Airport delays costing economy, critics say
Passengers are beginning to avoid Pearson to escape interminable security lineups
OTTAWA— Officials at Pearson International Airport are pressing Ottawa to cough up more funding to ease
backlogs at security and customs checkpoints that have left thousands of air travellers fuming.
The problem even has the attention of the prime minister’s office after Gerald Butts, the principal secretary to Justin Trudeau, took to social media to express his frustration at recent lineups.
“Friday of Thanksgiving weekend and half the security lines are closed at Pearson. #fail,” Butts said on Twitter on Oct. 7.
But the long lines at peak times are testing more than the patience of passengers — they mean delays, even missed flights that give Canada’s busiest airport a black eye and ultimately cost the economy.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on flights with international travellers who have talked about that. They’ll try it once but it’s just so painful that they are going to find other routings,” said Jan De Silva, president and chief executive officer of the Toronto Region Board of Trade.
She notes that Pearson, the country’s biggest international hub, is a huge contributor to the economy and warns that this is at risk.
“It’s really not on par with what one would anticipate an international hub airport would have,” De Silva said in an interview Thursday.
“The unintended consequences are going to be horrific for us at a time when we’re looking for global growth to stimulate our economy,” she said.
Transport Minister Marc Garneau told the Star this week that he’s heard the complaints and is looking to act.
“It’s probably one of the issues that come up the most often when you talk to people about the air traveller experience. So all that to say that we are looking at that very, very carefully at this point in time,” he said.
Garneau could hint at proposed solutions in the coming weeks.
In what is being billed as a landmark speech, Garneau will use an address to a Montreal audience on Nov. 3 to outline the department’s policy direction on a number of fronts, such as transport infrastructure and safety, as well as the “passenger experience,” a source said.
Certainly Ottawa has been feeling the heat on the issue. The Toronto Board of Trade has joined forces with its counterparts in other major cities to demand Ottawa fix the problem.
And now the Greater Toronto Airports Authority, which operates Pearson airport, is adding its voice too.
In a Friday presentation to the Commons’ finance committee — which is conducting pre-budget hearings — the authority will press Ottawa to invest millions of dollars more to improve security and border services.
Scott Collier, the authority’s vice-president of customer and terminal services, will call for at least $5 million in extra funding for the Canada Border Services Agency, responsible for customs and immigration screening of arriving international pas- sengers, to improve services at Pearson.
During May, authority staff were forced to hold passengers outside a jammed customs hall an average of twice a day with wait times topping 30 minutes.
The authority is also urging Ottawa to earmark another $20 million to the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA) to improve security screening at Pearson alone.
This would allow 95 per cent of passengers to be screened in 10 minutes or less.
“Additional staff resources are essential to handle current and future growth,” the airport authority stated in its submission to the committee.
Pearson falls short of other global aviation hubs such as London’s Heathrow, where 95 per cent of passengers are screened in five minutes or less, the authority says.
Of the 17.6 million passengers screened at Pearson in 2015, almost three-quarters got through the checkpoints in 10 minutes or less.
But 4.8 million passengers had to wait longer than 10 minutes and half of those were stuck waiting more than15 minutes.
At peak times, passengers have waited more than 60 minutes, the authority says.
The problem is that while passengers are paying upwards of $25 a flight for security screening, that revenue goes into the general federal coffers and not all of it is passed along to the security agency.
CATSA got a one-time infusion of $29 million from Ottawa earlier this year to help it keep pace with rising passenger levels.
Unless the federal government loosens the purse strings further, the security lineups are likely to get worse.
That’s because CATSA is facing budget restrictions even though passenger volumes continue to grow at Canadian airports. “Next year, if our budget is as planned right now, wait times will increase. That’s what we’re trying to address with Transport Canada,” agency spokesperson Mathieu Laroc
que said Thursday.
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