What’s really going on at Toronto’s Pearson airport?

Clip You’re listening to a Frequency Podcast Network production in association with CityNews.

Jordan It’s not exactly breaking news that flying can suck, especially this year.

Clip Last week, about half of the flights out of Pearson were delayed and more than 700 were cancelled. Air Canada ranked number one in the world for delays. Just the check-in notice from Air Canada said leave lots of time. Customs was about 3 hours, got through, flight cancelled from Toronto to Boston. Worst lineup I’ve ever seen. They already told us we’ll miss our flight. I’ve been waiting for like, maybe 30 minutes. Now I expect to wait another maybe an hour, and my flight lives in 20 minutes, so I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to make it.

Jordan But right now, there are two kinds of bad airports in this world. There are regular bad airports, and then there is Pearson International Airport. The stories you hear coming out of Pearson right now are so frustrating and awful that they beg for someone or something to blame. The government for COVID restrictions, the airlines for greed, the airport authority for understaffing and poor planning, customs, fellow passengers, inflation, weather, whatever. Just let us know who to be mad at. The truth, it’s a lot of some of those things. It’s less of others. And in the mix are a few other problems you’ve never even heard of. So this is the story of how Canada’s largest travel hub went from tolerable to terrible. This is how Pearson fell apart. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Richard Warnica is a business features writer for the Toronto Star. Hey, Richard.

Richard Warnica Hey. Thanks for having me.

Jordan You’re welcome. I think the whole country wants to know what the hell is up with Pearson at the moment.

Richard Warnica Yeah. I mean, I certainly did. It was one of those things where anytime I went online, all I saw were horror stories and I really had no idea what was actually happening.

Jordan Maybe let’s rewind for a bit before the pandemic because we want to tell the story of this airport. So prior to COVID and to all the nightmares that have happened as we kind of come out of it, what was Pearson’s reputation as a big city airport in the world?

Richard Warnica I mean, it was mixed. I think. I think they had had some pretty high-profile stumbles. They did a runway refurbishment a couple of years ago that caused a ton of delays, a ton of cancellations. In Canada, I think it had a reputation as well. You don’t want to go to Pearson or Pearson can be a real nightmare. But I think part of that is because Pearson is really the only big global hub airport in Canada. There’s really nothing to compare it to. So before the pandemic, it had its issues for sure, but no one would have called it a disaster. It wasn’t like making the list of the worst airports in the world.

Jordan Right. So let’s discuss, I guess, how many months now, the last three months or four months that people have really been coming back to the airport for recreational travels in large numbers. And before you dug in and went out to Pearson and started really reporting this story, what kinds of things have you heard? What did you expect?

Richard Warnica Yeah, so for me, it started with I had a much-delayed trip to New York this spring. And in the lead-up to that trip, I started hearing all these reports of people being stuck in hours-long customs lines at Pearson. So much so that me and my friends who were going on this trip, we kept emailing back and forth like, is this going to happen? Do we need to be at the airport 6 hours early? And one of our friends actually went to the airport 4 hours before our flight took off. You know this is in April when we started seeing on Twitter or TikTok or Instagram, wherever you’re looking, pictures of the departure hall in Pearson just packed with like unruly numbers of people, and people sending out messages saying, I got here 3 hours early and I didn’t make my flight. So that’s when it first sort of clicked for me. It didn’t really become something I wanted to look into professionally until it kept going for a couple of months, right until the problem started evolving. It went from there’s too many people in the departure pre-clearance zone so there’s way too many people in the customs halls and planes are getting stuck on the runway. And then we start hearing these stories of like, lost bags. I flew into Newark for this story, and at the Air Canada office at Newark, there was just like this wall of missing baggage in front of it. Had I wanted to go into that office to talk to someone, I would have had to literally climb over this moat of missing suitcases. I’m always interested in stories that everybody is talking about, but that I don’t understand. And it really started to become one of those in sort of late spring, early summer for me.

