Transport Committee on March 19th, 2024

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 105 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on Monday, November 20, 2023, the committee is meeting to study accessible transportation for persons with disabilities.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format, pursuant to the Standing Orders of the House of Commons. Members are attending in person in the room and remotely using the Zoom application.

Colleagues, although this room is equipped with a sophisticated audio system, feedback events can occur. These can be extremely harmful to interpreters and can cause serious injuries. The most common cause of sound feedback is an earpiece worn too close to a microphone. We therefore ask all participants to exercise a high degree of caution when handling the earpieces, especially when your microphone or your neighbour's microphone is turned on. In order to prevent incidents and safeguard the hearing health of our interpreters, I invite all participants to ensure that they speak into the microphone into which their headset is plugged and to avoid manipulating the earbuds by placing them on the table, away from the microphone, when they are not in use.

I would now like to welcome our witnesses for today.

For our first panel, from Air Canada, we have Michael Rousseau, president and chief executive officer, by video conference. Welcome to you, sir. He is joined by David Rheault, vice-president of government and community relations; Tom Stevens, vice-president of customer experience and operations strategy, by video conference; and Kerianne Wilson, director of customer accessibility.

For the second panel today, from Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance, we have with us Professor David Lepofsky, who is the chair. From the Council of Canadians with Disabilities, we have Heather Walkus, who is the national chair, joining us by video conference.

We'll begin with our first panel. For that, I will turn the floor over to Mr. Rousseau for five minutes of opening remarks.

The floor is yours, sir.

[Dan Muys, Conservative, Flamborough—Glanbrook, ON]

Is he off-line?

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Perhaps someone else from Air Canada—Mr. Stevens, Mr. Rheault or Ms. Wilson—would like to provide the opening remarks on behalf of Mr. Rousseau.

We will suspend for two minutes to ensure that we have no issues in relation to Mr. Rousseau. We will give him a chance to take his chair and we'll check the AV.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

I call this meeting back to order.

Once again, I will turn the floor over to you, Mr. Rousseau. You have five minutes for your opening remarks, sir.

[Michael Rousseau, President and Chief Executive Officer, Air Canada]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good morning, everyone.

Let me assure the committee, people with disabilities and the Canadian public that Air Canada takes very seriously its obligations to ensure that our services are accessible. We want to be the preferred airline for people with disabilities.

We're already investing significant resources in accessibility, and we'll do even better.

Each year, Air Canada successfully carries hundreds of thousands of customers who require mobility assistance or other accommodation. We invest significant resources in accessibility. We have been and will continue to be a leader. In January, we became the first carrier in North America to adopt the Sunflower program for customers with non-visible disabilities, and we were also the first in Canada to enable customers to track their checked mobility devices in real time. In addition, we have updated our policy around priority boarding and storage of mobility aids.

Also, at the start of 2024, we created a customer advisory committee comprising representatives from four Canadian accessibility groups. We were a key participant in drafting the Canadian Transportation Agency’s “Mobility Aids and Air Travel Final Report”. We are proud of the contribution to this government-led initiative. Air Canada was one of the first airlines to waive liability limits in international treaties to pay the full cost for damaged mobility equipment. I sit on the board of the International Air Transport Association, which represents 250 airlines worldwide. Air Canada was a key member of its mobility aid action group.

We endorsed the Accessible Canada Act and its goal of a barrier-free Canada by 2040. As part of this, we publicly filed a three-year accessibility plan, which we are currently implementing. Our plan includes 145 far-ranging new initiatives based on a year of research, expert consultations and feedback from travellers with disabilities who took over 220 flights. We would be pleased to provide a copy to committee members for your review.

Our employees, third party international contractors and the entire leadership team have a high awareness, a strong work ethic and deep empathy for this very important customer segment. Hundreds of thousands of customers requiring assistance successfully travel each year.

In 2023, across our network, we received nearly 1.3 million special assistance requests from our passengers. Based on the number of incidents reported, the vast majority had a positive experience. In terms of those requiring wheelchairs and mobility devices, in about 0.15% of these instances customers contacted us to report a negative experience. Overall, our records show that in 2023 about 100 accessibility-related complaints were filed with the CTA related to our services.

