Canadian Transportation Agency Still Backlogged For Over Two Years With 70,000+ Pending Complaints

The Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) is still a hot mess, with current email updates revealing that the paper tiger government agency is still experiencing a two-year backlog with tens of thousands of complaints from air passengers.

This comes a few years after thousands of consumers filed numerous complaints about refund issues with Canadian airlines during the COVID-19 pandemic as carriers refused to give customers their money back.

Passengers who filed their complaints in early 2023 still haven’t had their cases processed, and according to current status updates, they shouldn’t expect a resolution anytime soon.

As the CBC reported in 2024, the situation in Canada is especially serious. Even last year, the regulator already had a two-year backlog with 71,000 consumer complaints, and the files kept flooding in.

… “We’re still maturing the process. We’re still improving its efficiency, but as we’ve said we’re already seeing improvements in productivity,” said Tom Oommen, the agency’s director general of analysis and outreach.

Backlog of complaints hits 71,000

But despite the new process, the backlog now stands at a new high of more than 71,000 unaddressed complaints. …

I have—on numerous occasions—been very critical of the CTA in the past, and for good reasons. Based on personal experience, the agency doesn’t have sufficient manpower allocated to the department handling passenger complaints.

The biggest issue, however, is systemic, and that is that the regulator is way too close to the actual industry they are supposed to keep in check. This isn’t just the CTA itself; the problem comes from the top down, as can be seen by various government statements over the years, like from the Transport Minister himself.

I just received an email concerning another complaint file I had submitted for a friend’s FLAIR flight from Vancouver to Ottawa in February 2023 (filed in March):

It’s absolutely ridiculous that in two years the national regulator has not managed to take a look at a passenger complaint.

How many employees are working on these files, like ten?

I’m not surprised about the backlog at all. The CTA’s process is too complicated, and the outcome is never or at least rarely in the interest of the consumer, as the agency is positively biased towards the industry it’s mandated to regulate.

Generally speaking, consumers seeking to resolve a matter with an airline in Canada should go to court instead of calling upon the CTA to resolve the matter.

I previously wrote about a new system that the CTA implemented in coordination with Air Canada, offering complainants a settlement rather than keeping it in the stack for the agency to resolve:

Air Canada Has Started Offering Cash Payments & Vouchers To Settle CTA Complaints

This worked relatively well for me, and I used it twice so far. FLAIR doesn’t appear to participate in this program, though; let’s see how this 7-hour delay will eventually be regulated.

Conclusion

Canada is not alone in having such big problems surrounding its transportation regulators, as pretty much every country has a similar agency (like the U.S. Department of Transportation) that works more efficiently and in the interest of the complainant.

In comparison, my experience with DOT complaints has been generally positive. They are usually processed quickly and forwarded directly to the airline. Maybe it helps that the DOT process works differently than in Canada because the DOT doesn’t do mediation and has no enforcement power to resolve individual cases.

The email they just sent me for a March 2023 case is slowly approaching the two-year mark, and there is no resolution in sight. It is a clown show and has been this way for more than a decade.

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