When an airline changes its story to deny a refund, you might file a complaint. Murray Fallis launched a three-year odyssey to find out what happens behind the scenes when you do.
In 2023, the lawyer filed an access-to-information request, asking Canada’s transportation watchdog for just three days’ worth of internal emails. What he got back from the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) was nearly three years of delays and a stack of heavily blacked-out documents.
But Fallis persisted, taking his fight directly to federal Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard. Finally, late last year the CTA revealed some of what it had been hiding.
The records, shared with the Toronto Star and made public here for the first time, provide a rare, behind-the-scenes look at one of Canada’s most complained-to institutions.
Fallis didn’t get the answers he was hoping for.
He did, however, uncover something else of public interest: proof of a federal institution misapplying national secrecy laws to hide both frivolous and highly damning information.
Internal emails show senior CTA leaders debating who will pick up a tab for holiday drinks, upvoting shawarma over sushi, and planning an office treasure hunt. The files even reveal an exhausted airline traveller from Moose Jaw, Sask., pleading with the minister of transport: “Is there like more than one person working on things?” after discovering 34,000 cases were ahead of theirs in the queue.
But hidden behind another set of blackout bars was a far more serious issue — an admission about the agency’s inability to fulfil its constitutional duties to Francophone Canadians.
“The CTA proactively made a decision to hide the fact that they can’t provide the same level of service to French-language Canadians — and the office of the Information Commissioner helped them,” Fallis said in a recent phone call. “That’s jarring. If that doesn’t raise red flags, I don’t know what would.”
What they were hiding was a stark internal email sent during a surge of passenger disputes in November, 2023, warning the agency was overwhelmed.
“At present, our francophone/bilingual capacity is limited,” a senior CTA manager confessed to leadership, adding that the volume of French cases carried a “significant workload for decision writing.” Exactly how the agency handled those files remains blacked out to this day.
“The CTA just violates the Access to Information Act,” he said. “And the Office of the Information Commissioner lets them do it, catches them … and shakes hands with them.”
Fallis is no stranger to freedom-of-information laws. He began filing them as an articling student to understand how government decisions get made. Now, as a lawyer for a public interest organization in Washington, D.C., he calls this his most outrageous experience with bureaucracy.
Fallis’s interest in air passenger rights stemmed from a personal headache with a major Canadian airline in December 2022.
The carrier delayed his flight for more than four hours, warning passengers in writing that it was due to “scheduled maintenance” — which legally triggers mandatory passenger compensation under Canada’s Air Passenger Protection Regulations (APPR). When Fallis went to collect, the airline changed its story, denying compensation due to “inclement weather.”
Wondering how many other Canadians were being shortchanged by airlines changing stories, Fallis flagged his concerns to the head of the CTA’s dispute resolution branch.
When they suggested he file a formal complaint, Fallis had a better idea.
Filing an individual complaint might take three years to be heard and wouldn’t address the bigger issue of systemic transparency. He wanted to know if his email had triggered any broader internal discussion about these types of compensation denials. He requested access to just three days of emails sent to, and from, the agency’s dispute resolutions director general in November 2023.
He thought the information request might yield valuable data.
“Then this thing got delayed and delayed and delayed, and it worked its way up to an access-to-information issue.”
His request triggered a flood of more than 220 pages of communications involving Michelle Greenshields, the director general of dispute resolutions. The CTA claimed the information had to be censored to protect government deliberations, and for nearly two years, the federal Information Commissioner failed to prompt their release.
“I just lost it,” Fallis tells me. “I emailed the person in charge of mediation within the information commissioner’s office, and I was like, ‘What are you guys doing? This is clearly not meeting the legal standard.”
Following his intervention, the CTA eventually issued a sixth supplementary release — effectively acknowledging six separate times that they had applied an incorrect legal standard to hide information from the public.
In November 2025, the CTA belatedly unredacted a batch of emails that revealed internal red flags over language rights. Senior management warned directors of an “unusually high proportion of French files” — 131 cases due over a two-week period — that posed a challenge.
“At present, our francophone/bilingual capacity is limited,” wrote David Svab, a dispute resolutions director. “This volume of French files will carry a significant workload for decision writing, and so we have been required to (REDACTED)”. The rest of that sentence, and the operational directives that followed it, remain to this day blacked out.
The revelation of the CTA’s bilingual deficits raises serious questions about its ongoing treatment of Francophone Canadians.
Canada’s highest court is unequivocal on this point.
“The Supreme Court has consistently held that administrative costs and inconveniences are no excuse for failing to meet the requirements of institutional bilingualism,” says François Larocque, a veteran language-rights litigator and law professor at the University of Ottawa.
Canada’s Official Languages Commissioner, Kelly Burke, told the Star the CTA’s internal files raise serious concerns that “require further examination.”
“The issue of bilingual capacity of federal tribunals is also complex and requires investigation” Burke added, since adjudicators are generally appointed by government.
The CTA told the Star it “has no specific constraints regarding its capacity to process French complaints.”
The CTA would not say what changes, if any, it has made to its bilingual capacity since 2023.
Instead, the agency provided data showing that the volume of French complaints is actually on the rise.
According to the CTA’s own figures, French-language disputes made up 11.5 per cent of all complaints in the 2024–25 fiscal year.
That number climbed to 13.6 per cent in 2025–26, and currently sits at 13.8 per cent for the 2026–27 fiscal year up to May 24, 2026.
Fallis hopes his fight for transparency will prompt advocacy groups to continue the battle, asking tough questions.
A biggy remains: If a federal agency relies on systemic secrecy to obscure its operational failures, how can the system ever fix itself?
