Front Burner - Will Canada's new air travel protections actually help?

Episode Date: May 31, 2019

This summer, Canada's new air passenger protection regulations will begin to come into effect. The regulations apply to all flights to, from and within Canada, and include specific financial entitlements for things like delayed flights and damaged luggage. Today on Front Burner, CBC National Business Correspondent Peter Armstrong explains Canada's new air passenger protections, which some critics say don't go far enough.

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Uncover bomb on board. Investigating the biggest unsolved mass murder in Canada. CP Flight 21. Get the Uncover podcast for free on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. Available now. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. Sometimes flying is the best. If you think about it, you're tens of thousands of feet in the air, stuck in this metal tube. It's this incredible feat. Maybe we should appreciate it a lot more than we actually do.

But it can be so hard to do that because you find yourself in these long, infuriating lines. And sometimes you get kicked off your flight. Or your plane just gets delayed for hours. Or you have to sit on the tarmac for what seems like no good reason. And then they taxied out a bit, and then they taxied back again. There were babies crying. The whole place was just full of people. It certainly appears quite strong that I was lied to. Well, the federal government has introduced new rules that are supposed to make flying

better for you and me. So if you get delayed, you get hundreds of dollars. Our system will be world-class, offering travelers flying to, from, or within Canada with real and fair treatment standards and compensation. Sounds great, right? Maybe not. Today, I'm joined by Peter Armstrong. We're going to talk about these new rules and whether they actually do anything. That's coming up on FrontBurner. Hi, Peter. Hi. It is so nice to have you back. It's nice to be back.

What I like to think of... I miss our little chats. Me too. But I like to think of these semi-regular chats we have where I just complain to you about things like my cell phone bill or today. Things that annoy Jamie. Flying. A regular segment on Front Person. And you really elevate the conversation into corporate monopolies or I don't know where we're going to land today. I'm excited. So I have a lot of things to complain about when it comes to flying.

Do you like to fly? I love to fly. And I love to fly even more now that I have kids. Because when I get to go on a flight for work, I just, I'm like, I don't have to parent. Oh, like without your kids. Somebody else's kid is screaming and I'm just, I'll put on my headphones. I was going to say flying with your kids seems counterintuitive. It's the worst. But flying without kids, once you have kids, is like this, I don't know if I'm going

to read a book or I'm going to watch a movie or I'll take a nap or I'll do all three. It's like a break for you. It's such a wonderful break. Let's start here. How reliable do you think

Canadian airlines are compared to other airlines around the world? Reliable. I mean, listen, the vast majority of flights land on time. The vast majority of us

get up in the morning, we get onto a plane, we arrive at our destination, and yeah, somebody kicked you in the back through your, the seat was a little whatever. But in terms of the service, most of it goes okay. It's when things go badly

that we all have this, like, visceral response. I was on my way to Vietnam last year, and our plane hit a pole randomly on the runway. It shouldn't have done that. And it was like the six hours of chaos where we were fed these tired cheese sandwiches. And I was so angry.

I have not been that angry in a very long time. Right. And part of what makes that infuriating, I think, is two things. One, you're sitting back in 17C trying to figure out why aren't we moving? No control. No control. No control. Okay, we had a poll.

What does one do about it? You have no way of knowing that. You also have very little way of knowing what rights you may have in those instances. And the one thing critics, many critics disagree with me on this. And the one thing critics, many critics disagree with me on this, I think the one thing that's important in the rules that have come out now is that there is a more clear understanding of what those rules are. Speaking today on air passenger protection will be the Honourable Mark Garneau, Minister of Transport. I want to thank the thousands of Canadians who have taken part in the consultations. We needed to make sure we got it right and we finally finished today and we think we have it right.

