Air passenger advocates have taken their ticket refund battle to the House of Commons.
A Quebec MP on Friday introduced a private member’s bill that would amend the Canada Transportation Act to spell out that airlines that cancel a service must refund the passenger, even if the cancellation was for reasons outside a carrier's control, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s a declaratory bill,” said Halifax's Gabor Lukacs, founder and president of the group Air Passenger Rights, which worked with Bloc Quebecois MP Xavier Barsalou-Duval and the Quebec consumer rights group Option Consommateurs to draft the legislation.
“It just declares that to avoid any ambiguity, Parliament confirms that this is the law and this is the way it’s always been. ... It creates a kind of clarity that despite whatever the government says, despite whatever the airlines say, the law has and always been that you have to provide a refund, whether the airlines like it or not, whether the government likes it or not.”
For the most part, Canadian airlines have refused to provide refunds for flights that have been cancelled because of the pandemic.
As of June 30, Air Canada alone held over $2.4 billion in advance ticket sales, Lukacs said.
The amounts held by other Canadian airlines, such as WestJet, aren't known because, unlike Air Canada, they don’t have to publicly disclose their financial situation.
Five Canadian airlines - Air Canada, Air Transat, Sunwing, Swoop, and WestJet - could face class-action lawsuits if they are certified.
The only refunds given by Canadian airlines have been for flights that originated in the European Union, Switzerland and Ireland.
That’s because “the EU has a real air passenger protection regime, not the kind of smoke and mirrors that the (Canadian) government put in place, which is the source of the problem,” Lukacs said in an interview Sunday.
He said the Liberal government’s changes to air passenger protection regulations enacted last year are silent on refunds related to events “outside the carriers’ control.”
In a submission to the Canadian Transportation Agency when the changes were still in the works, Air Passengers Rights singled out that omission, Lukacs said.
“We predicted that this would be an issue already back in February 2019. We submitted a 52-page report on what is wrong with what the government is putting forward, and the ambiguity in the language of the regulations was flagged by us back then.”
Transport Minister Marc Garneau has refused to force airlines to provide refunds as opposed to vouchers or credits for future flights. He told the House of Commons in June that airlines have been financially devastated by the pandemic and he’s trying to keep them from collapsing.
Lukacs noted Air Canada is in the process of buying Air Transat so “clearly they have lots of cash on hand.”
And he dismisses the argument airlines should be protected because they face unprecedented circumstances amid the pandemic.
“It is an unlawful argument,” Lukacs said. “If I rob a bank, and then the police show up, I tell them, ‘Well, these are exceptional circumstances, I needed the money to feed my family.’ Would anybody take me seriously? Are we going to accept as a society that those exceptional circumstances mean that we can actually take someone else’s private property?”
WestJet recently announced that it will begin to issue refunds for flights cancelled over the past eight months as of Nov. 2. In a release last week, the airline said it will take six to nine months to process all the refunds.
Lukacs said it should only take weeks to process the refunds, not nine months, which makes him question whether the airline really intends to follow through with it.
As for the proposed amendments in Bill C-249, he said he’s optimistic the legislation will get the support of the opposition parties and even government MPs.
“The bill articulates common sense, decency and fairness,” he said. “I hope in the way we drafted the bill, (it) will appeal for different reasons to all political stripes.”
