Transport Committee on Jan. 12th, 2023

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

If you considered that Sunwing was missing the boat, why did you not intervene personally between December 23 and January 5?

It is easy to write tweets. You can do that from anywhere. You can have Zoom briefings from anywhere.

Why didn't you show leadership? Why didn't you go directly to the airports and see what was going on? Why didn't you call the airlines and communicate with the airports?

This is what Canadians expect from their minister.

[Omar Alghabra, Liberal, Mississauga Centre, ON]

Mr. Berthold, I think you're trying to confuse Canadians with respect to the role of my office in calls that I am not personally involved in.

You heard today from the airlines and the airports that my office and Transport Canada officials were calling on my behalf on a daily basis, sometimes more than once a day.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

You were missing in action.

[Omar Alghabra, Liberal, Mississauga Centre, ON]

The airlines and the airports were very much aware of my input and my expectations. We were—and I personally was—involved, daily, including on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, in what was happening. This is my responsibility, and we were putting pressure on the airlines—

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

You were active on Twitter.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Minister.

Thank you very much, Mr. Berthold.

Ms. Damoff, the floor is yours. You have three minutes.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

I'm going to change gears a bit, Minister. VIA Rail wasn't here today. I know they're coming to a future meeting, but in your opening remarks you mentioned the issues they had.

I want to share with you an email I got from a constituent whose 83-year-old mother and her 82-year-old friend travelled from Chatham to Aldershot on December 23. Their train was four hours late getting in, but she said that given the weather conditions, they accepted that and were thankful that they arrived safely. However, when they returned home on December 27, they were supposed to arrive at 9 p.m. Their train was five and a half hours late. These two 80-year-olds got in to an unmanned VIA station at 2:20 a.m. It is very difficult in a smaller town like Chatham to get a cab at 2:20 in the morning.

I recognize that VIA Rail is a separate entity and that you're not in charge of it, Minister, but I would welcome your thoughts on VIA Rail and its actions over the holidays, and on ongoing issues like the one this older woman and her friend encountered.

[Omar Alghabra, Liberal, Mississauga Centre, ON]

There are two parts to my answer. First, on what happened during Christmas, let me say that Canadians are familiar with weather disruptions. They are patient when it comes to disruptions. However, they rightly expect to be kept informed and that alternative plans will be prepared. What happened during Christmas, particularly with the service between Ottawa and Toronto, where passengers were kept on the train without information for 19 hours, was totally unacceptable. VIA accepted responsibility. It is now conducting an independent review into what happened.

Second, our government recognizes that VIA Rail is essential for Canadians and that the current status quo needs improvement. As you know, VIA does not own any of its tracks. It sometimes is at the mercy of the owner of the tracks and ends up facing delays. That's why our government is investing in what previous governments talked about in the past but never made a reality—high-frequency rail. We are building a dedicated track to enable VIA to have a reliable, fast and clean service in the busiest corridor of the country.

I'm excited about that future, but in the meantime VIA needs to accept its responsibility and learn from the lessons that happened during the Christmas holidays.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Thank you, Minister.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Ms. Damoff.

Once again, on behalf of the committee, Minister, we want to thank you for appearing before us, providing us with your testimony and answering all our questions.

With that, I will suspend for two minutes and provide the time necessary to switch over to our next line of witnesses.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

I call this meeting back to order.

With us for the second hour we have, from the Canadian Transportation Agency, Madame France Pégeot, chair and chief executive officer, as well as Mr. Tom Oommen, director general, analysis and outreach branch.

From the Department of Transport, we have with us once again Dominic Rochon, acting deputy minister; Craig Hutton, associate assistant deputy minister, policy; Nicholas Robinson, associate assistant deputy minister, safety and security; and Colin Stacey, director general, air policy.

Thank you once again for joining us.

We'll turn it over to Madame Pégeot for her opening remarks.

Ms. Pégeot, you have the floor for five minutes.

[France Pégeot, Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Transportation Agency]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank the committee for the invitation to appear today.