So let's go through these rules. Okay, so there's two phases to them. One set of these rules kick in on July 15th. The next set will kick in on December 15th. And they lay out the basic rules around tarmac delays, denied boarding, lost luggage, whatever it may be. The big one that people are going to care about is what happens if you get delayed, caused by an involuntary denied boarding. So if you get bumped for less than six hours, you get a minimum of $900. If you're delayed between six and nine hours, you get a minimum of $1,800. If it's more than nine hours delay, you get a minimum of $2,400. If you're lost, they lose your luggage, you're looking at

$2,100 for each lost bag. There's a new rule. And again, these are the July 15th rules. There's a new rule that kicks in that says after three hours on the tarmac, you're required to turn the plane around and get back to the gate. There's an exception in there that if they think they can fly within 45 minutes of that three hours expiring, they can stay out there. But it's one of those sort of perennial frustrations that people just sit out there waiting and waiting and waiting. Oh man, I have been there.

You have. We've all been there. During tarmac delays, the standards of treatment include regular status updates, access to the washrooms, quantities of food and drink, and proper ventilation or cooling or heating. Then on December 15th, a new set of compensations on delayed arrivals. And that compensation weirdly depends on the size of the airline. If your arrival is delayed between three and six hours, for large airlines, you're going to get 400 bucks.

For small airlines, you get 125. Again, six to nine hours, it goes up to 700700 for the large airlines, $250 for the small. More than nine hours, it's $1,000 for the large airlines and $500 for the small. There's some new rules around children. I've got young kids, so I've been through this, that if there's movement, reseed everybody. The new rules say that children under the age of five have to be seeded with their parents. How is that not a rule before? Well, I've been on planes where it's happened and you've got kids in tears and parents in tears.

A couple of different things happening in a couple of different stages. So any flight disruption, you hit a pole on the tarmac, your flight gets canceled, you're denied boarding, whatever that is, so long as these are, and this is a quote here, things that are, quote, within an airline's control, you'll get some compensation. There are, of course, exceptions to that. Within an airline's control, but required for safety reasons, the airline gets a free pass. Anything outside the airline's control, like, for example, security threat or weather or a natural disaster or political instability in some areas, you're not covered. And we clearly define the situations that are within the airline's control and those that are not within their control. And if there's any contestation, then the Canadian Transportation Agency will rule on whether or not it was within their control or not. I think a lot of people will jump at this.

I guess the question is, how do you define what's in an airline's control? This is the tricky part to this. These are the weeds through which I think you and I are going to try to sift through. Let's go through. And I should say, Peter's got a whole bunch of notes in front of him right now that look like they have come from a serial killer, I have to say. My writing isn't that bad. There's like all these sticky notes everywhere.

There's sticky notes, and then there's sticky notes on top of sticky notes, and there's like stuff circled. There's a guy named Gabor Lucas who runs this amazing organization at Halifax that really does just exclusively focus on what does this mean for me and you as airline passengers? He's not an airline industry guy. He's not looking at the global picture and what might this mean for airlines. What does this mean for me and you when we get on the plane? And his response to this has been visceral. This is bad news.

And his response to this has been visceral. This is bad news. The government is clawing back on the rights of passengers under the disguise of an air passenger bill. It's a slap on the face of Canadians. He is as upset about these rules as you were when your plane hit that post on your way to Vietnam. He says this reduces protections. He says the language in this, specifically to your question about how do you figure out who gets what, he says this is a goldmine for airline lawyers, that these rulings look very good on paper, but they give in all of this new stuff that allows the airlines even more leeway than they had before. And his point is, before all of this, there were all of these rules in place. They just weren't enforced.

There are no fines. Airlines have never been fined for breaking the rights of passengers. That's part and parcel of the problem, the lack of enforcement. Right. I want to get to this idea that this reduces protection because I did not even know that there were protections that I had in the first place. So let's talk about that. So these are all the papers that I brought in that I have highlighted and circled and scribbled on. So these are all the papers that I brought in that I have highlighted and circled and scribbled on.

What you're looking at here is the Air Canada, and each of the different airlines had one of these. And the list is called the Domestic Tariff General Rules Applicable to the Transportation of Passengers and Baggage. Okay, that is a mouthful. So it's headline-grabbing stuff. If you, like Gabor Lucas, or unfortunately like me, want to really dig into this and figure out what's what, you go to page 70-something. Okay. 72. And you find rule number 90.

