Duncan D. was the Chief Operating Officer for Air Canada up until 2013, the second senior-most executive for what was then the ninth largest airline in the world. He was then appointed by the Minister of Transport federally as the Airline Sector Lead for the Transportation Act Review, which looked at the entire Canadian transportation system.
00:05:06.180So help us understand, because to my point about the blame game, there's different elements at an airport.
00:05:11.400There is the government regulations, the things that the government is most directly responsible for.
00:05:16.900Then there are the private companies that are the airlines.
00:05:20.680And then there's these agencies, which I guess report to the government, but they still run their own domain.
00:05:25.460I mean, how does the who's in charge of what thing unfold here?
00:05:29.400So that is an excellent question, and it's actually a very, very complicated answer.
00:05:36.320And in many ways, we've made it even more complicated than it should be in Canada.
00:05:40.280In terms of the two elements that the federal government is responsible for that are causing a significant part of the delays that we've seen for the last three months.
00:05:54.420So the folks that screen travelers when they board, before they board the aircraft, when they get to the airport.
00:06:03.020And Canada Border Services, which is the agency that screens travelers when they return from an international destination.
00:06:10.500So if we focus just on those two elements of the process, because those are the two bottlenecks which started this entire thing in the first place,
00:06:20.840you've got a situation where the federal government, in the case of airport security, has created really a multi-headed beast in terms of accountability and who's really responsible.
00:06:33.380So in Canada, unlike in the U.S. and many other countries, we have the regulator, which is Transport Canada.
00:06:40.880They're the folks that write the rules.
00:06:44.460CATSA is the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority.
00:06:47.700These folks, their only mandate is to negotiate contracts with private security screeners.
00:06:55.500So wherever you go in the country, a different company is responsible, a different private company is responsible for managing the individuals that perform the physical screening of travelers when they get to security.
00:07:11.880And so CATSA, the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, negotiates agreements with a variety of these private companies.
00:07:23.600And then these private companies, in turn, negotiate agreements with the various unions that govern the working relationship between the actual screeners and the private company.
00:07:35.340So in Canada, we've created a system which has multiple heads and because of that, you end up in a situation where no one is really accountable.
00:07:46.340So a traveler facing a three-hour line at Pearson one morning, who do they complain to?
00:07:52.380Well, the first line of defense is the private security contractor responsible for the screeners.
00:08:01.460You go to them and why are we in a three-hour line?
00:08:05.480They say, well, we've been given the resources that we have and obviously there's not enough screeners here.
00:08:15.460And so you write a letter to CATSA because nobody knows where they are.
00:08:21.020And CATSA then says, well, we negotiated these contracts based on the appropriation we received from Parliament based on the standards that were established by Transport Canada.
00:08:32.480And so they say, go to those groups for your complaint.
00:08:37.320And so you write a letter to Transport and Transport Canada says, well, the regulations we have in place to govern the standards of the security system at the airports has been established because we want to keep everyone safe.
00:09:36.340Now, Transport Canada recently sent out a press release trying to explain away the problem as, and I'll quote,
00:09:42.660In Canada, June 2022, air departure traffic was 58 times higher than it was in spring 2020.
00:09:49.980In comparison, global travel volumes are up more than eight times since the low point during the pandemic.
00:09:55.080And airports across the world are feeling the impact from too many flights, didn't know there could be too many flights, to not enough staff.
00:10:01.660There is no single reason for these delays.
00:10:04.220So, that's, you know, kind of their answer.
00:10:06.880Oh, there's a lot of stuff going on and no one's really to blame.
00:10:09.440What do you make of that as the sort of driving rationale?
00:10:12.380Is that basically an accurate explanation that things have just yo-yoed up and down and, well, they can't really deal with it?
00:10:18.780I think really it's a bizarre explanation.
00:10:20.900How many businesses on the planet, let alone Canada, compare their current activity to the depths of the pandemic?
00:10:29.540If you take a look at what's happening in air travel in Canada, let's just use the Minister of Transport's, Federal Minister of Transport's own words.
00:10:37.920The Federal Minister of Transport said back in May that he had 90% of his pre-pandemic staffing at CAATSA.