As you noted, I am accompanied today by Tom Oommen, director general for analysis and outreach at the agency.

The agency has a broad economic regulation and dispute resolution mandate. On the one hand, this mandate relates to transportation by air, rail, marine and interprovincial bus, all of which fall under federal jurisdiction. On the other hand, it seeks to protect the rights of persons living with disabilities to an accessible transportation system.

The agency carries out its responsibilities in two specific roles. First, it acts as an economic regulator, responsible for developing regulations under the relevant legislation and implementing them. In addition, it issues licences, makes decisions and enforces regulations.

Second, the agency is also an administrative tribunal, resolving complaints through both informal and formal processes. A central part of its mandate is to provide air passengers with a consumer protection regime.

With the coming into force of the Air Passenger Protection Regulations in 2019, the agency established, for the first time, minimum consumer protection requirements that all airlines had to follow. Many of these requirements are designed to attenuate the impact of disruptions in air passengers' travel journey, and that is at their core.

The regulations impose requirements regarding three categories of flight disruption, with different passenger entitlements depending on the category of flight disruption: flight disruptions could be categorized as being within airline control, within airline control but required for safety, or outside airline control. Since the regulations came into force, many passengers have used them to enforce the airlines' new obligations.

I would like to remind everyone that the regulations came into force just before the pandemic. The pandemic, as you know, had a significant impact on the transport industry, which indeed had difficulty resuming normal operations. This resulted in a record number of complaints to the agency. To put this in perspective, here is some background.

In the year before the regulations came into force, in 2018‑19, the agency received about 7600 complaints. In the year that the APPR came into force, in 2019‑20, we received just over 19,000 complaints. And finally, in the current year, 2022‑23, that is since April 2022, the agency has received almost 21,000 complaints, just in the first half of the year.

We have streamlined our processes and achieved new efficiencies. Unfortunately, the fact remains that we have a backlog of about 33,000 complaints.

I just want to add that our experience has been that about 97% of our complaints are resolved informally through our facilitation process, which takes an average of 20 business days to close once an agency facilitator begins the process.

With respect to the recent holiday flight disruptions, we expect that a significant number of complaints will be filed with the agency. These complaints are usually filed a month or so after the flight disruptions in question, as passengers must first make their claim directly with the airline, which has 30 days to respond.

These flight disruptions began with winter storms that first impacted flights out of western Canada, particularly Vancouver, and later on impacted Ontario- and Quebec-based flights.

We were very quickly on the ground. Enforcement officers were there, communicating with airlines, monitoring the situation and gathering the necessary information. They are currently investigating potential violations of regulatory requirements, and the work is ongoing.

As an example of other things we have done, over the same holiday period, agency staff communicated with Sunwing regarding its cancellation of all flights to and from Saskatchewan until February 3.

At that time, we were told that all passengers requesting compensation—if they were informed less than two weeks in advance of their cancelled flights—would get compensation as required under the APPR, or the air passenger protection regulations.

We will continue to monitor the response of airlines to the holiday flight disruptions. We will also respond to incoming complaints arising out of these flight disruptions.

In order to help passengers who have filed complaints with the agency, we have recently added a new application to our website, which we call the case status update. It allows every complainant to know where they stand in the queue and what the next steps are in resolving their dispute with the airline.

Furthermore, we have posted consumer-friendly guides that can be easily read and navigated on a smart phone, and have provided information on what passengers are entitled to and how to file a complaint. This is to make it easy to follow the process, particularly if they are at the airport when the event happens.

We're also working on addressing the complaint backlog by further increasing our complaints processing capacity through identifying and implementing procedural improvements and modernizing our processes. We hope to eventually be able to automate some parts of our processes.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We'd be happy to respond to any questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Ms. Pégeot.

To begin our line of questioning today, we have Dr. Lewis.

The floor is yours. You have six minutes.

[Leslyn Lewis, Conservative, Haldimand—Norfolk, ON]

Wonderful. I want to thank all the witnesses for their testimony here today.

