Airline complaints face a case of governmentitis

Canada’s transportation agency is bogged down in bureaucracy and Alghabra needs to shake off the illness

Sometimes, politicians in power can start to talk like their officials, or the people they talk to over and over again. Maybe that’s why Canadians who are getting angry about airlines, and asking whether anyone is listening to their complaints, are finding the Liberals have a case of governmentitis.

So when the Canadian Transportation Agency has an 18month backlog of complaints, Transport Minister Omar Alghabra shouldn’t waste his breath defending the airlines, or the system.

But it sure sounded like that was what he was doing on Tuesday, when New Democrat MP Taylor Bachrach asked him why the agency, a transportation industry regulator and complaints body, hasn’t fined airlines for failing to compensate mistreated passengers. Mr. Alghabra replied that the airline industry was hit hard by the pandemic, and that the government is working on providing more resources to the CTA.

But it’s time to get past those excuses. The CTA’s complaints system is bogged down in bureaucratic governmentitis. The minister had better shake off the illness.

The Globe and Mail reported Wednesday that about 18 per cent of air passengers’ complaints about airlines get withdrawn before the agency ever touches them. And as for the rest, the agency can’t tell us the outcomes of 97 per cent of the cases.

So we don’t really know what is happening with most complaints. Even so, there are a lot of reasons to suspect complainants are giving up.

“What we do know for a fact is that the system is dysfunctional,” said Gabor Lukacs, the president and founder of Air Passenger Rights, a consumer advocacy group.

The way the CTA counts up its complaints should make us all feel frustrated with the system, which is supposed to hold airlines accountable to passengers and the public.

There’s a big batch of complaints that don’t really count at all: the 18 per cent that get withdrawn before the CTA gets to them. You have to wonder how many withdraw because of the complex process and the 18month wait – which, as Mr. Lukacs observed, “sounds like a prison sentence.”

The agency publishes the results of the 3 per cent of cases that go through its formal adjudication process. But the agency “facilitates” an informal process for the other 97 per cent. It tallies them up as resolved, even though it doesn’t report on how they were resolved – meaning it doesn’t track whether the complainant got compensation, or not, or just gave up.

The agency said it can’t force airlines and passengers to tell it what happened in those cases. So we can’t know what happened to 97 per cent of the complaints. But in the world of government agencies, those cases count as resolved. That is not the kind of accountability the public is clamouring for.

This is a situation in which politics should be doing some good. The public is complaining about airlines, and about the fact that their complaints don’t get action. Loudly. This has been a winter with a litany of reports of stranded passengers, lost luggage, bumped passengers and multihour waits on the tarmac. That’s a lot of angry Canadians. That is usually the sort of thing that gets the attention of people who want to get re-elected.

But the Transport Minister oversees a department that spends a lot of time talking to a small group of major stakeholders – airlines and railways in particular. And his predecessor as transport minister, Marc Garneau, rolled out the Air Passenger Protection Regulations in 2019, touting it as a great step forward for accountability, so Mr. Alghabra appears to feel he has to defend it.

To be fair, he has promised change. He has said the government will put the onus for defending against complaints on airlines, and that legislation he hopes to introduce in spring will strengthen passenger rights. “We are actively working with the industry to improve processes for the treatment of passengers in Canada,” his spokesperson, Nadine Ramadan, said in an e-mail.

A good place to start might be to look beyond the airline industry. And Transport Canada. Mr. Alghabra might want to read the letters his fellow MPs are getting and talk to the consumer advocacy groups that are telling him there are better ways to hold airlines to account. Defending the system is bad politics.

The Globe and Mail reported Wednesday that about 18 per cent of air passengers’ complaints about airlines get withdrawn before the agency ever touches them. And as for the rest, the agency can’t tell us the outcomes of 97 per cent of the cases.