‘Low-hanging fruit’: Air passenger advocate says airline fines too small to deter them from rule breaking

A number of major Canadian airlines have been handed thousands of dollars worth of fines by the federal government after they were found to have committed hundreds of violations over the summer and during the holiday season.

But one passengers’ rights advocate says the fines will do little to deter the airlines from breaking the rules in the future.

“We are talking about very small amounts in the airline industry – small change. Their revenues are measured in hundreds of millions of dollars if not billions of dollars,” said Gabor Lukacs, president and founder of Air Passenger Rights.

Sunwing, the airline at the centre of the air travel chaos this past holiday season, was hit with the largest fine, totalling $126,000 for 36 violations related to a failure to provide reasons for flight delays and failure to update passengers on their flight status.

The airline cancelled and delayed dozens of flight in December due to a large winter storm that swept across the country, however many passengers say the travel interruptions continued well after the storm had passed.

WestJet, set to purchase Sunwing in a recently-finalized merger, was fined last month for 122 violations “of not providing the prescribed compensation requested by a passenger or an explanation as to why compensation is not payable, within 30 days after the day on which it received the request.”

The fine totals $112,800 for violations that took place between July 4, 2022 and Jan. 7, 2023.

The Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) is responsible for enforcing the rules set out in the federal air passenger rights protection regulations (APPR), and for handing out fines. But Lukacs says there’s a lack of transparency when it comes to how the agency determines the amount to fine each airline per violation.

“The figures that are worth paying attention to [are] the number of violations and the amount of fines. If you divide out the fines with the number of violations, we see very, very low amounts of per-violation fines,” Lukacs says.

“The law permits the government to fine airlines up to $25,000 per violation, but we are typically seeing a few hundred dollars of fines per violation and that is troubling.”

Lukacs says most of the fines also don’t address the most egregious violation that airlines commit: a failure to properly compensate passengers whose flights have been cancelled or delayed.

“The real issues are happening with airlines not paying compensation to passengers and most of these fines have been issued for simply not communicating; not telling passengers that flights were being delayed or cancelled, not telling passengers the reason for the flight delay or cancellation, or the reason for refusing to pay them compensation, or just not responding to passengers’ claims for compensation within 30 days,” he said.

“These are important rules, but they are not the real issues that people are facing, who for example are not being rebooked, not being payed compensation, and for those, precious little has been done.”

Ian Jack, VP of public affairs with the Canadian Automobile Association (CAA), agrees that the fines handed down to Canadian airlines are low, but says the CTA will continue working to hold airlines accountable for the holiday travel mess.

“The regulator has a huge backlog of complaints and bangs away at them slowly. These are just the first cases to make it through the system and get posted,” Jack said in a statement to CP24.

“We criticize the government for making the rules so complicated, and the regulator for taking so long to render decisions. The government has said it will be introducing improvements to the rules later this spring – we’ll see if they actually improve timeliness.”

Federal Transport Minister Omar Alghabra announced yesterday that the Liberals will provide close to $76-million over three years to the CTA to help them deal with a “record number” of recent air traveller complaints.

“Since 2019, our government has always provided more resources to the CTA to help implement the Passenger Bill of Rights, but it's clear that even more resources are now needed to clear the backlog,” Alghabra said while speaking to reporters. “So today, I'm announcing that we are providing close to $76-million more over three years to the agency to reduce the backlog of complaints and make sure travelers get the money they're entitled to.”

More than $10 million in federal funding was given to the CTA last summer to help the agency deal with the same issue, when it had a backlog of over 18,000 complaints.

Since then, the backlog has only grown, now sitting at over 40,000, according to Alghabra.