fallen to approximately 1,500 per month in April, May and June, rose again with the major disruptions of the summer, climbing to 3,000 in July and 5,700 in August.
What is the CTA’s service standard and when will it be met, asked the committee’s Conservative vice-chairman, Mark Strahl, after clarifying that airlines have 30 days to respond to complaints?
The plan to meet the service standard calls for a “comprehensive review” of the complaints process, he was told. Procedures are reviewed and optimized, in particular by grouping cases that affect the same flight.
As for this famous standard, after asking for it three times, OTC officials said that it exists and not having it in mind, but that it is mentioned in the annual report of the ‘organization. However, it is not there, found The Canadian Press.
The explosion of complaints is due to the fact that the airlines are in the process of adjusting according to the jurisprudence, indicated Tom Oommen, his colleague responsible for the general direction of the analysis and the liaison, in an interview after their testimony.
For example, Air Canada and WestJet are appealing to the courts landmark rulings in recent months where the CTA ruled that staffing shortages are not issues beyond the airline’s control, forcing them to compensate The passengers.
According to the Canadian Air Passenger Bill of Rights, an airline must pay compensation of up to $1,000 “in the event of delays and cancellations in situations attributable to the carrier, but which are not necessary for reasons of safety” and if the passenger has been informed 14 days or less before the departure time. But airlines don’t have to pay a penny if the flight is canceled for safety reasons.
However, there is another factor that explains the backlog. “The government has given us 11.5 million temporarily until March 31, 2023 to be able to process a number of additional complaints,” Oommen said. So if we have more resources, we will process more complaints. If we have fewer resources, we will process fewer complaints. »
On this subject, Annie Koutrakis, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport, who finds that the delays are “not acceptable”, refused to say whether Ottawa should grant additional funds to the CTA. “We have to speak with the Minister of Finance,” she summed up in an interview after the committee meeting.
Convenience, security?
Other Liberals on the committee have tried to find out how the consumer can verify airline claims about delays and cancellations.
WestJet spokesman Andrew Gibbons, who was also testifying, said the CTA audited hundreds of flights and “not one” was “deliberately” misclassified.
Alongside him, National Airlines Council of Canada President and CEO Jeff Morrison asserted that ‘safety is non-negotiable’ and that it is wrong to claim it is ‘used as an excuse’ to avoid compensating passengers. “That’s no excuse,” he repeated to the committee.
For Mr. Barsalou-Duval of the Bloc Québécois, the consumer is currently “the turkey of the farce” and the CTA lacks “proactivity” to put the airlines back on the right track, which he accuses of putting “false reasons in quotation marks” to avoid paying compensation.
He believes that the regulations should be revised so that travelers are compensated regardless of the reason for the delay or cancellation of a flight since consumers are unable to confirm whether the glitches are due, for example, to the weather. , a missing driver or a defective part.
“It must be clear: a canceled flight, well people are compensated, he launched. If I order a pizza and they don’t deliver it to me, whether it’s because there’s a snowstorm or whether it’s because the guy didn’t come in to work that morning, they’ll pay me back the pizza. »
New Democratic Party (NDP) MP Taylor Bachrach explained that elected officials want to ensure that safety is never compromised and that passengers are treated “fairly”.
According to him, there is currently “a vague gray area in the middle” which must be clarified since the airlines attribute delays and cancellations to safety reasons when, in essence, almost everything in the airline industry is linked to safety.