Transport Committee on Jan. 26th, 2023

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to thank all the witnesses for being with us today.

I must say, quite frankly, and I'd say somewhat cynically, that I feel like it's Groundhog Day today. Every time we return from vacation, I feel like we're meeting the same witnesses and talking about the same issues. The good news is that we talk about them. The bad news is that the issue remains unresolved. We continue to see airlines showing little respect for the rights of passengers, on a massive scale. It's extremely frustrating.

I feel that you've brought meaningful solutions to the table today, and I hope we can get them adopted and move forward, because I feel like we've been getting the same solutions for too long. The government deserves credit for trying to enshrine rights in its much-touted passengers' bill of rights. However, it's clearly got some major loopholes, particularly when it comes to how complaints are handled.

You work with people, and consumers come to you. How do you see these airline passenger protection regulations? People say they are too complicated. How could they be simplified so that they can be enforced quickly and people don't have to wait forever for cases to be resolved?

I'd like to hear from Mr. Lukács first.

[Dr. Gábor Lukács]

Thank you for the question.

The way to simplify the regulations, first and foremost, is to harmonize with the European Union's classification approach for entitlement to compensation. Under the European system, there are only two categories. The first is flight disruptions, which are caused by events that are normal to an airline's operation. That would include maintenance issues. The second is extraordinary circumstances, which would involve events like sabotage and acts of terrorism, or a situation when a whole fleet of a particular aircraft model is being grounded around the world because of some manufacturing defect.

What that allows is.... Even if one may argue that it is, perhaps, harsh with the airlines on its face, it results in a system that is very simple and, therefore, saves money for the public overall. This is because in that type of system, determining entitlement to compensation takes very few numbers and bits of information, such as the flight's supposed arrival time, when the passengers actually arrived and whether there was an extraordinary circumstance. That's it.

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

Thank you.

I've heard several suggestions from you and the other witnesses. For example, one suggests that airlines should proactively pay compensation to all passengers when an issue comes up with a flight. Another is to eliminate the category of complaints about safety-related situations outside the airline's control.

Do you all agree with these recommendations?

Perhaps Mr. Jack from CAA could answer this question.

[Ian Jack]

I don't know that I can talk personally on whether we're unanimous or not among the three of us. We'd have to caucus, I suppose.

There are a bunch of measures that I heard from my two colleagues that we would be supportive of, and I hope the same is true for them. I think there are, as you said, many obvious problems. Some of them have obvious solutions. Some don't and that's fair, but some do. The perfect can be the enemy of the good. I hope that when these recommendations are put forward by the committee, we can push forward with the low-hanging fruit, at least.

We can expect a lobby from other folks who are affected by this stuff on some of this, but there should be some very simple things that we can agree on. I would go, for instance, to the transparency piece. It's very difficult to argue against that. Here we are, talking about what a poor job the carriers are doing, and we all believe that, but I don't know that any of us know exactly how many complaints they're receiving internally, how many they're disposing of, how many people they're saying yes to and how many people they're saying no to. That information they keep to themselves.

There are other industries.... I think telecom was cited. You can look up in this country how many complaints each of the telco carriers had, as an example, and how they were disposed of. In the U.S., you can do that now. A lot of these carriers fly in the U.S. In the U.S., you have to provide this information, and it's available online for anybody to judge performance.

That's not the be-all and end-all, but it is a very simple example of something that would help all of us do a better job and put on pressure where it's warranted.

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

Thank you.

It feels like people who file complaints with the Canadian Transportation Agency go to war with the weapons the airlines give them, because the airlines have the information and they also give it out, which makes it very difficult for passengers. It seems they don't have what it takes to get justice.

If I'm not mistaken, I've heard people from CAA and Air Passenger Rights talk about how important it is that the burden of proof be reversed. Mr. Lawford, I'd like to know if you agree with that.

[John Lawford]

We absolutely agree with Air Passenger Rights that it's crucial the burden of proof be shifted. If we manage to put the onus on the airlines, that will solve a lot of problems with the regulations. However, we also have structural issues related to the three categories, as I said—

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mr. Lawford. Time is up, unfortunately.

