Transport committee  Absolutely, we're better off having the passenger protection regulations than not having them. I would have started them—instead of 2019, as Professor Gradek said—more like in 2003, or whenever the Canadian Airlines-Air Canada merger was. That's when PIAC started working on airl

Transport committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and honourable members. My name is John Lawford. I'm the executive director and general counsel at the Public Interest Advocacy Centre. PIAC is a national non-profit and registered charity, and we provide legal and research services on behalf of co

Transport committee  Yes. I do believe the labour shortage issue does have something to do with the working conditions and the pay at airports. That has been a long slide. When things were going well.... The labour unions have complained that they got zero per cent increases all this time, when times

Transport committee  As I said, they do have mediation and conciliation-type streams. The folks I've spoken to claim that they have a less formal process, which works something like the method for CCTS. But it still gets a formal CTA number and the airline can object, as we've seen, to what looks lik

Transport committee  Thank you very much. The European regulations are a bit stronger, in the sense that, whenever there's a junction point, if you will, where the airline position—which is more limited—or the consumer position comes before the regulator, they take the consumer position, and they're

Transport committee  There would still have been a bulge in complaints, given all the uncertainty around refunds when COVID first came and, more recently, around baggage loss and other delays this summer. However, the model I'm referring to is largely done in telecommunications, where a consumer ma

Transport committee  That's often the case once things have gone private, so to speak. When business gets tough, then subsidies and bailouts are demanded so that they can serve the public, but that's a very inefficient, indirect way of funding something that is a public necessity. It would be more se

Transport committee  Yes, absolutely. That, to me, is very similar to the trouble we have now with many of these areas being cut off from bus services, as you know, being cut off from train service, or where the train has not been brought to them. In that kind of environment, we pretty much have to g

Transport committee  That's one way to do it. You could also have a regulatory board that has rates capped. Whether the cross-subsidization, as you're saying, is the way to do it, or whether there are subsidies to support those routes, having someone look at it in that way, through that lens, would r

Transport committee  I think he will. I actually do believe there is this strange situation where the government has, in effect, handed the control of the airports to these agencies and then turned around and asked them for fairly decent fees back, and provided these leases to have users, in effect,

Transport committee  We haven't done an in-depth study on this, but our general position at the Public Interest Advocacy Centre is that public services delivered directly from government are often more efficient. They have no profit motivation, and they are ready to step up when there are challenges

Transport committee  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 cons

Industry committee  Sure. Apart from a proper CRTC deep dive and the reconsideration of whether to impose quality-of-service requirements on the companies, which is our preferred way to go, cabinet can also, under section 14 of the Telecommunications Act, ask for a report. If the CRTC is not doing

Industry committee  Yes. The idea is to have the CRTC get some idea of the seriousness. Now, it's saying it's serious about it, but if the chair of the CRTC is also saying that industry has an incentive to fix this, maybe it does now that there's a public issue and you're having hearings, but public

Industry committee  I don't have any comment on the impact of competition, because I'd rather talk about what the CRTC can do.