00:10:48.260So, the screeners, he had 90% of his pre-pandemic staffing.
00:10:52.580He also said in that same interview that he had less than 70% of the pre-pandemic passenger traffic.
00:11:00.780So, passenger traffic is indeed higher than it was during the depths of the pandemic.
00:11:19.020So, to try to compare what's happening now to what happened during the depths of the pandemic is really curious.
00:11:26.500And then his own comments where he said that he had 90% of his pre-pandemic staffing.
00:11:32.980So, what he's effectively said is he has more staff now processing fewer travelers than he did before the pandemic, which would be the normal comparison.
00:11:44.600And even then, he now says, in fact, that he needs more staff.
00:11:50.220So, the question the minister needs to answer is why did CAATSA become so inefficient over the course of the last two years, where in the past they were never a great agency, but at least we didn't see the delays we are seeing now.
00:12:05.620But the situation is such that he's got more staff processing fewer travelers and the delays are, as you said in your introduction, record-breaking, not in North America, but are on the planet.
00:12:19.580So, Duncan, when we think about really long lines, we think of, I don't know, our experiences at the grocery store where it's like they don't have enough tills open and you're getting frustrated and people are starting to make some comments.
00:12:30.300And then eventually the manager notices and then you hear in the PA, can Bob and Shirley please go to the counter?
00:12:35.860And then they open two more registers and then, oh, things start flowing again.
00:12:39.240And, you know, I understand how problems arise in these scenarios.
00:12:42.200What I think a lot of people are having difficulty understanding is how is this airport situation persisting for so long and for weeks?
00:12:49.500Like, surely there are quite a few people who are paid big money to solve these problems.
00:12:56.260Well, not only are a lot of people paid big money to solve this problem, but Canadian travelers pay the highest air security surcharges on the planet on their ticket.
00:13:06.440So, Canadians have the privilege of paying the highest security charges for what, for the last couple of weeks, has been the world's worst on-time performance for air travel.
00:13:21.060The situation at a grocery store, like you described, is a perfect analogy.
00:13:26.740Because at a grocery store, if you have huge lines, you're able to redeploy staff and get those lines moving much more quickly.
00:13:34.880If you don't have enough staff, you try to hire new workers to come and help you out.
00:13:41.520So, the federal government has talked about adding first 650 new screeners, and then it ballooned to 850, and then now 1,000, after they said they didn't have a staffing problem.
00:13:54.560So, they finally realized it was a staffing problem after several weeks of denial.
00:13:59.120The problem, though, is that every worker at an airport needs to be screened before they're able to have a security badge to work at an airport.
00:14:09.540You see them whenever you go through an airport that every single person that is an employee has a badge around their necks, saying that they're entitled to be in the secure area.
00:14:17.940Well, the same people managing the security for travelers are the same people managing the security for airport employees and the screeners themselves.
00:14:31.120Well, it means that a security screener in the pre-pandemic days was waiting about a month to get their background checked so that they can be provided with this badge.
00:14:41.640Now, it takes them a month before they're even able to get an appointment with Transport Canada to complete the security checks, and several months after, before they get their badges.
00:14:54.180So, you've got a situation where the bottleneck is doubled.
00:14:59.460The same people responsible for bottleneck one, which is the screening of travelers, happens to be the same agency responsible for the screening of the screeners themselves.
00:15:10.100And so, you have a situation where even if you wanted to deploy more staff today, and you were able to hire and train that staff over the next couple of weeks, there is still a third layer before the staff can actually be deployed.
00:15:27.460And unfortunately, the people responsible for getting those staff in place in the third layer are responsible for the delays we're already seeing, and they're not moving quickly enough to get those barriers removed.
00:15:40.560Wow. I mean, to what degree? Well, you used the phrase early on, predictable.
00:15:44.420I mean, we obviously shut down so much of travel, so we had to scale down massively, and there are all these ripple effects that happen.
00:15:51.720But I know the airlines were looking forward to scaling back up again.
00:15:55.640Why was it not anticipated, oh, hey, we're going to have to do all the logistics that are consistent with a scale-up?
00:16:00.740Well, that really is the reason for my personal frustration with what's been going on, because it puzzles me that the airlines filed their schedules last fall for this coming summer.
