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Canadian Airport Luggage delays

 Headline:  "British Columbia Man blames Air Canada for luggage delay!"

What's wrong with this headline -- its easy, Air Canada aside from taking your luggage when you check in has zero input on how the luggage is processed.  In fact, airlines pay a per passenger fee for use of terminal, baggage handling and other important service to CATSA which manages virtually all Canadian airports.

When the pandemic hit in 2020 the airlines cut employment but in early 2021 airlines such as Air Canada started hiring back laid-off workers.  I don't have the most recent figures but Air Canada in particular grew its payroll by nearly 80% from 16,000 in January 2021 to nearly 27,000 in January 2022.  Lets leave WestJet aside for a minute but I understand that they did the same thing, with number of employees.

What did the airport do during that time?  Very little, they saw that AC and WJ were bringing workers back, they saw that both airlines were adding back aircraft that they had parked during the worse of the pandemic, and they did nothing.

Training ground crew is a multi month process, its complicated there are tons of issues to address still, the airport luggage handling problem is directly related to the airport not hiring any additional staff, in fact doing very little of anything.

They committed the most serious offence, they didn't follow their clients!  What are the consequence of this failure:  nothing...

The Federal Minister of Transport thinks he's doing a great job, there are tons of Press Release from the minister showing how great he is!

The entity that runs the airport for the Ministry of Transport is CATSA the CEO (since 2017) is a guy called Saunders, he was a Mountie for 28 years before that.  So not a logistics guy but a security guy!

The airlines probably warned CATSA and the Minister that they were ramping up operations as were their American colleagues.  The airlines are not crazy they cannot blame CATSA, its a monopoly!

So there you have it, or so its seems, because in reality CATSA's primary client is the Minister of Transport and as long as he thinks they are doing a good job...then mission accomplished!  BTW there is no real solution here, airports ARE a natural monopoly.

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