According to the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA), as of 31JAN 2023, it has received 6,395 new complaints since 21DEC 2022 when the holiday travel chaos began.
The CTA told CTV News that of the 6,395 new complaints, 2,028 are related to Air Canada, 1,951 are related to WestJet and 761 are related to Sunwing.
The new additions mean that the CTA is dealing with a backlog of more than 36,000 total complaints, with customers seeing wait times of up to 18 months before the regulator makes a ruling.
"We have received more complaints than we have been able to process in a given period of time," said Tom Oommen, chief compliance and enforcement officer of the CTA.
CTV News reports that under Canada's Air Passenger Protection Regulations, pax are entitled to receive up to CAD $1,000 from airlines in compensation for delays and cancellations, depending on the size of the disruption, but only if the delay was "within the airlines' control" and not related to safety.
Filing a complaint with the CTA is intended to be a last resort measure when pax are entitled to compensation but are unable to resolve the dispute directly with the airline. With so many Canadians taking this last resort measure, wait times have ballooned.
One lawyer told CTV News he is considering filing a claim at small claims court due to the long wait times. "We're not seeing resolution for consumers. If you don't take steps to protect your rights...at some point you're going to be out of time to seek your remedy," he said.
As reported by Open Jaw in JAN 2023, federal Transport Minister Omar Alghabra announced that the government is looking to strengthen these air passenger protection rules to shift more responsibility to airlines to fairly compensate pax, not the CTA's complaint mechanism.
"Currently, it feels to many passengers that the burden is on them," Alghabra said. "We want to make sure we put rules in place to ensure that the burden is on the airline."
While Alghabra did not provide anymore details, he later added that an overhauled airline passenger bill of rights would be introduced by this spring.
