Hon. Paula Simons: Tansi.

Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to Bill C-47, or the budget implementation act — specifically Division 23 of Part 4, which deals with the air passenger bill of rights.

For days now, I’ve had this famous quote from Shakespeare’s Richard III stuck in my head, and I’ll stick it in your heads now:

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this son of York,

And all the clouds that loured upon our house

In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

I think it’s because this has been a winter of deep discontent for Canadian air travellers. But then, it was also an autumn of discontent, and a spring of discontent; alas, I see little evidence that the clouds are breaking or that the glorious sunny summer of air travel is upon us.

When the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic shut down airports and radically reduced air passenger demand, airlines and airports took much of their service off-line. Starting Canada’s air system back up again after that shutdown has not been easy. There are labour shortages at every pinch point: We don’t have enough air traffic controllers. We don’t have enough pilots. We don’t have enough security screeners. We don’t have enough ground crews, flight crews, baggage handlers or passenger service agents.

Airport and airline executives keep telling us that things are getting better. But we — senators — who travel so much, know intimately that the air travel experience is still nothing like it was before the pandemic struck. Flights are chronically delayed or cancelled. That’s if you’re lucky enough to find a flight since many smaller centres — and by “small,” I’m also including cities as “non-small” as Ottawa and Edmonton — have lost many of their direct flights, compelling flyers to change planes in already overwhelmed Toronto and Montreal airports. And when flights are delayed or cancelled and connections are missed, it often feels as if the airlines have simply abandoned frustrated and frightened passengers to their fates.

Senators, who fly so often, are often lucky enough to rack up enough travel points to qualify for a chance to call a special “elite” customer service line to get help. But most passengers have no such access to assistance. When your flight home for Christmas gets cancelled and all you get when you call is a recorded announcement telling you someone will get back to you in three days, no wonder overwhelmed passengers often lash out, taking out their fury on cabin crews and gate agents who themselves have neither the answers nor the authority to fix passenger problems.

Everybody understands that sometimes unexpected things happen. I think Canadians could deal with such crises relatively calmly if they got timely answers and real support from airlines when things went wrong. Airlines can’t control the weather. They can, however, control the number of passenger agents and customer service agents to help stressed and distressed people when things go awry. To blame everything on the weather in a country where we have rather a lot of weather is insufficient.

It’s a terrible system to navigate for people who don’t fly often, like grandmothers going to visit grandchildren, students returning home from campus, families going on vacation or people who need to be on time for a wedding or a funeral. The most heart-rending scene I witnessed this winter was a woman who was desperate to get from Edmonton to Cape Breton, where her mother was on her death bed. The scream of anguish she let out when she realized our flight was extremely delayed and she would miss her connection to Sydney and not get home in time to see her mother one last time — that scream haunts me still.

But it’s also a terrible system for frequent flyers who need to travel for work and can’t reliably get to their meetings or conferences. It’s not just an inconvenience we can shrug off; it’s a drag on our economy and a blight on our international reputation.

I have anecdotes. You have anecdotes. Heck, complaining about our most recent travel stories is one of the things that bonds senators from all corners of this chamber. But you don’t need to rely on anecdotes to understand the scale and scope of the problem. During our hearings on Bill C-47, our Transport and Communications Committee heard that publicly available, monthly on-time performance data shows that Toronto Pearson, Montréal-Trudeau and Vancouver International consistently underperform compared to comparable U.S. airports like Seattle, Detroit and Chicago O’Hare. About 1.5 to 2 flights out of every 10 at comparable U.S. airports are delayed. In Canada, we have closer to 4 flights out of every 10 delayed at Canada’s three largest airports. That means that if we’re lucky, 60% of flights depart on time.

We do have an air passenger bill of rights, which allows passengers to complain if they don’t get satisfaction from the airlines in resolving their issues. Our committee heard from witnesses that people flying in Canada filed some 40,000 official formal complaints about their treatment by the airlines last year alone. But the complaint system is totally broken. As of last month, there was a backlog of 46,000 complaints, which would suggest that virtually none of the 40,000 people who complained last year has had their issue resolved — unsurprising since, on average, it takes the Canadian Transportation Agency a full 18 months to resolve a complaint. A backlog of 46,000 complaints is bureaucracy at its most absurd — consumer justice delayed and denied. If we’re honest, we have to recognize that those 46,000 complaints are just the tip of the iceberg. Most Canadians who’ve had terrible travel misadventures don’t even bother to file a complaint, either because they don’t know the complaint system exists or because, with cool-eyed cynicism — no, make that world-weary realism — they recognize the reality that filing a complaint in a system like this accomplishes next to nothing.

Therefore, I was more than a little thrilled to learn that the government was updating the bill of rights in an effort to give aggrieved passengers a little more support and recourse.

In her testimony before our committee, France Pégeot, Chair and Chief Executive Officer of the Canadian Transportation Agency, attempted to explain how this proposed new system would be better than the ineffective and inefficient system we now “enjoy.”

Under the status quo, passenger entitlements depend on how a flight disruption is categorized: within airline control, within airline control but required for safety or outside airline control. This has made it difficult for passengers to understand their rights, and it makes the regulations difficult to enforce.