And rule number 90 is the rule that governs previous to all of this, that governed one of the rules. If you get denied boarding, it lays out the amount of money that you would get if, in fact, your flight was delayed. That if it was between zero and two hours, you get 200 bucks. Did you know that?

I did not know that. If you delayed arrival at a pointed destination caused by an involuntary denied boarding. So if you get bumped, you get 200 bucks. If you get over two hours to six hours, you get 400 bucks. I thought all I got was a tea sandwich. Right. Legitimately. And most people didn't.

And unless you knew to dig through the Air Canada domestic tariff general rules applicable to transportation, passengers, and baggage, and go to Rule 90 on page 72. On page 72. And dig through all that, then how on earth would you know that these were within your rights? And so when we look at what is actually available to customers today, those reductions actually matter. The tarmac delays, right? One of the rules, one of these new rules that's been put in place is that after three hours of waiting on the tarmac because of some delay, the airline is now required to return back to the gate. Right? Like, we can't just leave you guys sitting out there.

Well, the old rules were that it was 90 minutes. Wow. The regulations announced, defined this denied boarding so incredibly narrowly that, this is Gabor Lucas' main line, is that it deprives passengers from being entitled to compensation in many, if not most, cases. The proposed regulations relieve airlines from compensating passengers if a flight is delayed

or cancelled due to the airline's own maintenance problems. If the aircraft breaks down, the airline can claim it was a safety issue and just not pay compensation. It results in an unenforceable, unverifiable scheme. They've added in a section that says, let me just find it here because it's important to get the language around these things right, that if it's something within an airline's control, they got to pay you. But if it's not in their control, but required for safety reasons, well, that's a new category. And when you combine that with anything that is outside of the airline's control, so any political instability, any weather, security threats, any natural disasters that might delay a

flight or cancel a flight, when you add in something that's, quote, within an airline's control but required for safety reasons, well, how do you know, Jamie Poisson, when you're sitting on the tarmac after hitting a pole on the tarmac, that this is required for safety reasons. Because you don't really know. Well, I don't have access to the information. So every time an airline has to have a delay for whatever reason, it has to file the reason why. And Transport Canada sees that information.

So we know why there will be a delay in every case. So there's no way that the airlines are going to be able to hide the reason why there is a delay. Yeah, and I mean, there was a case just last week where a WestJet flight was actually given formal warning for lying about the reason that they cancelled the flight. They said that the airport on the other end was closed, and it wasn't closed. It was open. Lawson booked a December flight from Toronto to Santa Clara, Cuba. WestJet cancelled it.

The reason? The Santa Clara airport was closed until January because of Hurricane Irma. Turns out, that wasn't true. I looked at the airport and I saw all the flights were actually operating out of the airport. So the idea here is that what these advocates are saying is that these new rules, which are being touted as this new era for passengers, this idea that we're finally going to be treated properly by airlines, we had better rules before that nobody knew about and they weren't enforced. Exactly. So if there was nobody enforcing these old rules, is there anything different with the new regime? Is there anybody who's going to be enforcing these new rules? and say, let's hope that the organization that is responsible for adjudicating these, the Canadian Transportation Agency, of which there are, I think, some legitimate complaints

that it is too cozy with the airline industry. Let's hope that they avail themselves of that and say, no, we are not too cozy with the airline industry. And Mr. Scott Skreiner, chair and CEO of the Canadian Transportation Agency. This balanced package establishes clear, consistent, transparent, and fair rules for air travel. And that's in everyone's interest. It's in the interests of air passengers, and it's in the interests of airlines.

The former vice chair of the organization was the CEO of the Canadian Business Aviation Association, the CEO of Air Transport Association of Canada. These are not consumer advocates. What are the airlines saying? Well, the airlines are saying that they are going to abide by this, that they are going to follow it. As I say, it's coming in two stages. There's a July 15th round and there's a December 15th round.