My question is for Mr. Rochon. Canadians have experienced one of the worst travel seasons in history. Canadian airports have sunk to the bottom of the world's airports in terms of reputation. Surely you saw the luggage piles all over Pearson airport.

We heard from the minister that it's natural that we're going to have weather disruptions, but he also acknowledged that Canadians can also expect to have information and updates.

The chaos at Pearson lasted until the 26th—48 hours—but, Deputy Minister, you didn't contact the airport executives until the 29th. That was three days after the crisis had been cleared up.

Wouldn't you agree that Canadians deserve to have their government show up during a crisis, and that they deserve to have information during that crisis?

[Dominic Rochon, Acting Deputy Minister, Department of Transport]

Absolutely. I would agree that throughout the course of the crisis, we should be keeping Canadians apprised. The royal “we” there would be everyone involved throughout the air sector environment.

What I will point out—as the minister highlighted—is that Transport Canada officials, coming out of the air sector summit that the minister held on November 24, if memory serves me well...following that, our policy officials got together and formed something that we refer to as the AROC, which is the airport recovery operations committee. That committee is formed of the four largest airports and a couple of the largest air carriers, as well as CBSA, NAV Canada and CATSA. Our officials got together with them on a regular basis leading into the holiday period. I believe the last meeting of that committee was on the 20th.

The purpose of that committee was to ensure—

[Leslyn Lewis, Conservative, Haldimand—Norfolk, ON]

We heard evidence from Sunwing that they were trying to reach out to you on December 28, and that they did not get a response from the minister until January 5. That's when they had that virtual meeting with the minister.

I know you communicated with them on the 29th, but they had to wait for over a week to hear back from the minister. Why was it that you were able to communicate on the 29th and the minister was not?

[Dominic Rochon]

I'm not going to speak for the minister. I think he did a good job of doing that for himself in the hour that preceded this.

What I can say is that Transport Canada officials were in touch with Sunwing on a daily basis. I know that for a fact, because deputy minister Mike Keenan and I were interacting with our officials. We were getting updates—at times, as the minister pointed out, on an hourly basis—leading into Christmas Day and, indeed, on Boxing Day, the 27th, etc.

[Leslyn Lewis, Conservative, Haldimand—Norfolk, ON]

Somebody's giving misinformation, then, because Sunwing gave evidence that they had reached out to your office on the 28th, and now you're saying that the executives were not giving the correct information. Could your office potentially be misinterpreting what happened?

[Dominic Rochon]

No, in the sense that we were interacting with Sunwing officials. When I say “we”, the Department of Transport and our officials were in touch with Sunwing to get periodic updates in terms of what was happening with regard to their flights and what was happening in terms of their obligations to passengers. That was happening. I have emails, exchanges, from my officials, and indeed, hearing from the president—

[Leslyn Lewis, Conservative, Haldimand—Norfolk, ON]

When you say “we”, you're not talking about you or the minister.

[Dominic Rochon]

That's correct. I'm talking about the department.

[Leslyn Lewis, Conservative, Haldimand—Norfolk, ON]

The department. Okay. So they are accurate in saying that they didn't hear from you or the minister at that time, during the period that they stipulated today.

[Dominic Rochon]

That's correct. I would have to get back to you specifically. I personally did not speak with a senior official at Sunwing, but our deputy minister, Mike Keenan, had an interaction. I believe that's probably the reference to the 28th that you are referring to.

[Leslyn Lewis, Conservative, Haldimand—Norfolk, ON]

When you saw all that luggage all over the place at the airport, don't you think that instead of sending out a tweet it would have been important to make that connection, to give Canadians some assurance that the government they elected to take care of them is actually on the crisis and doesn't show up when the crisis is over?

[Dominic Rochon]

We were interacting with airport authorities. We were interacting with air carriers. We were interacting with VIA Rail. There was interaction happening to understand exactly the extent of the issues, and we were seeking assurances from all the various players on what they were doing to rectify the situation.

Of course, at the same time we were in the middle of three massive storms that were happening—