Massimo Bergamini

When Canada’s air passenger rights regime was announced last May, Transport Minister Marc Garneau called the new rules “world leading”, but recent confusion and consumer frustration around what the rules actually cover suggest that the minister’s self-congratulations might have been premature.

In a move reminiscent of a building contractor who tells a dissatisfied customer to take it to the Better Business Bureau,  the Transport minister’s response to the growing confusion and frustration has been to advise travellers “who feel that they did not get an adequate response,” to complain to the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA).

A   CBC report  of passengers being denied compensation for delayed or cancelled flights prompted Canadian Automobile Association (CAA) spokesperson Ian Jack to comment, “If the [passenger rights] system were working properly, people wouldn’t be feeling this level of frustration”.

But Mr. Jack should not have been surprised by the turbulence hitting the government’s passenger rights regulations. It was totally predictable; the result of a rushed process designed to meet a political timetable and agenda — in this case, last fall’s federal election.

In representations made last year to the CTA, to whom the minister had given responsibility for drafting the regulations, the National Airlines Council of Canada (NACC) warned that the government’s rush to regulate passenger rights by July 1, 2019 would  produce “rules that reduce[d] consumer protection and convenience through higher fares, reduced service, and market confusion”.

While the government ultimately agreed to delay implementation of the more complex elements of the new rules by five months, this was not nearly enough time for airlines to train thousands of staff and roll out new systems.

NACC had cautioned that the draft regulations not only lacked the clarity needed by airlines to translate them into day-to-day commercial practices but they were often at odds with global airline operating realities. In practice this meant that implementation would be more difficult because of new airline systems and procedures that would be required.

Pointing to troubling parallels with the government’s disastrous rush to implement Phoenix, its still-not-functioning payroll system, NACC urged the minister  to delay implementation in order to give the CTA time to get the new rules right and industry time to ramp up.

As much as Marc Garneau might want to deflect consumer dissatisfaction by getting unhappy travellers to complain to the CTA, coming from the minister who rejected repeated industry warnings and who justified the regulations by saying they were needed to make air carriers treat their “passengers like people and not numbers”,  this advice, like his regulations, falls well short of the mark.