This is not to minimize the number of incidents, nor the serious impacts the disruptions had on the individuals involved, but it is important context that indicates, first, that we do a good job and, second, more importantly, that we need and will continue to get better. Our industry is more complex than others; however, I believe that if all our partners work together, we can remove all barriers for air travel.

While the causes behind these negative experiences differ, we have concluded that the chief issue is inconsistency, and the best remedy for this is to provide our people, who all want to do a good job of serving customers, with more and better tailored training and tools so they can succeed every time.

For example, our 10,000 airport employees will receive extra disability-related instruction as part of a new recurrent annual training program. Apart from reinforcing processes, it will promote better understanding. In addition, our frontline and management groups are required to complete a specially designed training program put together with expert advice, which includes content on the principles that all persons must be treated with dignity and barriers removed.

A good parallel is airline safety. Incidents still occur, but aviation today is the safest mode of travel. This was achieved through our industry’s willingness to examine and learn from mistakes, constantly refine processes, adopt new technology or add redundancy, and through continual and better training.

We are well aware of the effects a disruption has on our customers with disabilities. When we fail, we are incredibly disappointed, because it affects a person’s quality of life. In these cases, we apologize and we take responsibility. However, what we hear is that our customers’ overriding concern is always that we act to make sure that whatever happened to them does not happen to others.

This is why our leadership team and all employees at Air Canada are committed to improve and we are striving each day to deliver a positive experience for every customer. We know we must and can do better.

We're ready to answer your questions.

Thank you.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mr. Rousseau.

Before I turn the floor over to Mr. Strahl, I want to apologize to one of our witnesses today. I believe I mispronounced her first name. It's Kerianne. I want to make sure that I get that on the record.

We'll begin our line of questioning today with Mr. Strahl.

Mr. Strahl, you have six minutes. The floor is yours, sir.

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Hope, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the folks at Air Canada for being here today.

We've heard, obviously, from a number of Canadians who have had difficult experiences. We kicked off this study because of the high-profile case of Stephanie Cadieux being without her specialized wheelchair for a time when it was left behind, and she talked about the difficulties this brought upon her.

We've heard, again, from numerous people that a mobility aid is not simply like a piece of luggage. It is an extension of a person. It is what allows them to have independence. We've heard how upsetting this is, both physically—it can take days to recover from having to use a non-specialized piece of equipment—and mentally, as there is also a mental component. Once again, those folks are being subjected to being second-class citizens.

I want to understand, from Air Canada's perspective, how you are going to ensure.... I heard the stat that you shared. It was 0.15%. How are you ensuring that it gets down to zero?

Second, as part of that, what is the response from Air Canada when this happens? You say you had lessons learned. What happens when this is such a high-profile case? You say that you have already taken steps to increase training and have sensitivity towards this issue. What happens when Air Canada employees fail in their duty to serve a person with a disability? Is there a reprimand? What are the steps that are taken to ensure that this is treated with the seriousness it deserves?

[Michael Rousseau]

Thank you for the questions. I agree with you on your points.

In regard to the first question, about what we are doing, many of these situations happened before we initiated a number of changes as part of our accessibility plan, which was posted last June.

In terms of mobility aids, we've now changed our policies to be much more customer-friendly. One, if we can put the mobility aid in the cabin of the plane—if it's foldable and it can fit—we will put it in the cabin of the plane. If it can't fit in the cabin of the plane because it's too large, it will go in cargo. It will go in as priority, so it will go in last and come off first. Two, customers will have the ability to go to a mobile application and monitor the status of their mobility aid in the cargo to make sure it's on the plane. Three, to protect the mobility aids, in many of our planes we put them in different compartments by themselves. In the planes that don't have separate compartments, we pack it separately, so it's not part of the other cargo on the plane.

We believe these measures will minimize and, hopefully, eliminate some of the situations you've heard of in the past.

On the second point you made, first of all, we call all customers who contact us with a negative experience. Kerianne can certainly expand on that. She speaks to them about their experience and gets feedback, and then we incorporate that in our lessons learned.

With regard to employees who make a mistake, as in safety, we want employees to tell us what's going wrong, and that's a non-punitive issue. We will train those employees to a greater degree. We'll put them through special training and re-enforce the training. If those employees are not great at that job, or do not continue to improve, we might reassign those employees, but we want to first start by training those individuals to make sure they understand the processes and are sensitive to the needs of the customers, and then we'll monitor the performance of those employees on a going forward basis.