00:16:14.720They started selling seats for those flights earlier this year, if not the end of last year.
00:16:21.640They communicated with the airports, the agencies, the government as to what they were anticipating for the coming summer peak.
00:16:30.740In fact, internal documents that were reported in the media in Ottawa indicated that the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, in their planning documents, showed that they anticipated a three- to four-fold increase in the number of travellers, 2022 versus 2021.
00:16:51.900So they knew there was a huge pent-up demand for travel, a potential increase of between three and four times in comparison to 2021 and 2022.
00:17:04.940And for some reason, they decided to do nothing.
00:17:07.540But the final warning came in early April of this year, when alarm bells were being rung.
00:17:14.980I was one of the very early alarm bell ringers, but other industry groups also joined the chorus.
00:17:29.240And the Minister of Transport's very first response, and I believe listeners will remember this, was to blame out-of-practice travellers for the lines they were seeing at the airport.
00:17:40.080You don't know how to take off your shoes anymore.
00:17:42.780Right. And, you know, the thing, Anthony, that I think has happened is not that we have out-of-practice travellers.
00:17:49.160We have out-of-practice screeners, and we have out-of-practice government bureaucrats.
00:17:54.080They seem to have completely forgotten how to get things done.
00:17:59.360And if people have any doubts as to whether or not that's only happening with the airports in this country, they just have to look at the passport office, where the lineups are equally bad.
00:18:09.320And they've been bad for much longer than they have been at the airports.
00:18:13.440The crisis at the passport offices started almost six months ago.
00:18:17.620The crisis at the airports started about three months ago.
00:18:20.920And yet, we have governments that's the only solutions they can come up with are solutions which are frankly creating other problems.
00:18:29.360What about this idea of pausing random testing?
00:18:34.640Okay, we're no longer going to randomly test vaccinated travellers.
00:18:38.820Just a bit of a timeout, and it's set to return, okay, well, middle of July.
00:18:42.380Man, are you going to have your problems fixed by middle of July?
00:18:46.980At the same time, a lot of voices in the airline industry saying,
00:18:49.780Can we just drop all of this stuff entirely right now?
00:18:53.080To what degree are these COVID rules the primary challenge here, secondary?
00:18:59.220Where do they fit in all of it in the bottleneck process?
00:19:02.300So earlier, we talked about two different bottlenecks.
00:19:05.220One is security, which has nothing to do with COVID checks, thank goodness.
00:19:10.280And we talked about international arriving travellers having to go through customs.
00:19:15.300And that is where the second bottleneck is taking place.
00:19:19.380And that second bottleneck is almost entirely related to the COVID pandemic checks that are still going on at the airports.
00:19:28.720The airport authorities have identified those processes as contributing to a quadrupling of the amount of time each and every traveller takes to be screened at customs compared to what they were being screened at before the pandemic.
00:19:46.540And so unless the government either makes the process simpler or they add a requisite number of resources, meaning staff, to process this system that they decided and designed would be used for international arriving travellers,
00:20:07.260then they're inherently accepting that there will, in fact, be tremendous cues.
00:20:11.840And so what you've got in the case of the pandemic inspections still going on at the airports is when you have a quadrupling in the amount of time for each and every traveller.
00:20:24.600So a person would normally be screened within 30 to 60 seconds pre-pandemic.
00:20:30.240That is now ballooned to upwards of four, sometimes even five minutes.
00:20:35.060When you end up with that situation, unless you make up for that inefficiency by adding a similar number of staff, in which case you'd be talking about quadrupling the number of agents that you have to do this,
00:20:47.240then you're basically, it becomes a pure mathematical equation.
00:20:50.760You end up with huge lines, huge delays, and in the case of Pearson and Montreal, their buildings were never designed for that type of a delay.
00:21:02.340And so the only answer they've got to do things like meet national fire code restrictions is to keep aircraft off the buildings at the airport.
00:21:15.140So aircraft are being told to stay on the tarmac in what is used during the wintertime as a de-ice pad,
00:21:23.480and they sometimes stay there for upwards of three to four hours after they've landed before the travellers are allowed to get off the plane at the airport where they join a two- or three-hour line.
