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. PIAC has been active in the field of air passenger protection and policy for 20 years.
The air passenger protection regulations are not red tape. Removing or amending them will not ease airport delays or reduce traveller frustration. The APPRs are hard-won redress and fairness for the flying public. Modern air transportation regulatory schemes throughout the world have such rules, including the EU and the U.K.
There is currently a problem with a backlog of consumer complaints at the Canadian Transportation Agency, CTA. There are somewhere between 16,000 and 20,000 that are about a year old. This backlog is due in part to bad timing, as the APPRs were proclaimed just before COVID-19, in the fall of 2019.
However, it has always been the position of PIAC that the APPRs were going to generate a backlog. The CTA's facilitation, mediation and adjudication streams within a quasi-judicial formal framework are a ridiculous approach to dealing with high-volume, low-value consumer redress for such routine and, unfortunately, now chronic issues as flight delays and cancellations.
A better model is a dedicated administrative complaints agency with a regulatory overseer for systemic issues. This administrative model is currently in place for telecommunications and broadcasting; it's called the CCTS. For banking and investments, we have the OBSI. The federal government should not abandon the APPRs but should remove them from this formalistic tariff-like adjudication process.
We also note that consumer baggage complaints cannot be solved through changing or improving the APPRs. The APPRs effectively say nothing about baggage. Due to the Carriage by Air Act, the Montreal Convention stipulates that compensation for delayed or lost baggage must be contained in the domestic tariffs of the aircraft carriers. This means that consumer frustrations with baggage can only be solved with a directive for airlines from either the minister or the CTA to meet a minimum standard in their tariffs.
PIAC also wishes to underline that the present APPRs are under attack by the airlines, first by styling all crew shortages to be safety cases. WestJet has appealed from the CTA to the Federal Court of Appeal, the issue being whether staffing is within the airlines' control and therefore whether the safety exemption to the APPRs compensation for a delay or cancellation can be applied by the airline. We note that, in the European Union, under the passenger protection regime there, staff shortages must be planned for and compensation must be paid, with the implicit message to airlines not to schedule flights for which they cannot manage their labour supply.
Second, major Canadian as well as U.S. and European air carriers, along with IATA, are also challenging the entire APPRs, at least for international flights, at the Federal Court of Appeal as conflicting with the Montreal Convention. This committee can and should, by contrast, express its undying support for the APPRs despite their growing pains and challenges. Consumers do need them.
Moving now to airports more specifically, Canadian airports are fragile. They are largely a hybrid of public-private partnerships, and COVID-19 has exposed the fragility of this model when the usual flow of commerce is interrupted. Likewise, CATSA and Nav Canada are privatized emanations of the entire airport matrix, and they face sudden economic pressures during a financial downturn like COVID. Short of renationalizing these entities, we are resistant to these parties all pointing the finger at each other, and we wonder whether the minister might come in and help.
Finally, we note that major airlines fired or retired workers during COVID-19. They made their own labour shortage, despite taking large CEWS amounts that were intended to keep staff on the payroll. Most of the airlines also took some of the money offered as bailouts—not WestJet, and Air Canada did take amounts only for consumer refunds—but they were not required to rehire or to be ready to restart at the level that we see at airports now. This money only supported their balance sheets while COVID requirements faded away.
I thank you and look forward to questions you may have.