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Hope, BC]

One of the things we've heard in this study is that different models are used around the world, including the European model, where it's actually the airport that is responsible for getting an individual who requires extra assistance from the curbside to the airplane. Do you feel that this approach and that sort of system would prevent some of the failures we've seen over the last number of months, in that there are perhaps fewer opportunities for someone to be lost in the hand-off from security, etc.?

Right now, I assume that at airports like Pearson or Vancouver there are dozens of airlines that each have a different approach to a person with a disability. What is your view on going to an airport service delivery model, as opposed to every airline having a different approach and having that responsibility to get the individuals onto the aircraft?

[Michael Rousseau]

It's a very interesting concept. Of course, Air Canada, in flying around the world, has experience with both models, here domestically and outside of Canada. Again, it has merit. I think it certainly has merit for smaller airports in Canada to consolidate services. We'd have to spend more time thinking about the larger hubs, where there's much more activity. It would require a different level of coordination between different partners: the airport and the airline. I think those are all areas that we should spend some time looking at to improve.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mr. Rousseau.

Next we have Ms. Koutrakis.

Ms. Koutrakis, the floor is yours. You have six minutes, please.

[Annie Koutrakis, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses for appearing before us today.

We've heard time and time again at this committee and in the news that it's not a surprise to anyone that there have been incidents where passengers with disabilities feel that their experience was not what it was sold to be. I'm interested to find out from you what you have added to your training for your employees that is different from before 2023. What is your new training program right now? I heard in your testimony, Mr. Rousseau, that it's annual training. Are there any thoughts about perhaps increasing the frequency of that training? Also, what specifically are they being trained on?

[Michael Rousseau]

Thank you for the question.

It is annual recurrent training. If we require more training, then certainly that's an option for us to put in place. Certainly, all new employees would receive the training, and all existing employees—10,000 at least—would receive the annual recurrent training.

As to the actual details behind the training, it's basically two different buckets. One is process: what has to happen to ensure the customer has a positive experience. Two is sensitivity: the needs of that customer and the fact that the mobility aid is critical to that customer. Those two aspects are the two areas of focus.

If I may, I can easily refer the question to Kerianne, who's much closer to the training program and can provide you with a little more detail.

[Kerianne Wilson, Director, Customer Accessibility, Air Canada]

Thank you very much for the question and for the opportunity to speak before you.

As Mr. Rousseau explained, it really is those two categories, but something that we think is important to point out is that the regulatory requirement is only every three years, and this is a decision that Air Canada has made to go well above and beyond, because we believe that it's really important to keep hard skills and soft skills fresh.

We're also trying to take a more holistic view, so that it's not just a training session that people attend. We really want it to permeate throughout their jobs. We've started looking at different ways to allow our staff to interact with customers. One example is that we had a customer workshop a couple of weeks ago. We had two customers come in and meet directly with a wide range of staff, management, frontline managers and frontline staff to really have that personalized connection to our customers, to understand what it is to travel, in this case, with a power mobility aid.

It's about understanding that human aspect of it. We're really looking at how we can scale up that kind of training approach for all of our employees.

[Annie Koutrakis, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

For the longer term, for Canadians with disabilities travelling on Air Canada, I'm looking for some insight as to what your business plans are and what they include for future aircraft infrastructure. We've heard from passengers with disabilities that they are calling out the industry for not considering the needs of passengers with disabilities in the design of aircraft.

In particular, it's duly noted by many advocates that washrooms are not designed for use by anybody who is not in perfect physical condition, and they are certainly not wheelchair accessible. These same advocates also speak loudly of the need for aircraft to be able to accommodate passengers to stay seated in their own mobility devices. As you can imagine, for passengers who are travelling with these disabilities, it speaks to their dignity.

What kind of commitment can Air Canada make today when they're considering the design of their future fleet so that they can help these passengers fly with the dignity they deserve?

[Michael Rousseau]

It's a very complex area and a very important area to take accessibility to another level.

There are many safety issues with putting wheelchairs on planes. Regarding seats, we go through a very complex regulatory review of the interior of the plane to make sure that it's safe for all customers, so that's one aspect that we always have to adhere to.

