Thank you very much.
I'd just like to thank the members of the House committee for having invited me to speak to you today on the air passenger protection regulations.
Today I would like to address the issue of compensation, primarily to air travellers as a result of an airline's decision to disrupt a passenger's itinerary, and to provide you with my recommendations to address what I see as current shortcomings within those regulations. First, let me quickly walk through the history of that regime to make sure that we have the right context. I will then talk about my recommendations.
In May 2019, we had the introduction of the air passenger protection regulations, which stipulated certain minimum airline requirements for air travel, including things like standard treatment and, in some situations, compensation for passengers. These regulations were the result of extensive consultation with stakeholders in the commercial air travel industry, including airlines and consumer groups. These new regulations set out obligations to passengers for communication, delayed or cancelled flights, denied boarding, tarmac delays and transportation of musical instruments, among others.
These regulations were instituted by the Canadian Transportation Agency under the Canada Transportation Act, as amended by the Transportation Modernization Act. They were to be administered by the Canadian Transportation Agency and came into effect progressively through December 15, 2019. These regulations apply to all flights to, from and within Canada, including connection flights.
Some of the more contentious provisions in these regulations have been those concerning delayed or cancelled flights. My comments and observations today will focus on what I see as a definition of airline control and the interpretations that various stakeholders have taken of the airline control statement.
When you talk about the way in which the APPR has basically delineated scenarios, one provision in there seems to be causing the most grief. It is the things that are in an airline's control but are “required for safety purposes”. Based on that provision and those scenarios, passengers are exempt from compensation. It appears that disruptions with this characteristic have raised the ire of many travellers and consumer groups, which claim that airlines have been misusing this characterization to escape the compensation requirements of disruptions within an airline's control.
When we talk about some of those situations where airlines are claiming safety, we're talking about situations regarding maintenance and staffing. When we have those situations, the airlines are only obligated to provide a standard level of treatment, a completion of the passenger's itinerary and no compensation. The compensation, of course, varies depending on the type and length of delay, ranging anywhere from $400 for a three-hour delay to up to $1,000 for a delay of over nine hours.
I made some simplifying assumptions in how these conditions and regulations came into place. I'm pretty sure that a significant amount of consultation was going on with the airlines specifically and with consumer groups. I'm pretty sure there was agreement among all of these stakeholders that the regulations were, in fact, fair and could be applied readily. However, it has become very apparent that there are, overwhelmingly, situations now where airlines are looking at what's within airline control and required for safety as being a primary cause for not paying compensation.
Typically, in terms of the airlines designing their flight schedules, the resources required to fly that schedule—be they physical, human or financial—are deployed from established inventory and reflect the need to have the required resources at the moment the flight is scheduled to operate. Airline staffers recognize that absences and shortages are a matter of course. Things like vacations, leaves of absence, retirements and sicknesses are all part of the way staff are deployed. Planners already take into account the fact that these absences will be there by looking at creating reserves. Reserves are typically there for flight attendants and pilots. These reserves are deployed at the instant staffing shortages are apparent, even within a day of flight.
The number of airline employees that the airline says are reserve staff is very much at the airline's discretion. If the reserves are low and absences are high, flights are delayed and flights are cancelled. Welcome to 2022. Absences can be forecasted based on historical absences, and reserve levels did not reflect the realities of the 2022 absences.
While the CTA expressed the opinion that staffing levels are not grounds for delays that fall outside of the airlines' control, airlines continue to make such claims and have, in fact, gone to federal court. Both Air Canada and WestJet have gone to Federal Court looking for further exemptions from these regulations based on scenarios that they say are part of the Montreal Convention. These regulations are flying in the face of the ICAO Montreal Convention.
This leads me to submit that we need to overhaul these exemptions and that the rules by which airlines can deny compensation need to be addressed quickly. We have some models. We don't have to reinvent things from scratch.
My belief is that the European Union's regulations on compensation are probably in better condition than the Canadian ones. The outline of the rules in the European Union—