Transport committee  I'm not downplaying the complexity or difficulty of running an airline, especially in the present circumstances. What I'm saying is that if you're going to be in the airline business, it's an essential service to get people from A to B, so if you strand them, you have to pay for it.

Transport committee  I don't think the APPRs themselves have any large effect on cancellations or delays. I think when we went into this, after Mr. Emerson did his report, and we were setting up the regulations, we thought that if airlines had a lot of fines to pay for these cancellations and delays, they would change their habits.

Transport committee  I would just like to point out that the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-Television Services is experiencing the same problems with companies having powers and means to act to the detriment of consumers. At this commission, experts are looking into these issues and asking companies to respond in a month or less to consumer complaints.

Transport committee  Absolutely, we're better off having the passenger protection regulations than not having them. I would have started them—instead of 2019, as Professor Gradek said—more like in 2003, or whenever the Canadian Airlines-Air Canada merger was. That's when PIAC started working on airline issues and the problems of consumers being treated more like baggage than passengers.

Transport committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and honourable members. My name is John Lawford. I'm the executive director and general counsel at the Public Interest Advocacy Centre. PIAC is a national non-profit and registered charity, and we provide legal and research services on behalf of consumer interests, in particular vulnerable consumer interests, concerning the provision of important public services.

Transport committee  Yes. I do believe the labour shortage issue does have something to do with the working conditions and the pay at airports. That has been a long slide. When things were going well.... The labour unions have complained that they got zero per cent increases all this time, when times were good, and now they have very low wages and they can't bring people back.

Transport committee  As I said, they do have mediation and conciliation-type streams. The folks I've spoken to claim that they have a less formal process, which works something like the method for CCTS. But it still gets a formal CTA number and the airline can object, as we've seen, to what looks like a routine case and drive it through to adjudication, which it cannot do in telecom.

Transport committee  Thank you very much. The European regulations are a bit stronger, in the sense that, whenever there's a junction point, if you will, where the airline position—which is more limited—or the consumer position comes before the regulator, they take the consumer position, and they're then backed up by the European courts.

Transport committee  There would still have been a bulge in complaints, given all the uncertainty around refunds when COVID first came and, more recently, around baggage loss and other delays this summer. However, the model I'm referring to is largely done in telecommunications, where a consumer makes a complaint directly to the CCTS.

Transport committee  That's one way to do it. You could also have a regulatory board that has rates capped. Whether the cross-subsidization, as you're saying, is the way to do it, or whether there are subsidies to support those routes, having someone look at it in that way, through that lens, would really help.

Transport committee  That's often the case once things have gone private, so to speak. When business gets tough, then subsidies and bailouts are demanded so that they can serve the public, but that's a very inefficient, indirect way of funding something that is a public necessity. It would be more sensible to just cut out the middleman, but I'm not sure what level of deregulation and privatization we have and how we could design a road map to go back to public ownership and control.

Transport committee  Yes, absolutely. That, to me, is very similar to the trouble we have now with many of these areas being cut off from bus services, as you know, being cut off from train service, or where the train has not been brought to them. In that kind of environment, we pretty much have to get around Canada by air.

Transport committee  I think he will. I actually do believe there is this strange situation where the government has, in effect, handed the control of the airports to these agencies and then turned around and asked them for fairly decent fees back, and provided these leases to have users, in effect, pay for it, which seems highly inefficient.

Transport committee  We haven't done an in-depth study on this, but our general position at the Public Interest Advocacy Centre is that public services delivered directly from government are often more efficient. They have no profit motivation, and they are ready to step up when there are challenges like COVID-19 where there's a social reason for delivering the service.

Transport committee  Mr. Chair and honourable members, my name is John Lawford. I am the executive director and general counsel at the Public Interest Advocacy Centre here in Ottawa. PIAC is a national, not-for-profit and registered charity that provides legal and research services on behalf of consumer interests, in particular vulnerable consumers' interests, concerning the provision of important public services.