Jordan So as you began reporting it and I want to talk about the people first because they are sprinkled throughout your long feature, you sort of go from hearing things second-hand and third-hand to hearing warnings. You spoke to dozens of travellers directly. How true were those horror stories we were hearing? What was the universal experience? And maybe just tell us a few stories.

Richard Warnica Yeah, I think it remains the case that flying through Pearson, your odds of having a horror story happen to you are still pretty bad, right? The odds are you are going to go there. You’ll probably have a delayed flight, but you still probably won’t have a cancellation. You probably won’t lose your bags. But the percentage of people who were going through horrible things and the sort of extent to which that horror was happening had really gone up. Rebecca Stephen, who was one woman I spoke to who had a trip planned to New York, she was going for Pride Weekend. She was going to see friends she hadn’t seen in a long time, gets her boyfriend to drop her at the airport for a 07:00 a.m. flight at 04:00 a.m. And gets there and it looks like a hog pen. Like there’s no room for anyone to move around in this sort of pre-clearance zone, but eventually gets through, gets through security, umm sits down, spends a couple of minutes on TikTok, and then notification on her email, her flight is cancelled. Okay, goes to customer service, no one at customer service. Eventually gets rebooked on a flight that flights cancelled, tries to get on another flight that flights cancelled all the way until 04:00. So she’s supposed to leave at about seven. And now it’s 3:50, and she’s sitting in this departure zone, and the pilots show up, but nobody else does. At least she didn’t see them. And at like 3:50, an announcement comes over the megaphone. This one is cancelled too. We don’t have enough staff. And so at that point, everyone leaps up and goes rushing back to customer service. Because I’ll tell you, when I was going through there once, the customer service line was only about 20 people deep. And I asked people sort of midway through, they’d already been waiting 2 hours. And she was going into a customer service line that was going to have hundreds of people. But what really, really disturbed her and the reason she reached out to the Star. She actually sent us an email, was everybody takes off. The Air Canada person at the gate disappears, and there’s this elderly couple there. English is not their first language. Both of them are in wheelchairs, and they’re not mobile wheelchair users. They’ve been placed in these wheelchairs because they can’t walk distances and nobody comes to help them. So she goes over to them after about 20 minutes, and it’s like, are you guys okay? Can I do anything for you? And it’s clear they don’t speak super good English. They’re confused. They don’t know what’s happening. They feel completely abandoned. And so she has to go on this kind of odyssey through the airport to try to find someone from Air Canada to take responsibility for these two stranded senior citizens. And you know the story she tells me is that eventually, she waylays an Air Canada employee, sprinting through the airport and convinces her finally to stop. And the woman tells her she just doesn’t have time. And finally, Rebecca’s like, you have to make time. Someone has to take care of these people. And that experience to her is what pushed her over the edge. She went back to customer service and just said, cancel my flight. Like, I can’t keep doing this. She just cancelled her entire trip. And I heard multiple stories of people who you know there was this one woman I spoke to who was supposed to go from New York to London, and after about 24 hours in Canadian airports, just booked a flight on delta to fly back to New York because she just couldn’t take it anymore. So that’s kind of the prototypical horror story. There are lots of stories, really sad stories about people missing connections and then being forced to spend the night in Pearson. I spoke to one woman, they’d come from Tel Aviv or trying to get to Atlanta, and they end up sleeping on the Pearson floor with their three-month-old. So, yeah, that’s your garden variety Pearson horror story in the summer of 2022.

Jordan I am, like, anxious and angry just listening to you talk on behalf of these people. I don’t know how they do it. Yeah. So you mentioned before the pandemic, Pearson was maybe not great, but certainly tolerable for a really large airport. Can you quantify for us with some numbers how bad it has been at Pearson over the past few months? Like, how bad has it gotten?