Mr. Boulerice, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I would simply like to let Mr. Lawford finish responding.

[John Lawford]

Thank you, Mr. Boulerice.

I was going to say that we don't need the three categories. The European Union regime doesn't include these little differences and it works very well. As Mr. Lukács said, most of the time when there are issues with flights, all passengers are given a very clear course of action. Some airlines even offer to file the complaint for people because it's so clear. We could do the same thing here, but we would have to completely change the regulations.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Lawford.

Our statutory and regulatory provisions are insufficient to protect the rights of passengers. I feel we can all agree today that we need to do much more.

Mr. Hayman, you had a very unpleasant experience during the holiday season, when you were virtually trapped on a train that was delayed for over one day, 30 hours even.

Based on your experience and your analysis of the situation, how much responsibility for what happened do you assign to VIA Rail and how much do you assign to CN as the owner of the premises and the tracks?

[Tim Hayman]

Certainly in the case of the train that I was on, I think the responsibility for the actual delay largely falls on.... It's a combination of CN and, obviously, weather conditions as well. I think the major thing that falls on their shoulders in that particular case is the particular planning and the scheduling around what would be done to clear the line ahead of us and the decisions that were made from an operational standpoint.

I mean, in that case, we had a train that left Montreal and made it a significant distance along, through our route, all based on planning that had been laid out by CN around when that line would be cleared. It seems that there were some failures, I think, in communication there between CN and Via in terms of what was realistic to expect. I did hear things this morning in terms of similar comments about some communication failures on trains in the corridor as well. I think, for that part of things, I'd definitely put quite a lot of blame on CN.

Again, I think there were some potential communication issues on Via's front as well. I will give credit to the on-board staff we dealt with. They were generally doing the best they could in the situation, but they were often pretty strapped in terms of the amount of information that was provided to them or that they had to pass on to passengers. There wasn't a lot of clarity as we went along about exactly what would be happening.

I think some things could be improved on Via's front, but certainly on the way the situation unfolded, I think there's a lot of focus to go on CN. Again, this is why I think it's really unfortunate that they haven't been here and speaking to this committee.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

You just made an excellent point, Mr. Hayman. I actually pointed out earlier today. You are right: VIA Rail staff are very professional and I really like their service every time I ride the train.

Mr. Hayman, don't you think this would have been a little easier—I'm not saying ideal, but a little easier—if a public rail service owned the tracks and the location where the train transported passengers, and we weren't dealing with a private company that also refuses to answer any questions in public?

[Tim Hayman]

Yes, absolutely. At the end of the day that would alleviate a lot of issues. I understand that, obviously, there are I guess logistical challenges with all of that, but we've certainly been able to see, when you look at Via's on-time performance reporting across their system, generally how smoothly things run within their operations. Particularly, I'm thinking of the areas where they routinely perform the best, which are the particular stretches of track between Montreal and Ottawa. Also, for some parts between Ottawa and Brockville, where they are in fact the owners of the infrastructure, things can actually be properly scheduled and planned to accommodate passenger operations. Things around there definitely run more smoothly in the general run of things.

You need look no further, even outside of these exceptional situations, for the routine delays and routine issues that face Via trains, particularly on longer-distance services, but even in the corridor where there are many more frequent trains, there are still chronic delays and chronic issues that have to do with CN dispatching and the conflicts between the freight and passenger operations that are running there.

Anything that moves towards better control for that and better scheduling with priority being given to passenger trains would absolutely improve that situation, in my perspective.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Hayman.

Mr. Chair, how much time do I have left?

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

You have 45 seconds left, Mr. Boulerice.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

All right.

Mr. Lukács, what do you think of the prospect of automatic refunds being issued to air passengers in the event of delayed flights, of which there were many during the holiday season? Isn't it a fairly simple solution that the federal government could apply?

[Dr. Gábor Lukács]

Absolutely, and I strongly support not only simple criteria that match the European regime, but also that airlines would be required to proactively pay those compensations to passengers without the passengers having to run after the airlines and ask for the compensation.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mr. Boulerice.

Next, we have Mr. Lewis.

The floor is yours. You have five minutes.

[Chris Lewis, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses this afternoon.

