Internal government documents obtained by Go Public suggest Transport Canada officials and successive transport ministers worked to delay — and potentially undermine — an effort to force airlines to help pay for Canada’s air passenger complaints system.
The records show Transport Canada — under two different transport ministers — repeatedly intervened in the work of the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA), which is supposed to operate independently and was directed by Parliament in 2023 to introduce a cost-recovery fee on airlines.
More than two and a half years later, the fee still does not exist.
Taxpayers continue to cover roughly $30 million a year to process air passenger complaints and the backlog of people seeking compensation continues to grow — already topping more than 88,000.
Passengers who are denied compensation after such things as flight delays, denied boarding or lost luggage can file complaints with the CTA. But because the complaints system has been overwhelmed, as a temporary measure to recover part of the cost, Parliament ordered the agency to charge airlines a fee for cases involving passengers with eligible claims.
To understand why the fee has not been implemented, Go Public filed an Access to Information request with the CTA, covering the period from Aug. 1, 2024 to May 20, 2025.
More than 2,000 pages of heavily repetitious records include correspondence between the CTA and multiple transport ministers, internal discussions about how to respond to government concerns about the proposed fee, and submissions from a public consultation process.
