I want to thank the committee for inviting my colleagues and me to appear today.
We're living through an unusual and difficult time. I hope all of you and your loved ones have remained healthy and safe over the last nine months. While we have our respective roles to play, we are, first and foremost, fellow citizens.
I have the privilege to lead the Canadian Transportation Agency. The CTA was established in 1904 and is Canada's second-largest independent, quasi-judicial tribunal and regulator.
At no time in the century since the dawn of commercial aviation have airlines and their customers gone through the sorts of events we have witnessed since mid-March. Canadian airlines carried 85% fewer passengers between March and September 2020 than during the same period in 2019. Such a collapse in volumes is without precedent.
Through this turmoil, the Canadian Transportation Agency has worked to protect air passengers. Despite the fact that almost every CTA employee has worked from home since the pandemic struck, the 300 dedicated public servants who make up the organization have spared no effort to continue providing services to Canadians.
Immediately after the crisis began, we updated our website with key information for travellers so that those scrambling to get home would know their rights. We temporarily paused adjudications involving airlines to give them the ability to focus on repatriating the Canadians stranded abroad. We took steps to ensure that no Canadian who bought a non-refundable ticket would be left out-of-pocket for the value of their cancelled flights. We worked around the clock to process and issue the air licences and permits required for emergency repatriation flights and cargo flights to bring urgently needed PPE to Canada.
In the subsequent months, we invested substantial resources and long hours to deal with the unprecedented tsunami of complaints filed since 2019. Between the full coming into force on December 15, 2019, of the air passenger protection regulations, the APPR, and the start of the pandemic three months later, the CTA received around 11,000 complaints—a record. Since then we've received another 11,000.
To put these numbers in perspective, in all of 2015, just 800 complaints were submitted. In other words, we've been getting more complaints every two to four weeks than we used to get in a year.
We've already processed 6,000 complaints since the pandemic reached Canada. By early 2021, we'll start processing complaints filed during the pandemic, including those related to the contentious issue of refunds. If the recently announced negotiations between the government and airlines result in the payment of refunds to some passengers, a portion of those complaints may be quickly resolved.
On the topic of refunds, it's important to understand that the reason the air passenger protection regulations don't include a general obligation for airlines to pay refunds when flights are cancelled for reasons outside their control is that the legislation only allows the regulations to require that airlines ensure that passengers can complete their itineraries. As a result, the APPR's refund obligation applies exclusively to flight cancellations within airlines' control.
No one realized at the time how important this gap was. No one foresaw mass, worldwide flight cancellations that would leave passengers seeking refunds frustrated; airlines facing major liquidity issues; and tens of thousands of airline employees without jobs.
Because the statutory framework does not include a general obligation around refunds for flight cancellations beyond airlines' control, any passenger entitlements in this regard depend on the wording of each airline's applicable tariff. Every refund complaint will be examined on its merits, taking the relevant tariff language into account.