Bill C-47 would eliminate the three categories of flight disruptions. Under the new and simplified framework, air carriers would be required to compensate passengers unless there were exceptional situations. What’s an exceptional situation? We don’t know yet. The Canadian Transportation Agency will define the term later in regulations. But what we do know is that as soon at the provisions of Bill C-47 come into force, the burden of proof will be shifted. Right now, passengers must prove that they have a right to compensation. Under the new rules, the onus would flip. Airlines will now have to prove that they don’t have to pay compensation.

Bill C-47 would also attempt to deal with the overwhelming number of complaints by streamlining the claim resolution process. Under the proposed new rules, each complaint would need to be resolved in 120 days — a far cry from the current 18‑month timeline. On top of that, the Canadian Transportation Agency would also be allowed to recover the cost of air passenger complaints from the airlines, which should encourage airlines to address customer complaints directly with travellers as soon as possible.

The bill would also allow passengers to file claims not just for lost luggage but for luggage that disappears and goes on holiday for days or weeks or months. Companies that don’t comply could now be fined up to $250,000, a significant increase from the previous maximum of $25,000.

It sounds great. But there are serious questions about whether the changes will accomplish much at all.

During our committee hearings, for example, I asked Madame Pégeot about what these new rules would mean for people who get trapped on airplanes on the tarmac for hours and hours, whether because of bad weather, a shortage of available gates and ground crew or some combination. I myself got stuck on the Montreal runway for almost seven hours last June, exactly a year ago, and I know lots of you, my Senate colleagues, have had similar experiences.

Here was my question to Madame Pégeot:

Oftentimes in Canada a flight is delayed because of weather conditions, for which the airline takes no responsibility. But it has been the experience of many Canadians that the airlines provide them with nothing — no food, no water, no arrangement of accommodation — if they are forced to overnight some place. In the worst instances, people have been trapped on planes for 7, 8, 12 or 18 hours, unable to access food, water or working toilets.

Can you tell us what will be the rights of passengers in conditions where they have been denied humanitarian access to food, water and working toilets for up to 15, 18 hours?

Here was her answer:

Under the current regulatory framework, when the situation is outside the power of the company, like you said, a weather event, there is no obligation for the airline to provide assistance, whether it be food or accommodation for passengers. The current legislation before Parliament does not address that issue. But we note it, and that’s certainly something that we can look into, as we would have to — assuming the legislation goes through — review the regulation.

That seems a rather large issue to have left out.

The bill also does not seem to have any provisions to let people off the plane to get a breath of air or use a working toilet after they have been stuck waiting for a gate and ground crew for hours and hours.

Gábor Lukács is the President of Air Passenger Rights, Canada’s independent, non-profit organization of volunteers devoted to empowering travellers. Before our committee, Mr. Lukács testified that Bill C-47 perpetuates existing loopholes and will create a new one. In spite of the government promises to the contrary, he told us, “. . . the bill retains the “required for safety reasons” excuse for airlines to avoid paying passengers compensation.” He called this a “. . . made-in-Canada loophole . . .” that has “. . . unnecessarily and disproportionately complicated adjudication of disputes between passengers and airlines. . . .” Since, he noted, all the evidence for the reasons for a flight disruption is in the airlines’ exclusive control, passengers are at a great disadvantage in enforcing their rights to compensation. And while he and his group are concerned about the complaint backlogs currently, he also argued that this new system of fast-tracking complaints could backfire and strip some passengers of their full rights to adjudication.

In the meantime, we’ve heard plenty of anger from those in the air travel sector who have told us in hearings and meetings that these changes will raise prices, reduce the number of flights on offer and be a particularly heavy burden on small, regional airlines that serve our smaller regional airports. They also complain that they shouldn’t be held responsible for delays that are a knock-on effect caused by NAV CANADA’s air travel control systems or other hold-ups at the airport.

I wish I could tell you definitively if I think this new complaints system will work. Unfortunately, by wrapping all these changes inside this Turducken of an omnibus bill, the government severely limited the work our committee could do to unpack the details. I understand the urgency to get these changes enacted, if not for this summer, then at least in time for the fall and winter travel season. Packing them into the budget is undoubtedly efficient in the short term. I dearly wish, though, that these changes had come to us in a stand-alone bill and that we’d had more time to study them properly.

Disciplining the airlines for bad customer service — emotionally satisfying though that feels — is not enough to fix our snarled-up air travel system. We need to address the shortage of highly skilled pilots by finding a way to make expensive training programs more accessible and affordable. We need to reinvest in our airport infrastructure to make our airports more comfortable and user-friendly for passengers and airlines alike. We need to ensure that NAV CANADA, the private company that provides air traffic control services, has the necessary capacity to do its job. We need to encourage competition so that passengers are not held hostage to one or two airlines. We also need to come up with integrated, coherent emergency plans to deal with the extreme weather events to ensure that our airports and airlines are able to deal with the new realities of climate change.

COVID is not the only thing that has turned our world upside-down. We need to get ready to build an air service system robust and flexible enough to serve our magnificent, complicated, sprawling country with both convenience and compassion.

Thank you, hiy hiy.