Advocates and Air Canada’s CEO are serving up opposing views of accessibility within the nation’s aviation system.
Michael Rousseau, who heads Canada’s largest airline, informed a Home of Commons transport committee in the present day that an amazing majority of the 1.3 million passengers who requested particular help final yr had a optimistic expertise.
Underneath a three-year plan, Air Canada has pledged to roll out measures that vary from establishing a buyer accessibility director — now in place — to requiring annual coaching for its 10,000 front-line workers.
However incapacity rights advocate David Lepofsky says the grievance statistics fail to replicate the expertise of many individuals dwelling with disabilities, who generally wait unassisted for hours or must instruct workers on the best way to information them.
Lepofsky says Canada wants stricter guidelines and harder enforcement to make sure consistency and accountability — and to forestall travellers from being “handed like a baton” between the curb and the airplane.
A number of incidents have surfaced at Canadian airways over the previous yr, together with when a B.C. man with spastic cerebral palsy was compelled to tug himself off of an Air Canada airplane in Las Vegas.