On the one that you mentioned about washrooms, you're absolutely right with your comment. Our team, Kerianne and her team, are speaking to Boeing and Airbus, the two principal manufacturers of airplanes, especially about our narrow bodies, which are those smaller planes that are more difficult to get into, and about redesigns to allow a customer with a wheelchair or a disability to more comfortably get into that washroom. That work is under way right now. We're committed to continuing to work with Boeing and Airbus to see if we can find a solution on future planes or maybe even remodel existing planes in the near future to satisfy your question.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

You have 35 seconds, Ms. Koutrakis.

[Annie Koutrakis, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Very quickly, I was just wondering if you'd be able to talk to us a little bit about the resolution of complaints. What happens from the minute someone makes a complaint to the resolution?

If you don't have time to answer during this meeting, perhaps you can send this information later. How many complaints have you received since 2023, and how many have been resolved?

[Michael Rousseau]

Again, based on the 1.3 million requests for accommodation, we received about 2,000 complaints overall in 2023. Each of those was resolved in different ways, either personally through Kerianne or through our customer relations department, but certainly we can send you a more detailed process list of how we handled those issues.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you, Mr. Rousseau.

We would very much welcome that information.

Mr. Barsalou‑Duval, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Xavier Barsalou-Duval, Bloc, Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank the witnesses, especially Mr. Rousseau, for joining us today.

We're speaking with you today because, in recent months and over the past year, there have been many cases of people with disabilities facing accessibility issues. These issues seem even more prevalent at Air Canada. You must be familiar with the cases. However, I still think that we should go over them quickly.

A number of incidents were reported in the media, including the following. A lift fell on a passenger's head, causing her ventilator to disconnect. Staff failed to bring a customer's wheelchair on board. A man was dropped and injured by Air Canada staff when they failed to use a lift, as requested by the customer. A man with spastic cerebral palsy had to drag himself off an airplane because no assistance was provided. Paralympic athletes filed complaints and reported a widespread problem at Air Canada.

In your opening remarks, you said that these cases accounted for 0.15% of situations. I'm wondering about the difference in perception between your statement that these cases account for a mere hundred or so complaints, and the fairly significant number of recent cases that received media coverage.

It seems that the incidents are much more widespread than suggested by the 0.15% statistic.

What are your thoughts on this?

[Michael Rousseau]

It's 0.15%, 15 basis points. I take your comments, that it's probably under-reported. I understand that, but that's not the issue. Our issue is that we know we need to get better and we're putting a number of initiatives in place to minimize, if not eliminate, these occurrences. We run a very complex industry, as I spoke about in my opening comments. It is very emotional at times as well, because I'll see customers who want to get somewhere with everything they brought to the airport.

My belief, and certainly the team's belief here, is that we will get better, and we are getting better with the initiatives we have already put in place, which we've outlined. We are now putting customers with disabilities on the plane first. We are putting them at the front of the cabin, so that makes their situation much easier. As I mentioned earlier, we're dealing with mobility aids much better than we have been in the past, and we're training all our people. We've put in the Sunflower program for hidden disabilities. We're continuing to consult with well-respected disability groups to get better.

This is a continuous improvement process, but again—

[Xavier Barsalou-Duval, Bloc, Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC]

Speaking—

[Michael Rousseau]

—I think we do a good job to begin with, but we need to do better.

[Xavier Barsalou-Duval, Bloc, Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC]

You're talking about the need to do better. You spoke about the failure to declare certain disabilities. I think that there may be more issues than what people are declaring.

A witness came to speak to the committee. She said that, as a person with a disability, she expected to face issues just about every time she flew. She didn't wonder whether she would face issues. She was fairly certain that she would. I find that quite fascinating.

In terms of the cases reported by the media, we can see that, in any event, Air Canada features prominently on the list. We must applaud the initiatives that you referred to and that you want to implement. Some are already in place. I think that this should be acknowledged.

However, we also saw that you were in court quite recently to contest the Canadian Transportation Agency's request to allow wheelchairs on airplanes and to find airplanes that can accommodate travellers if, for example, the reserved seat doesn't work. This would mean moving the person from one airplane to another to accommodate the wheelchair on board.

How can you explain the fact that you claim to be making an effort—based on your message—but you're also contesting the agency's orders that would help people with disabilities?