Richard Warnica Yeah, I mean, there’s a chart in my story that just looks at sort of daily cancellations per day. And a cancellation is like, it’s your nightmare scenario in an airline because you’ve already paid a crew, you’ve paid for that departure slot. So they tend to be really rare and they have just spiked. If you look up my story and you look at the chart, it looks like I don’t know if you’ve ever done, like, a hill session on an exercise bike, but you know the part where it’s just, like, spiking up and you can’t feel your legs, you’re working so hard. That’s what the Pearson cancellation charts look like. If you lump together international and domestic it’s about 8000 flights had been cancelled. But at the time my story came out, that data is from a company called Syrium. As of last Friday, according to FlightAware, which is another one of these companies that tracks airline data, Pearson had the most delayed flights this summer of any airport in the world, and it was coming up to almost half in some cases. So, like, your odds of actually getting out of the airport on the time it says on your ticket are like one and two. One of the things I did in this story was I would wake up a lot of mornings and I would just start scrolling the departure list on the Pearson Airport website. And from about 06:00 a.m. on most mornings, it would just be this sea of red for cancellations and yellow for delays. Just delay, delay, delay and some of them are like eight, nine hours.

Jordan Wow. Can you sketch out maybe? And you do a good job of this in your piece, and I’ve noticed it just in media coverage of the situation. Before we get into what you dug up, how has the buck been passed around for this, from governments to airlines to the airport itself? Who’s actually taking responsibility here, and what do they say?

Richard Warnica Yeah, I mean, the reality is nobody’s taking responsibility.

Jordan Right.

Richard Warnica I think that there’s three major players here. There’s the airlines, there’s the airport authority, the greater Toronto Airport Authority, and there’s the federal government, which regulates transportation. From really from the start of this in the spring, the GTAAA and the airlines have placed the blame on the federal government. Their messaging, at that point at least, was very clear. It was very focused on COVID restrictions and the added burden that that was causing in the airport. I feel bad for the minister, Omar Alghabra, in that one off-the-cuff statement has come to be taken in for the full federal government response. But he did at one point essentially say that the problem was that people aren’t used to flying anymore, and they’re taking too much time going through security. What very few people addressed publicly in the messaging from any three of those was why the airlines were allowed to book this many flights this quickly after this massive complicated infrastructure had been at sometimes 80% shut down over a two-year period.

Jordan So you sort of knew who was blaming who. You’d heard these anecdotal stories. You had letters from readers talking about their horrible experiences. What did you do to try to get to the bottom of what is really going on here and where the blame should lie?

Richard Warnica You know when you’re reporting a story like this, and you’re essentially trying to explain a process that’s going wrong to people, you’re almost at, like, you’re at a party, and you don’t know who the host is, and you’re trying to figure out who the host is. So you’re just walking through being like, hey, who should I talk to? Hey, who should I talk to? Hey, who should I talk to? And you know I talk to experts all around the world. I talk to experts in Canada. I talk to people who work physically on the ground there. I talked to people who work with the unions there, and more than COVID regulations, the answer that kept coming over and over again was, nobody has enough staff, and everybody knew they didn’t have enough staff. Well, I should say that the airlines would and will deny that they knew they didn’t have enough staff, or that in fact, they didn’t have enough staff, and I should be clear about that. But about everyone else in the system told me that they believed the airport, 400 employers in the airport, the airlines weren’t ready, from a labour perspective, to be operating at this scale.

Jordan One of the experts you talk to says quote the airlines have been very greedy. And he actually instructs you to quote him on that. What’s he referring to? And how did we end up in that space then?

