Thank you for the question.
When the pandemic started, several emails were floating between Transport Canada and the Canadian Transportation Agency—emanating primarily, it seems so far, from Air Transat—requesting help to defeat provincial consumer protection laws requiring refunds for passengers whose flights were not operating. The Canadian Transportation Agency and Transport Canada were complicit in that. Ultimately, a misleading statement was issued on the Canadian Transportation Agency's website on March 25, 2020, giving passengers false information or the false impression that they had no right to actual refunds and that they somehow had to just accept vouchers. We are currently continuing litigation to unearth everything that happened there and to hold the Canadian Transportation Agency accountable for that.
That type of disinformation campaign continued in the recent amendments to the APPR, where the government was misleading the public into believing there was a gap in the APPR, while none existed. The obligation to refund passengers has been the law in Canada since 2004. It just hasn't been consolidated into a single piece of legislation in the APPR.
The government has now, as of September 2022, actually backpedalled on the existing right for a refund and created the impression—again, the false impression—that passengers do not have the right to a refund if their flight is cancelled for reasons outside of the carrier's control and the airline offers them an alternative flight within 48 hours. One reason—