People are shown at Pearson International Airport in Toronto on Friday, March 10, 2023. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette
MONTREAL – The National Airlines Council has released a report calling on Ottawa to implement “shared accountability” in aviation, with the goal of smoother travel – and across-the-board accountability for flight disruptions.
Released Thursday, the proposals come precisely three weeks after the House of Commons tabled legislation to overhaul passenger rights, and five days before a Senate committee hearing on the same bill.
Post-pandemic travel turmoil last summer and over the winter holidays prompted the Liberal government to lay out sweeping changes to Canada’s passenger rights charter in an effort to tighten compensation loopholes and toughen penalties.
The airlines council recommendations include imposing service standards on industry players, which range from airports to Nav Canada and the Canada Border Services Agency.
“They may have internal key performance indicators … but there’s is no accountability for them. There’s certainly no public reporting on them,” council CEO Jeff Morrison said in a phone interview.
“Even if, let’s say, an airport had a particular standard of getting your luggage through its luggage belt in a certain period of time, we don’t know what that is – we the public.”
The report also suggests travellers be entitled to compensation if service standards aren’t met by a given entity in the sector. Currently, only airlines must pay refunds or compensation in the event of a three-hour-plus flight delay or cancellation – though some 45,000 passengers have ongoing complaints filed with the regulator alleging they have not received what carriers owe them.
Morrison said he’s open to discussing how responsibility for compensation would play out.
“We don’t want to create a complex kind of system,” he said. “We want something very simple, and something that the passenger doesn’t have to jump through many hurdles.”
Other recommendations include allowing the Canadian Transportation Agency to conduct compliance audits and requiring organizations to state the reasons for service disruptions in real time.
Last month the council, which represents four of the country’s biggest airlines, took issue with the Liberals’ proposed changes to the Air Passenger Protection Regulations. The industry group warned that the bill’s potential scrapping of safety concerns as an exception to compensation requirements could threaten customer safety.
If passed, the reforms will put the onus on airlines to show a flight disruption is caused by safety concerns or reasons outside their control, with specific examples to be drawn up by the Canadian Transportation Agency as a list of exceptions around compensation.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 11, 2023.