00:21:33.700People sitting in an airplane for three hours just because they don't want to violate the fire code by having too many people in a hallway.
00:21:39.740Too many people in the hallway, too many people in the customs hall, and I think travellers probably don't look around very much when they get off the plane and into a customs hall,
00:21:51.760but we're talking about massive convention-like rooms.
00:21:55.000You know, these are not small, tiny little cubicles.
00:21:57.800We're talking about massive rooms that because of the delays, the quadrupling of the time it takes to inspect each and every traveller, is overcrowded.
00:22:06.680So could you imagine an overcrowded Toronto Convention Centre where they basically stop people from entering because things are proceeding so slowly inside?
00:22:17.820It's hard to imagine. It is really quite remarkable that we're seeing all of this.
00:22:22.480We'll be back with more Full Comment in just a moment.
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00:24:13.880In your estimation, do we need these COVID rules right now?
00:24:17.520A lot of people in the industry have said, let's pretty much just do away with all of them. Should we just do that?
00:24:21.880Well, look, I am not a medical doctor. I happen to be a dad of two medical doctors.
00:24:27.300But if I look at what's going on right now, there were four very well-renowned infectious disease physicians who came out about 10 days ago to say, let's just end these inspections.
00:24:44.040Because they really add nothing to our understanding of the pandemic in Canada.
00:24:49.920So whether or not I believe that they're useful, these infectious disease doctors have basically come out and said, no, they're no longer useful.
00:24:59.220And as a layperson, I have questioned the usefulness of an inspection for a two-dose vaccine where the second dose is almost or over a year old.
00:25:11.840So you have a situation where part of the delay is a customs officer in Canada being mandated by the government to verify the vaccination status of a traveler where the first dose is for sure a year old and the second dose is very likely at least 10 or 11 months old or even over a year old.
00:25:32.980And we all know about the diminishing effects and usefulness of vaccines after a certain period of time.
00:25:43.100And yet the government still wants to know whether somebody got their second dose sometime in May or June 2021.
00:25:50.280And so whether that's useful or not from a scientific perspective, I'll let the scientists opine on that.
00:25:57.180But it's certainly not useful in terms of travel restrictions when it's causing a fourfold increase in the amount of time to inspect each and every traveler.
00:26:07.100And listeners might not appreciate why it's taking that long.
00:26:10.440But when you ask a traveler to provide their vaccine certificate, Canada took several months to come up with its own plan for what a vaccine certificate should look like so that they would look the same in New Brunswick as they do in British Columbia and in Ontario.
00:26:28.080Well, the world has a cacophony of these certificates and multiple languages.
00:26:34.200They also use vaccines that are completely different than what we've got here.
00:26:39.000There are vaccines from China, vaccines manufactured in Cuba or in Russia.
00:26:44.340And so when an officer has to scrutinize a document that is not standardized in any way, shape or form with vaccines that are not well known in Canada, you can quite easily see why it's taking them four times longer for every traveler to be processed.
00:27:01.360Now, Duncan, I had to chuckle when the government made great fanfare saying we have a big announcement.
00:27:12.020Ten cabinet ministers are all going to come together.
00:27:14.520It made me think, well, how many liberal ministers does it take to change a light bulb kind of question here?
00:27:19.660I thought, wow, is this really the thing that's going to solve the problem?
00:27:23.060Bringing in people to have meetings and invariably write different briefing notes and a report and then have a meeting to discuss the report.
00:27:28.940I mean, what are the productive pathways forward here?
00:27:31.740I feel like committees really are a slowdown, not a speed up.
00:27:36.100Well, I think you've hit the nail on the head.
00:27:39.360Only Ottawa thinks yet another committee is the way to solve a problem.
00:27:44.580And to reinforce the point you've just made, one of the things that the committee has come up with as part of their mandate to shorten the lines at the passport office is to issue a request for proposals urgently
00:27:57.780because they need more chairs at the passport office.
00:28:01.460So, you know, they're not talking about increasing the number of staff at the passport office, increasing the number of counters that are servicing Canadians at the passport office.
00:28:10.760They need more chairs at the passport office.