Richard Warnica Yeah, that’s John Graddick from McGill, who is a former Air Canada executive and has been teaching in the airline management program there for a long time. What he means is that you know normally an airline will make its summer schedule in October the previous year. They’ll make some small changes as the year goes on, but that’s the bulk of it, that’s the base of it. And that gives everybody in the system. So all the third-party industries, the businesses that do things like fueling planes or putting on food, their own staff, the airport, the customs, a long time to understand, okay, how many people are going to be coming through this airport, what kind of staffing levels do we have? If you look back to October of last year, nobody had any idea what this summer would look like. I have a ton of sympathy for the airlines in that. We were just in the middle of Delta, nobody knew Omricon was going to come. And so they put out what was effectively like a provisional schedule in October. Then Omricon hits tons of cancellations, real collapse in traffic again in late December, January. But then from an airline perspective, that clears pretty quickly. And by the end of February, Air Canada at least is ready to assume that demand is going to pick up like crazy this summer. So at the end of February, they put out a big increase in their traffic to a ton of these secondary US markets all over the world, the tourist destinations. And what John’s talking about when he said the airlines are greedy is he was talking about the fact that February, March, they start seeing that projected demand is going through the roof. People are starting to book these summer holidays that they haven’t for two years, and they say, we need that money. John believes, and I think there’s a fair bit of evidence to back him up, that airlines, in general, should have known at that point that the infrastructure they needed, from the airport to their own staff, to all those third-party businesses would not be ready to handle the amount of traffic they were planning at that point, but they went ahead and planned it anyway. So that’s what he means when he’s talking about the airlines being greedy.

Jordan I know this is a really dumb question with a really complex answer, but why didn’t they just hire a ton more staff and ramp up as soon as they saw this going on?

Richard Warnica Yeah, I think they would say they tried and there’s a couple of factors going on. One is that and this is happening in airports all over the world, a ton of staff were let go during the pandemic. You know Air Canada lost about 50% of its staff. There are airport businesses where I talk to union people as much as 80%, and a lot of those people didn’t stick around and wait for the airport to come back. In Toronto, a lot of them went and worked in the warehouses around Pearson, which were absolutely booming during COVID. And there was you know one expert I talked to who said that when you’re living your normal life and you have a demanding job, you don’t have a lot of time to stop and think, would I rather have another job? And this kind of created this mass opportunity for people who work at an airport who do kind of crazy overnight shifts. Even now, the pay is not super competitive. It’s very physical work often to say, you know what? I like another job better. And so it wasn’t as simple as just saying, okay, you know there were 55,000 employees at Pearson, I think, not directly by the airport, but through all those different companies before the pandemic, saying to say 25,000 of them, okay, time to get off your couch and come to work again. Most of them have moved on. And the airport, like other businesses in Canada, other businesses around the world, is facing a labour shortage, especially for these not particularly high paying, socially difficult, physically difficult tasks. And then the other factor that’s really important to think about is I don’t remember who said it to me, but one of the airline people I spoke to was like, people assume that because these are not highly paid jobs, they are not highly skilled jobs. And in the airport, that’s not the case. Like to keep an airport moving, to turn around a plane with no delay, to unload bags and get them to the terminal while reloading that fast, get people through customs. Those are minutely, time-sensitive jobs that take people with experience to do. If you are bringing in, say, 30% new staff, 40% in some places, 50% new staff to these complex, time-sensitive jobs, you are having to train people while they’re doing it as things are falling apart, and you’re having people on shifts where most of the people are new. Just imagine where one of us worked if you all of a sudden tried to put out a newspaper with 50% of the people had no newspaper experience. Your Toronto Star is going to suck for quite a while if you do that right. Your podcast would suck if you come into work tomorrow and your producer is the only guy you could hire because there’s a labour shortage and have never listened to a podcast before.

Jordan That covers to me the main dynamic at play in terms of staffing and over demand and undersupply. But and I know we can’t go on forever here, so I would urge people and we’ll link to it in the show notes to check out your entire feature there. Two other aspects I want to get at quickly because they were both news to me. Can you first explain what’s happened to the cargo business over the past couple of years?

