By now, you’ve seen the headlines, and maybe you’ve lived them. Airlines losing checked baggage with everything from loved one’s ashes to wedding dresses. Hours-long waits to take off, sometimes when you are already on the tarmac. You’re denied boarding because the flight is overbooked, or told to leave the plane due to weight imbalances (what happened to a fourteen-year-old girl travelling alone from Toronto to Victoria).
Even if everything goes right, you probably feel squeezed for every penny—Air Canada announced its economy basic fare will no longer include carry-on baggage for tickets purchased after January 3, so be prepared to pay $35 for your first bag alone. Economy seats these days average thirty inches of space between you and the customer in front of you, with legroom seemingly shrinking. If you are tall or plus size or have any intention of being comfortable, you’ll likely need to pay extra for a preferred seat for more room (which will run you anywhere from $20 to $199). You might have heard horror stories about lost luggage, so you put everything in a carry-on item and fought tooth and nail to get overhead bin space. Then you might be given a bag of pretzels for a multi-hour journey—if you want to eat more, you’re paying $12 for a ham-and-cheese croissant. The kicker, of course, is that you’ve already paid hundreds of dollars just to be there, fighting for leg space with the manspreader next to you while people cough ominously in the row ahead.
Travel is a privilege, but Canadians are reliant on it. Our country is massive, with 18 million square kilometres of airspace, and our connections are far-reaching. Domestic travel makes up half of our flights, with over 86 million passengers in 2023. According to Cirium, an aviation analytics company, Air Canada’s most popular routes, like Toronto to Vancouver and Toronto to Calgary, can fly upward of 800 and 380 trips per month respectively. In the words of Air Transport Canada, “Canada’s skies are busy.”
Admittedly, airports and airline staff don’t have an enviable task. They operate in the middle of myriad overlapping jurisdictions, from municipal to federal to international, while navigating the labour shortages that have beleaguered industries around the world since the pandemic. Profit margins for air travel are also thin—only 2 to 3 percent, according to Statistics Canada—while airline expenses are about 27 percent fuel and 20 percent labour.
But air travel accountability remains a confusing matter for passengers, perhaps particularly in Canada. Toronto Pearson has ranked worst or close to worst in North America for delays and customer service at various points over the past few years. Air Canada ranked last among North America’s largest airlines in 2023 for on-time performance (the percentage of flights that arrive or depart at the scheduled time). About 70 percent of the top Canadian carriers’ flights were on time in 2024, compared to upward of 80 percent for leading US airlines. According to a Cirium on-time performance review, Air Canada and WestJet deliver 63 and 69 percent of the time respectively, meaning about 37 and 31 percent of their flights are delayed.
Those stats are “unacceptable,” says John Gradek, aviation management professor at McGill University and former Air Canada executive. In September 2023, the airline’s president and CEO, Michael Rousseau, told Aviation Week Network that Air Canada’s on-time performance will not be top of the market, compared to that of airlines like Delta: “We don’t want to be the bottom, but we’re going to be somewhere in between, basically.”
“When we have that type of statement being made by the CEOs of Canadian carriers, I’m not holding out much hope that we might have a change,” Gradek says.
A new set of regulations introduced in 2019 aims to manage carrier behaviour by requiring airlines to compensate passengers for disruptions within the airline’s control—for large airlines, $400 for three-to-six-hour delays, $700 for six to nine hours, and $1,000 for nine-plus hours. The regulations came after growing discontent, a number of mishandlings, and significant delays, including an incident in 2017 where Air Transat left passengers in two planes stranded on the tarmac at Ottawa International Airport for upward of four hours, in one case without food or water (a passenger called 911). The top issue for complaints is flight disruptions, according to 2021/22 Canadian Transportation Agency data, with 14,667 mentions. (The number for 2018/19 was 4,145.)
For passengers in the thick of a travel haze, the reason for their flight’s delay or even cancellation—often announced in a fuzzy voice over speakers at a noisy gate—might seem vague. It could be maintenance, weather, or staff shortages. But because compensation is required only for disruptions within the airline’s control, that distinction is important. Consumer advocates say that airlines may be using the grey area of what’s considered a safety issue, and therefore not the airline’s responsibility, as a loophole not to compensate. In 2022, the CTA, the quasi-judicial body that settles airline–passenger disputes, ruled that Air Canada needed to pay two passengers $1,000 each for flight disruptions caused by crew shortages, which the airline had initially claimed were safety related but the agency said were within their control.
