Air Canada customers looking to lodge a complaint with the regulator over their experience during the flight attendants’ strike should prepare for a wait.
The Canadian Transportation Agency says its backlog of air travel complaints stood at about 85,000 as of Aug. 14, two days before the strike started.
The backlog has been growing since the federal government passed rules that came into force in 2019 that set compensation amounts for flight delays, cancellations and the like.
The CTA says it put in a new system in 2023 to ramp up its capacity to deal with complaints, but the number of gripes being submitted has also swelled.
The agency received more than 42,000 complaints a year in the past three years, up from around 12,000 in the fiscal 2021-22 year.
It says that in the 2024-25 fiscal year, it closed more than 33,600 complaints, a sharp increase from previous years, but not enough to reduce the growing backlog.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 25, 2025.
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