I'm learning some pretty neat things here, too, specifically with regard to the EU and how that model looks compared with our model here in Canada.

I would start by saying that perhaps what we should be looking at is not only the air passenger protection act, but the air and rail passenger protection act. In some dialogue this morning with the previous witnesses, I asked this question: Does our rail system have the same constraints, if you will, about how much time somebody can be on a train compared to how much time somebody can be on a plane, sitting on the tarmac? The answer that I heard was “no”. This is very important testimony.

The first thing I'd like to share is from January 24, this year. It's a CBC article entitled “Flair Airlines cancels service from Windsor to Montreal without notifying customers”. The last flight from Windsor to Montreal via Flair is on February 6. It goes on to say that they're going to cancel it.

Further on in the article, it says:

On Jan. 5, Aidan Gendreau booked a flight to Montreal [from Windsor] to visit his girlfriend in Ottawa on Feb. 17.

He was able to put in his reservation code and see his flight was confirmed through Flair's app, but when Gendreau went on the airline's website to book another trip in March he saw there were no flights available.

He was able to book it. He's paid for it and now they're saying that he won't be flying, because they've cancelled that flight.

Further on in the article, it talks about all of the costs incurred by this gentleman to go and see his loved one. He's booked trains to get from Montreal to Ottawa. He's talking about cancelling hotel rooms and whatnot. To add salt to the wound, the last sentence says, “Gendreau said he had to book a new flight that cost an extra $150.” That's not with Flair. That will be with another airline.

My first question is to Mr. Jack. Do you believe that it should be not only about the passengers who have shown up at an airport and didn't get to fly, but those who have booked in advance and now they're saying, “No, you're not flying. If you want to fly, it's going to be more money”?

Is that part of this conversation?

[Ian Jack]

Absolutely, it is. In fact, there are some rules around that. The rules may not be good enough, but there are rules about how much notice you have to be given for a cancellation and what a carrier has to do for you if it cancels within a certain amount of time.

Certainly, it's within the committee's purview to look at whether you think those time limits are good or not, and whether the compensation is good or not. We would point you to the fact that, when the APPR was written, there was a bit of a carve-out for what were then considered smaller carriers—which was everybody smaller than Sunwing, Transat and the big two—as well as what they're calling the ultra low-cost carriers, which would be Flair and Swoop right now.

[Chris Lewis, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Thank you, sir.

Through you, Mr. Chair, this question is to Mr. Lawford.

Thank you, by the way, for bringing options for us.

You mentioned that you would like to see the minister have the power to change this, but also that he could go back to his cabinet. Would it not make more sense to use all 338 members of Parliament, as each one of our regions is unique? We know what passengers are facing in all of our ridings.

I would love some comment on that, please.

[John Lawford]

I'm sorry if I was unclear. I will be happy to provide our recommendations in written form to the committee so that you can read them.

What I was referring to is that there are already two different powers. There's one for the minister to direct the CTA to make new regulations under subsection 86.11(2). There's also a direct cabinet power to tell the CTA what to do in section 40 and, in effect, make regulations. I was referring to those.

I invite Parliament to change the Canada Transportation Act to put the full burden of proof on the airlines, which is something all of you members can do together. I would love to see that in a bill. I agree that Parliament is usually the best place to say the real will of Canadians.

[Chris Lewis, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Lawford.

This question is to Mr. Hayman.

Sir, would you agree with me—going back to my original remarks that I believe there's a disconnect between rail and the airlines—that the ministry should, indeed, be making life easier for the rail lines in setting out those guidelines for them? That way, when there's a 13-hour delay, they don't have to make a decision. It's already in black and white for their people.

Would that make sense to you, sir?

[Tim Hayman]

Yes. I would certainly agree with that. I think there's definitely some merit to that.

On that front, I would also say there's been talk here about looking to the EU for passenger protection standards around air passengers. There are also some good existing standards there for rail passengers as well, so I think we wouldn't be reinventing the wheel here. Obviously, it's a slightly different situation in the Canadian context than in the European one, but I think there are definitely some good baselines there to start from.

[Chris Lewis, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Thank you, sir.