Kelly McParland: Two good ideas sneak past Ottawa's parliamentary guards
Bigwigs in Ottawa made two astonishing admissions last week. One, that Canada’s official prime ministerial residence is a disgrace and something has to be done about it. Two, that the country’s airline passenger rights rules were badly contrived, have proved utterly useless and need to be radically improved.
This is not small stuff. Politicians don’t like to admit mistakes. They particularly dislike confessions involving their own actions. Justin Trudeau was more than happy to denounce errors of any sort as long as they could be pinned on anyone but himself; when the blame pointed directly at his office, the best anyone could expect was a vague concession that “mistakes (possibly) were made.” By who was left unclear, as if someone had snuck into the PMO and perpetrated untold gaffes while everyone else was out for lunch.
So it’s positive news that Prime Minister Mark Carney is willing to say out loud that having a falling-down dump at 24 Sussex Dr. is an embarrassment, and for Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon to pronounce the passenger rights regime an unmitigated disaster.
Perhaps they’ll follow through on their declared plans to do better. Still, Canadians can’t help but wonder what shift in the slow march of the universe brought about this wondrous realization. The official residence has been in crappy shape for at least a handful of prime ministers, maybe more depending on the degree of crappiness in question. None of them had the nerve to do a thing about it, other than Trudeau refusing to step so much as a sock in the place.
The notion that air passengers enjoyed actual rights has proved similarly farcical, as MacKinnon candidly conceded in a statement that seemed weirdly eager to concede the flaws of a policy put in place by a government he’s served for a decade. “We hear repeatedly the regulations … are too complex,” he declared, citing “the frustration, the unfair rules, the exemptions, the lack of clarity, the confusion, the loopholes …”
And what, you were too busy enjoying winter in Ottawa to fix it?
It can take years to settle a complaint before the Canadian Transportation Agency, where tens of thousands of cases end up because the airlines are so skilled at ignoring, rejecting or delaying passenger gripes brought to them first. I happen to know this first-hand, as a complaint I lodged with the CTA just over a year ago is still marked “not started” on the CTA website. I have to admit the matter in question wasn’t a huge deal, and I’d probably have ignored it if the airline hadn’t been so rude, abrupt and crudely dismissive in responding to my original approach.
But that’s just the thing. Air Passenger Protection Regulations introduced by the Liberals in 2019 were hailed as a new dawn in ensuring “Canadians, tourists and businesses all benefit from a safe, efficient and more transparent air industry.” They proved so hopeless they were updated in 2023, with the need for improvement blamed on COVID and a later surge in travel that revealed “ambiguity” in the rules, “resulting in an excessive number of refusals to compensate by airlines, and many appeals to the CTA.”
The 2023 update was supposed to erase the flaws but proved just as big a bust.
“The system did not work as planned,” MacKinnon acknowledged. “We put in place a system that in hindsight was onerous, expensive, took too long” and let the airlines get away with murder. The new one, he promised, will have “fewer loopholes, fewer exemptions, is very clear for all involved, airlines and passengers alike.”
Again, it’s great to have elected representatives being honest about stuff. MacKinnon has been in Parliament since 2015 and in cabinet since 2021, including as chief whip, an important post that involves ensuring MPs vote like they’re told to. All that time Canadians have been complaining loud and long about the horrors of dealing with airlines they see as pampered, protected, haughty, unresponsive and several more adjectives I could add if you haven’t already got the point.
The airlines themselves seem aware of this, though they still enjoy testing the limits of what Canadians will endure. WestJet in January staged a rapid retreat when plans to tighten up already-constricted seating suggested anyone beyond Munchkin stature might as well fly in the overhead bin for all the room they could expect. Air Canada recently announced it would try outsourcing complaints — the CTA has a backlog of almost 100,000 — to a third-party arbitrator, perhaps hoping to avoid the boom before Ottawa can lower it.
The aim, the airline said , was to “explore a solution that … has yielded good results elsewhere, and that we think can yield some good results in Canada.”
It’s precisely the fact that other countries have far better systems, and have had for some time, that makes Canada’s excruciating sluggishness so maddening. Sounding as if it was an attribute that Ottawa had finally awoken to the glaringly obvious, MacKinnon said the planned new regime “is based on a proven model in other countries in the world, like many in Europe. Carriers must pay compensation within 30 days, and no delays, no excuses.”
Like, um, yeah. Has this information been blocked from transmission within the borders of the city of Ottawa until now? Have Russian cybercreeps been feeding misinformation to Liberal members since, oh let’s say 2015 or so, claiming passengers couldn’t think of anything finer than the abuse that masquerades as Canadian air travel?
In any case, it’s nice that someone eventually slipped the news to MacKinnon. Ditto the shocker that 24 Sussex is in bad shape. It’s like someone snuck some Red Bull into the Parliamentary water fountain and suddenly good ideas have wings.
It may be too much to expect lightning action on both fronts, but the solutions are there to be had: photocopy the European rules, use the government’s shiny new majority to cement them in place, then phone up the ex-prime ministerial tag team of Jean Chrétien and Stephen Harper and ask if their offer to raise the cash needed for a 24 Sussex rebuild — the one ludicrously rejected by Carney’s most recent predecessor — is still on the table. Canada has lots of architects, and the land is already paid for, right?
Two problems solved, just like that. Governing doesn’t always have to be complicated. Here’s a chance for Carney’s people to prove they can do things fast, if they really put their minds to it.
National Post