Mr. Chair, Honourable Senators,
Air Passenger Rights is Canada’s independent nonprofit organization of volunteers, devoted to empowering travellers.
We have a track record of successfully predicting shortcomings and loopholes in legislation relating to air passenger rights.
For example, in 2023, we cautioned that the government’s proposal in Bill C-47 violates Charter-protected freedom of expression rights.
Earlier this year, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice declared that the provision in question was contrary to the Charter.
Since 2017, we have testified before multiple Parliamentary Committees. Each time, we cautioned that Canada’s existing and proposed passenger protection regimes were inadequate, and would result in a soaring backlog of passenger complaints.
By 2026, the Canadian Transportation Agency had a 97,000-complaint backlog, thereby validating our predictions.
After nine years of denial, the government acknowledged that "the system is broken" and that "Canadians deserve better."
In Bill C-31, the government proposes to solve the crisis by privatizing passenger complaint adjudication.
- Proposed section 85.21 would allow airlines to handpick the adjudicators who decide passenger complaints.
- Proposed section 85.24 would make decisions rendered by the airline-chosen adjudicators binding on passengers.
In our view, the government’s proposal is illusory, ineffective, unfair to passengers, and unprecedented in the Western world.
It is illusory and ineffective, because it does not remedy the root causes.
First, despite Bill C-47, the Government of Canada failed to implement and impose significant fines on airlines that violate passengers’ rights.
Second, the Air Passenger Protection Regulations are filled with loopholes that shield airlines from liability and make the regime unnecessarily complex and unworkable.
The regime is so complex that a decision maker must review hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of documents—consuming a full working day on average—to resolve a mere $400 case.
A private third party adjudicator will not render decisions any faster, unless humans are replaced with AI whose reliability and accuracy in legal matters remains very limited at this time.
In sharp contrast, under the European and the UK regimes, eligibility for compensation can be determined in minutes using publicly available data rather than hundreds of pages and lengthy adjudication.
Bill C-31 proposes to merely swap decision makers, without closing any loopholes, without improving enforcement, and with the existing complexity left intact.
Without fixing these root causes, any complaint system—however structured—will perpetuate, not resolve, the crisis.
Bill C-31 also proposes creating a regime that is unprecedented in the Western world and dissimilar to any existing Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) regime in Canada, the EU, or the UK.
Regulation (EC) 261/2004 and its UK counterpart contain no provision for private third-party adjudication binding on passengers.
The ADR schemes that do operate in Europe supplement these legislative frameworks, leaving passengers free to reject outcomes and pursue legal action.
Canada’s own telecommunication complaint system, the CCTS, similarly lacks binding authority over consumers.
In no comparable jurisdiction have law makers granted private entities selected by airlines the authority to impose legally binding decisions on passengers.
The government’s claim that Bill C-31 follows the European or the UK model is untrue.
Bill C-31 is also unfair to passengers, because the airlines would be handpicking private entities to adjudicate complaints against themselves and render legally binding decisions—a glaring conflict of interest.
No impartial adjudicator can emerge where the adjudicator’s livelihood depends on the airlines’ continued goodwill.
This would create the most airline-friendly passenger protection regime in the Western world, surpassing even Canada’s broken Canadian Transportation Agency.
We ask you, Senators, to harmonize proposed section 85.24 with existing ADR systems, such as the CCTS, where decisions are binding only on the service providers, and consumers are free to accept or reject them.
Thank you.