If you complain, you might be waiting years to see any restitution, because of a 71,000-complaint backlog. The CTA received more than 43,000 complaints in 2024, the highest number since the Air Passenger Protection Regulations came into force. Last year, the federal government put $75.9 million toward clearing the mountain of disputes. Passengers are prohibited from speaking publicly about CTA decisions, and full decisions aren’t made available unless both parties agree to make them public—which they never have. This means that, in almost all cases, the specifics of how much passengers were compensated and for what remain a mystery. According to the CBC, the CTA ordered airlines to compensate or refund passengers in 50 percent of the cases it received between September 2023 and June 2024.
And all this might just be the tip of the iceberg. Based on the results of a student-led survey at McGill, Gradek estimates that only 10 percent of people who experience disruptions complain. The government is trying to institute a $790 fee for airlines to pay for every customer complaint that goes to the CTA, regardless of whether it’s settled in favour of the passenger or the airline. The agency says the fee would cover 60 percent of the costs of handling the complaint, but an Air Canada representative told the Globe and Mail the fine is more than the average revenue the airline makes on a one-way ticket. According to recent reports, Air Canada is offering cash vouchers for passengers to drop their cases with the CTA. (One passenger received a settlement offer of $225 cash or a $400 travel voucher for her $1,483 claim.)
After four years in the system, Air Canada customers Andrew and Anna Dyczkowski received a CTA decision in their favour: a twenty-four-hour flight delay was the airline’s fault, the agency said. But instead of settling, Air Canada took the passengers to federal court to dispute the decision, the CBC reported, leaving the Dyczkowskis caught in the middle of duelling institutions. (This sort of escalation happens very rarely, and advocates told the CBC the couple are functionally being used as “guinea pigs” for the new system.)
The passenger compensation process the Canadian government chose was modelled after the one in the European Union, according to Gradek, where regulations have created “a multi-billion-dollar business of chasing carriers for payment,” with independent businesses doing legwork in the complaint process in return for a cut of the final payout.
In Canada, the tribunal operations cost almost $30 million annually for staff and legal services to resolve an estimated 22,600 eligible complaints per year. “We’ve created a monster,” Gradek says. WestJet CEO Alexis von Hoensbroech told the CBC he feels airlines are being unhelpfully singled out. For example, he said, if a flight is delayed due to air traffic control staff shortages, it’s treated like an “act of God” with no compensation, but the passenger might appeal to the CTA, furthering the complaint pileup. Here, he and Gradek overlap in their concerns of ending up with something like the European system, where millions are invested in lawyers and the like but nothing appears to get better.
The root causes of these issues certainly don’t leave CEOs blameless, but experts say the problems are more complex than the regulations seem able to address. Workforce shortages are still a serious and worsening challenge in the industry, both globally and in Canada, according to Gülnaz Bülbül, aviation disruption management researcher and assistant professor at the University of Waterloo. “The air transportation industry is growing, but yet again, there’s not enough workforce, specifically with pilots and aircraft crew,” she says. “When you’re scheduling a flight, you also have to schedule the aircraft maintenance. If there’s a shortage in aircraft mechanics and you’re not able to efficiently schedule your regular maintenance, then it will reflect on your on-time performance.”
Last year was marked by a series of narrowly avoided strikes in the Canadian airline industry, from pilots to mechanics negotiating wages and working conditions on par with those of their US counterparts. The big Canadian airlines seem to be doing okay financially—Air Canada saw $6.1 billion in operating revenue in its third quarter alone, according to a November press release.
In part, this profitability is thanks to something called “Sixth Freedom Travel,” according to John Korenic, adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia Sauder School of Business and former aviation marketing director at the Vancouver Airport Authority. Sixth Freedom Travel is a business model that focuses on using Canadian airports as a “hub” for international travellers with destinations outside of Canada. YVR might serve as a connection for US travellers going to Asia, or YYZ as one for those going to Europe. It’s a strategy that got Toronto Pearson in hot water in 2022, when the narrow turnaround times of this route strategy collided with a massive wave of post-lockdown travel demand. That year, Gradek told the Toronto Star that the airlines were “very greedy.”
