Close to four years after they filed a complaint with the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA), Andrew and Anna Dyczkowski finally got a resolution — in their favour.
In November 2023, a CTA officer determined their 24-hour flight delay from Vancouver to Costa Rica in 2020 was Air Canada’s fault. The airline was ordered to compensate the couple $1,000 each, as per federal regulations.
“We were kind of happy that the system works,” said Andrew Dyczkowski who lives with his wife, Anna, just outside Kelowna, B.C.
But instead of getting cash, the couple was served with court documents in January. Turns out, Air Canada is taking them to Federal Court in an attempt to overturn the decision of the CTA officer. The agency is not named in the case.
Feeling stuck, the couple, who work in the construction industry, got a lawyer.
“We’re kind of numb,” said Dyczkowski, who believes the legal dispute should be between Air Canada and the CTA — not passengers.
“Leave us little folks alone. Like, we really don’t want to be in this business of courts, or hundreds of pages of legal documents,” he said. “Something is really wrong in the system.”
The CTA, Canada’s transport regulator, is tasked with settling disputes between airlines and customers. Both parties have always had the right to legally challenge CTA decisions but it rarely happens.
Tens of thousands of air passenger complaints have poured into the CTA over the past couple of years.
During that period, airlines appealed just six agency decisions involving compensation, according to the CTA.
However, new federal government measures broaden the type of CTA decisions that can be contested in court. Some legal experts suspect airlines will take advantage and drag more unsuspecting passengers into legal disputes.
“It’s really unfortunate; there’s going to be a lot more of these [cases], I think,” said John Lawford, a lawyer and executive director of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre.
Airlines are going “to try to further gum up the process and make the complaints process look bad, even worse than it already does.”
New measures explained
Opening the door to more legal disputes wasn’t the intent of the new measures, adopted in late September 2023. They were designed to speed up the backlogged complaints process by allowing the CTA to hire complaints resolution officers who can issue decisions on behalf of the agency.
But a byproduct of the change is that airlines can no longer challenge the decisions in the Federal Court of Appeal. Instead, carriers now must request a judicial review in Federal Court, which has a lower bar for the kinds of cases that can be…
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