I will be interested to see if there are any changes between now and December 15th. The airlines are unhappy with this. And it's often a good sign of a compromise that the critics are upset with this. The airlines are upset with this. Airlines are warning that this summer is too soon to implement those changes. They say that rushing into the new regulations could drive up prices for customers. But I think when you go through it, the airlines have found a way to, yes, the potential compensation they'd have to pay to consumers and to passengers is higher, but the instances in which they'd have to pay it has been severely limited. Okay, got it, got it.

So if I can just kind of try and sum up this conversation that we've been having, we've got these new rules, which dictate how much money I could be paid for delays or being bumped. And they're not as comprehensive. A lot of people are saying as these old rules, which I did not even know existed until our conversation today, particularly because of this clause in the new rules that say, look, like the airlines can decide what's in their control around safety. And that's like a very difficult thing to define. And also we've got this agency that is supposed to be adjudicating complaints and it's really unclear how much teeth they have. They have the teeth. The question is, do they have the gumption or the desire to bite? I think even the harshest

critics would say the Canadian Transportation Agency hasn't shown that it's willing to bite as much as they would like, but that there is potentially at least an opportunity for that agency to prove its naysayers wrong and take this on and become an organization that understands the plight of the consumer as well as it understands the plight of the airline industry. We've, as you can imagine, mobilized significant resources internally to getting these regulations written. As we complete the work on these regulations, we're going to be redirecting our efforts, we're going to be redirecting some of those internal resources to compliance monitoring and enforcement. So is that what makes things better here,

a more stringent transportation agency? Is that where we're landing? Listen, I think that's a huge part of it. But remember when I was in here last time, or maybe the time before that, we were talking about cell phone bills? I was complaining about my cell phone bill. And who did I say you needed to complain to?

To my MP. To your MP, right? Whether it's your cell phone bill or your frustration over delays, don't be afraid to write to the person you hired from your community to go to Ottawa to represent you. Their job, their stated job is to hold the government to account. Whether they're in government or they're in opposition, that's their job.

And they're there for you. And this is the stuff of government. And this is the stuff you want your local MP to say, well, hold on a second. Does this best represent my constituents? And so on the one hand, yes, I think the Canadian Transportation Agency has a chance to prove its naysayers wrong. On the other hand, I think consumers have a chance to really look at this. And because it is at least somewhat more clear, avail themselves of the opportunity to understand the rules, to go back and look, understand, like follow Gabor Lucas on Twitter.

Go to his website and look at the news release he put out comparing this new set of rules to the old set of rules and Canada to Europe and to understand those. And then engage in that broader political conversation with your MP, with your neighbors, with your flight mates as you're flying places and make sure people better understand the rules that are in play, the ones that are changing, how they look compared to the old ones, and what you'd actually like to see going forward.

I hope the next person that has to wait four hours for a cheese sandwich is sitting beside someone like you. Or listens to this podcast. Peter, thank you so much. You bet. You know who doesn't have to deal with being bumped from flights or having his luggage lost? U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, who landed in Ottawa Thursday to meet with Justin Trudeau about the new NAFTA deal or USMCA. Both Trudeau and Pence are trying to make this deal official, but there's a bunch of political opposition among U.S. Democrats right now.

But I want to highlight Pence's response to a different issue, the detention of two Canadians in China that many believe is retaliation for the arrest of Huawei's Meng Wanzhou. President Trump will be traveling along with the prime minister to the G20 in the weeks ahead. We anticipate he will be meeting along with the Prime Minister to the G20 in the weeks ahead. We anticipate he will be meeting with President Xi there, even while we deal with the larger economic and structural issues between the United States and China. We are standing with Canada in this effort. We respect and are grateful for the strong stand for the rule of law that Canada has

taken with regard to the Huawei executive and will continue to engage on the issue. So that's it for this week. Frontburner comes to you from CBC News and CBC Podcasts. Our show is produced by Matt Alma, Chris Berube, Imogen Burchard, Elaine Chao, Shannon Higgins and Katie Toth. Derek Vanderwyk does our sound design. Our music is by Joseph Chabison of Boombox Sound. Nick McCabe-Locos is our executive producer.

And I'm your host, Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening, and see you guys Monday. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe.

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