The Supreme Court of Canada is set to rule Friday morning on a case that could see Canada’s airline passenger protection regulations struck down.
The court will issue its ruling on an appeal brought by 16 international airlines including Air Canada and Porter, which say the Canadian Transportation Agency overstepped its authority in creating the regulations that compensate passengers for delays and cancellations.
The airlines — and the International Air Transport Association — argue that the Air Passenger Protection Regulations should be struck down, because Canada has already signed the Montreal Convention, an international air passenger protection treaty.
If the APPR is struck down in its entirety, the result would be chaos for a complaints resolution system already mired in a giant backlog of cases, said John Lawford, special counsel at the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, an Ottawa-based consumer advocacy organization that appeared before the court as an intervener.
“It would be Armageddon for passenger protections, because you’ve got 78,000 people who will now have nothing, who’ve been waiting 18 months for their claim,” said Lawford in an interview with the Star.
Even though the APPR is nowhere close to perfect, said Lawford, it’s still better than nothing.
“It was 20 years in the making to get any kind of air passenger protection regulations. To wipe that off the map would be pretty galling if it happens,” said Lawford.
Passenger advocate Gabor Lukacs, who has long criticized the existing APPR as inadequate, said it would still be bad for airline passengers if it were struck down, because it would mean the possibility of improving protections is even more remote.
“If I were the airlines, I’d be happy with the APPR as it is now,” said Lukacs, founder of Air Passenger Rights. “The airlines are trying to close the door on the possibility of European-style protections for airline passengers.”
While the court could decide to strike down the APPR for international flights but uphold it for domestic ones, if it strikes it down entirely, other federally regulated industry could soon come calling to court as well, warned PIAC’s Lawford.
“That’s my big worry. I think it would give ideas to the banking and telecom industries that they shouldn’t have to put up with an ombudsman if the airlines don’t,” said Lawford. “It could be a slow roll toward getting rid of this ombudsman model, which in telecom at least has been working, in terms of resolving high-volume, low-value complaints.”