Airlines have disruption management software that considers factors like weather conditions, strikes, or political challenges. (Canadian airlines are prohibited from flying across Ukraine or western Russian airspace, for example.) Bülbül says disruptions are a “million-dollar problem” for which airlines and their mathematical systems are constantly creating updated schedules to “minimize the costs of disruptions and loss of passenger goodwill.” When senior airline and airport leaders were asked why they were investing in disruption management, the top response, at 70 percent, was “to improve our public image,” followed by 66 percent looking “to improve the passenger experience,” according to a recent report from global travel technology company Amadeus.
Schedules rarely go as planned. Take overbooking, which airlines do because they know some passengers won’t show up, so they make a bet based on data. Those guesses, and all airline schedules, need quality data on travel patterns—data Bülbül suspects may have been disrupted by the pandemic. The lack of good data might be why we seem to be seeing more cases of people being denied boarding due to overbooked flights these days, but definitive numbers are hard to come by. On top of the CTA non-disclosure agreements, Transport Canada doesn’t provide detailed statistics on disruptions. This is especially frustrating given that the US Department of Transportation issues monthly reports on the state of service and on-time performance with data that airlines are required to give them.
Also not present in Canada is any real airline competition. Canada operates as an airline carrier duopoly, according to Korenic, with Air Canada and WestJet making up roughly 46 and 34 percent of domestic market shares respectively. Korenic says the barriers to starting a new budget airline in Canada include a risk-averse investment culture and a 25 percent foreign-ownership rule for carriers that make it nearly impossible to get the financing for an upstart airline. And it’s hard to compete even if you do—Lynx Air, the ultra-low-cost carrier based in Calgary that promised a new era of affordability for the Canadian passenger, shuttered earlier this year (racking up a heap of CTA complaints on their way out the door). While Canada’s population and market will never match up to those of the US, Korenic points to examples in comparable countries like Australia, where airlines with foreign ownership, such as Virgin Australia, are allowed to operate as long as they are registered in the country and therefore subject to its laws. The Competition Bureau has launched a study into the Canadian air industry and has obtained court orders for Air Canada and WestJet to submit information, including key performance metrics and analyses of the state of competition in the sector. The potential for transparency and real competition is a breath of fresh air given the seemingly outsized power two carriers wield in the country’s airspace.
Despite the tit for tat over passenger compensation amounts, Canadian regulators rarely fine airlines in any real way. The mechanism that regulates air travel functionally pits individual customers against massive corporations and, in some cases, the agencies that are meant to protect them. The CTA can fine airlines a maximum of $25,000 per incident if they don’t comply with Air Passenger Protection Regulations; they’ve floated raising the amount to $250,000. But in 2023, the agency’s head told the House of Commons that the CTA hadn’t issued any fines for “failing to compensate passengers,” the CBC reported. The fines they have issued are for things like improper ticket price display and are reportedly around $200 each.
By comparison, the US Department of Transportation fined American Airlines $4.1 million (US) for more than a dozen cases where the airline kept passengers on the tarmac for more than three hours. The department also fined Southwest a record-setting $140 million (US) for their 2022 holiday meltdown, and fined six (mostly foreign) airlines $7.25 million (US) and $600 million (US) in refunds for failure to compensate American passengers for flight disruptions the same year.
“In the US, they use a hammer. In Canada, we use fly paper,” says Gradek.
In 2021, the federal government bought $500 million worth of stock in Air Canada, or 6 percent ownership of the company. The deal was for pandemic relief for the airline, but Gradek says it meant the CTA was indirectly “shareholders in one of the companies that they’re supposed to be regulating.” The government sold its Air Canada stock in December 2024, removing that potential conflict of interest and hopefully ushering in “more focused and unbiased oversight of the airline’s behaviour,” Gradek wrote by email.
But for weary travellers like you and I, what is there to be done? Well, know your rights and arrive early, says Bülbül. Call your local MP, says Gradek. And keep your eyes on the news as the airlines take the CTA to court over the air passenger protections that don’t really seem to be working for anyone but seem to be all we’ve got.