00:28:18.320And so if you can just think about what's happening at the airport, the initial response that the airline and airports used to try to cope with three and four hour lines at security is to ask travelers to show up three or four hours earlier for their flights.
00:28:39.460So that's a great solution in the short term to eliminate these three and four hour lines up at security, but they create a whole host of other problems at the other end.
00:28:50.900And so, you know, these task forces and these committees that Ottawa loves creating, you know, first of all, they create these task forces after the public finds out about the problem, not when the problem is first identified.
00:29:06.040And they point to the task force as their action plan for getting things resolved.
00:29:12.260But, you know, they've done nothing for five months.
00:29:15.300So what is a task force going to do at the passport office?
00:29:19.440They haven't done anything for three months at the airport.
00:29:21.900And so a new task force is supposed to figure out what to do at the airport.
00:29:26.200And so it's an exercise in frustration, but it would be much funnier were it not for the fact that travelers are really suffering here.
00:29:36.040You not only have these delays and disruptions at the airport, you also have travelers who have who are completely missing their property.
00:29:43.140You know, these are travelers who check their bags in, likely with valuables in them or at least emotionally valuable souvenirs or things that they really treasure, suddenly disappearing into thin air because of the tremendous delays and cancellations we're seeing at Canada's airports.
00:30:04.080Now, Duncan, I know you've referred to how this has been inevitable sort of a few months back based on planning for the summer's travel season.
00:30:11.180Also, when I look back to headlines, for instance, one from January 2021, CBC headline, ailing aviation sector pleads for aid as Ottawa considers new travel restrictions.
00:30:23.200Industry and union representatives telling MPs about sector specific concerns.
00:30:26.920It goes on to predict how there will be an atrophying, a yo-yoing of the workforce as people go in different directions, potential brain drain from air traffic controllers who I guess are in high demand and ours are well trained here.
00:30:39.980So maybe they can get money, more money at a different country.
00:30:43.580To what degree are these two-year-old, one-year-old, 18-month-old schisms at play now as well?
00:30:49.140Well, I mean, are they directly resulting in what we're seeing today?
00:30:55.600Yes, but not as greatly as the problems that were identified three months ago.
00:31:02.460The difficulty with the industry in Canada in terms of the assistance received from the government was, yes, these were significant levels of assistance in terms of dollars.
00:31:15.920But the federal government waited way too long to actually do anything about assistance in the industry, whereas the U.S. and several countries in Europe provided their industry with huge infusions of support very, very early on and continued throughout the process.
00:31:34.960Canada waited so late that only a handful of Canadian airlines actually decided to even access that aid because it was so late in coming.
00:31:44.360WestJet, for example, has not accepted a single cent from the federal government in terms of the aid because it just came too late.
00:31:51.940And WestJet said, look, I mean, we can't use your money to fix anything anymore.
00:31:57.900Air Canada took the aid and quickly repaid it after a couple of months and never even accessed the bulk of it because they decided that there was no need to do it because the aid just arrived way too late.
00:32:09.800And as you pointed out in your question, one of the challenges faced by the industry at that point were, like in every other sector of the economy, very senior and experienced staff who were looking at the pandemic upheaval in front of them and basically deciding that, you know, do I still want to be a part of this?
00:32:32.940Should I not just take my money and run and retire and decide that now is the time for me to go?
00:32:51.560But you and I both know that experienced workers are worth more than a brand new rookie who's still learning the ropes.
00:32:59.320And so that's part of the problem that we're seeing today.
00:33:03.420Is the airline sector less safe now because of those dynamics?
00:33:07.820Well, I've got to say the one thing that we can count on in Canada is a very, very strong safety culture at every airline that operates in this country.
00:33:18.280And I would also say that that's the case for the regulator.
00:33:21.340So when you look at safety records anywhere on the planet, Canada stands head and shoulders above most countries.
00:33:30.740And that's because of the culture of safety we've got at the airlines, at the airports, and at Transport Canada.
00:33:38.020And that's why right now you're seeing things like maintenance delays.
00:33:42.540You know, when maintenance delays are announced, it's because an airline has not signed off on the airworthiness of a particular aircraft.
00:33:52.480That somehow there's something that's going on with that particular aircraft that needs to be repaired before it's allowed to operate.
