After a cancelled flight led him to abandon a trip to Toronto, Fredericton-based data analyst Ray Harris began tracking flight cancellations across the country.
His Toronto-bound flight on Thursday was cancelled. Harris and his family were rebooked for Friday with a four-hour layover in Montreal. Fearing a lengthy travel day with their three-year-old daughter, Harris and his wife opted to head to Prince Edward Island instead.
“Overall a pretty frustrating experience, but not a unique one,” he said.
Over the last five days, 18 per cent of flights from New Brunswick to Toronto Pearson and Montreal Trudeau airports have been cancelled. That’s almost one in five. The national average over that same span sits at eight per cent.
Harris says New Brunswick’s four regional airports are all in the top 11 regarding cancellations over the same time period.
“The first thing I thought is surely that’s not an Atlantic Canadian problem, and it is,” he said. “There’s something inherently different about flying out of Atlantic Canada that’s causing this problem.”
Routes have returned to the province’s airports after airlines cut most of their service due to the region’s pandemic border policies. And with routes rebounding, so is demand.
“If you remember this time last year we had zero scheduled service,” said Kate O’Rourke, a spokesperson for the Fredericton airport. “Over the next two months, we’re looking at traffic volumes that are potentially very close to where we were in 2019.”
But issues elsewhere in the system are having a trickle-down effect on New Brunswick. Former chief operating officer of Air Canada Duncan Dee says backlogs in Toronto and Montreal are at the root of the uptick in cancelled flights in New Brunswick. Much of it, he says, is due to federal vaccine rules.
“The airport in Toronto has estimated that the average amount of time each traveller needs to be screened has increased by 400 per cent since pre-pandemic,” Dee said. “I can guarantee you that Canada Border Services has not added four times the staff to deal with it.”
That means flights are spending more time waiting to offload passengers, in turn delaying their next flights. While the problems in Toronto and Montreal are impacting many regions across the country, New Brunswick has been particularly hard hit mostly due to how airport service in the province is structured.
The three main regional airports in Fredericton, Saint John and Moncton each have around three flights to Toronto Pearson a day. Those flights all leave around the same time and arrive in Toronto at peak times. And so the mix of scheduling and lack of routes leaves the province’s airports worse off than Halifax or even Charlottetown, Dee says.
“In a place like Halifax, they’ve got several flights a day going to Toronto,” he said.
“So let’s say the morning flight cancels, there’s probably a flight two hours later at the most, but in the case of New Brunswick you’ve got that 5 a.m. flight and nothing, likely till early afternoon or noon, and then likely nothing until the evening.”
That leaves the province’s airports extremely dependent on other parts of the system working smoothly.
Transport Canada said it was up to operators to speak to the number of cancelled flights in the province.
A spokesperson for Jazz Aviation, which operates on behalf of Air Canada in New Brunswick, said all airlines are facing a lack of staff in the face of increased demand, but that backlogs in the system remain the primary culprit for cancelled flights.
“Long processing times at airports and other restrictions have resulted in flight delays and in some instances cancellations, which are having negative effects not only for our customers but also impacting our employee resources and operations,” Mannon Stewart said.
“For example, if an aircraft is held at a gate longer than expected or a flight is suddenly forced to cancel, that can affect the schedules of the ground staff servicing the aircraft and crews, disrupting subsequent flights.”
The federal government recently announced it will pause some COVID-19 testing at the border and the requirement to have two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine to travel domestically has been dropped as well. Federal transport staff who lost their jobs upon refusing the jab will also be allowed back to work.
O’Rourke says the changes will hopefully help, but that at the local level there’s little they can do.
“Some things are out of our control.”
For would-be travellers like Harris, it’s easy to question if it’s worth trying.
“As much as I wish we had gone to Toronto, I’m in no hurry to book a flight any time soon.”
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