00:33:59.440And that's one thing that Canadians should be proud about.
00:34:02.960And that's one thing that hasn't diminished, at least as far as I can tell, during the course of the pandemic.
00:34:09.380Well, that's at least nice to have some positive notes from all of this.
00:34:13.440Duncan, I got to ask before we go, if I can have you break down what your specific action plan would be for the resolution here, a prompt resolution.
00:34:24.040I know you were previously appointed to the review of the Canada Transportation Act review.
00:34:29.660So let's say you're someone who's appointed, you get the phone call.
00:34:32.720All right, Duncan, we need you to solve this where we're creating this position or whatever, a quick resolution team here.
00:34:38.900We're going to give you as much authority as you conceivably can have over the different elements at play.
00:34:45.940Well, Anthony, the difficulty we're facing now is that 15% of the summer peak is now behind us.
00:34:54.600We've only got about 60 days left in the summer peak and the clock is ticking.
00:35:00.100So any solution that is put forward now has to be activated with a push of a button.
00:35:06.960So I would focus on the things that can have an overnight impact on the lines, the cancellations, the disruptions that we're seeing.
00:35:17.120In terms of inbound arriving international travelers, the quickest and most effective thing the government could do if they're not willing to cancel these pandemic checks altogether is just to suspend them for the rest of the summer.
00:35:32.140Stop doing the arrive can app, stop doing the return of random testing on the 14th of July, stop verifying vaccination status.
00:35:44.120We wouldn't be alone in stopping that.
00:35:46.860Most of Europe and the United States have either done that or they've outsourced the verification of that to airlines, which have used electronic ways of verification.
00:35:56.980You can't get a boarding pass for a flight to the United States unless you've uploaded or verified your vaccination status online with the airline.
00:36:09.440But once you get to the customs officer that's admitting you to the United States, they don't bother with a secondary vaccination check the way Canada does.
00:36:19.500So let's stop that now and you will see an immediate improvement in the lines at International Customs for arriving travelers.
00:36:30.660In terms of the security lines, the immediate thing that can be done is listeners may not know that pilots and flight attendants are screened just like average travelers.
00:36:44.000So the people that operate your aircraft are the ones that you can trust your lives with when you take a flight.
00:36:53.180They are screened just like you and me.
00:37:01.500And so those things require resources at both Toronto and Montreal airports.
00:37:07.240There are special rooms dedicated just for the screening of crews.
00:37:12.260If we cancel that and join the rest of the world, there are many countries in the world in canceling that, you free up resources to send to regular screening.
00:37:21.980You mean the rest of the world doesn't actually screen the pilots?
00:37:24.800In many, not all countries, but for example, in the United States, pilots and flight attendants are treated as part of the air security system.
00:37:36.060So they're known as known crew members because their backgrounds have been checked before they're even provided with their badges to operate the aircraft.
00:37:44.940You know, there's an absurd little thing, Anthony, that listeners may not know, that the one thing that sits behind a pilot in the flight deck is a fire axe.
00:37:57.960So a pilot getting to the airport, going to a security screener is checked for the length of their Swiss Army knife blade and how much mouthwash they've got in their mouthwash container.
00:38:16.660They get through that screening and they pass it with flying colors, they get to the flight deck of an aircraft and sitting right behind them is a fire axe.
00:38:27.580Here's your weapon, sir, should you choose to use it.
00:38:33.400We are not making the air system safer by spending very scarce resources on screening people who, if they wanted to do something nefarious, don't need the permission of a screener at the airport to do so.
00:38:48.960And the great thing about the system in Canada is we've done a very, very good job of screening these pilots, both at Transport Canada and at the airlines, to make sure that they are people we can count on with our lives when they're operating the planes.
00:39:08.560Duncan D., this has been such a fascinating conversation, so many details that we really couldn't get from hardly anybody else.
00:39:14.820So I thank you so much for joining us today, and I know you've been an advocate for getting these messes cleaned up promptly, so I know Canadian travellers, thank you as well.
00:39:28.940Full Comment is a post-media podcast. I'm Anthony Fury. This episode was produced by Andre Proulx, with theme music by Bryce Hall. Kevin Libin is the executive producer.
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