Richard Warnica Yeah, so this was happening before the pandemic, but it really accelerated during the pandemic, which is everyone knows online shopping has gone through the roof. The demand for people who can take packages, goods from one place to another quickly has soared. And airlines have looked at that like a business opportunity. So that cargo space under an airplane, they call it the belly. There’s no way more competition for that belly space from online shopping primarily, but other things like that, where you are selling commercial goods and transporting them from one place to the other. Air Canada has really doubled down on this business. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I think their revenue year over year from cargo went up something like 42% in the pandemic. And part of that was because literally when people weren’t flying, they converted some planes entirely to cargo planes. But now a lot of that business is literally you can watch it if you stand at the departure window. I did this, drove my wife crazy. We’re on vacation and I’m just standing at a departure window staring at planes loading and unloading.

Jordan She wants to go on vacation and her husband won’t leave the airport.

Richard Warnica Exactly. Exactly. It’s the worst place in the world to be. And I’m like, oh, that’s so interesting. But you can look at they bring out these mini conveyor belts, essentially, and they have these cargo packages that the packages are stuffed in, and they’ll come off the conveyor belt, the full ones, and then they’ll put new ones on. And that’s a huge part of the airline business now. But like any other part of the airline business, it takes people and it takes time. And the airlines don’t have enough of either of those right now.

Jordan And finally, can you explain sixth freedom travel to me? Because this is something I had never heard of before, and it made me look at departure and arrivals lists in a completely different way. I had no idea this was happening. What is it?

Richard Warnica Yes, I didn’t either. And I feel like we could do one of those seven-hour deep dives on this where no one would listen because I find it so fascinating. So sixth freedom travel, the sixth freedom in air travel is essentially the idea that if you run an airline in Canada or the US, you should have the freedom to take people from one country through your country to another country. And for Air Canada, that is a huge and growing part of the business. What they are trying to do with Pearson is use it fundamentally as a hub to take customers from primarily sort of second-tier US markets like St. Louis, Raleigh, Denver, to Toronto, and on to Europe, the Middle East, or through Vancouver, and on to Asia, because those are really, really valuable flights, right. If you’re selling someone a ticket from this example, this person I talked to, Tel Aviv to Atlanta, round trip. That’s worth a lot more than selling a ticket from Winnipeg to Toronto round trip. So if you go to the airport now and you look at the US departures list in Pearson, you see a ton of flights to, again, the second-tier US markets and Air Canada is establishing those routes only partially to serve Canadian domestic demand to like Nashville. There’s some demand people are going there for a bachelorette weekend or to see a hockey game. But the real reason they are massively expanding those routes is because they want to serve a Nashville crowd who wants to go to London and thinks they can do it cheaper going through Toronto than going through New York or going through Atlanta. One of the hubs, again, makes a lot of business sense. If you are a huge global airline, that’s going to be part of your business. But it puts a ton of strain on your airport because to sell that kind of flight, you have to have a lot of planes leaving the airport at about the same time in the morning. So all those 6:3,7,7:30 flights, those are often the departing end of a sixth freedom flight because you have to get down to Nashville or St. Louis on time to get those passengers back to Pearson, to then fly on to London or Berlin or all the way onto Abu Dhabi. Again, this is something I had never heard of before digging into this story. And it is something that came up a lot when people told me that they don’t think Pearson is super well set up to handle this level of sixth freedom traffic. And it’s also a big reason why looking at the pure numbers of passengers or flights and comparing them to pre-pandemic doesn’t necessarily give you the full story of the problems at Pearson. Because one of the big problems is that these peaks, which are often exacerbated by the sixth freedom travel, are getting way worse. To give you one example, when I flew to Newark for this story, I flew at about 02:00 p.m. I’d been following all these crazy stories about going through US customs. So I show up 3 hours early. There were zero people in front of me to get into US pre-clearance and two people in the security line. And so I asked, I’m asking everybody to go through there, what’s going on? I thought this was a disaster. And they’re like, I should have been here a half an hour ago. And so I went back at 04:00 a.m. And it was insane because everybody is trying to get on those 07:00 a.m flights because that’s how the airports have scheduled them.

Jordan The last thing that I want to ask you is just what you’ll take away from this. I guess having learned so much about the inner workings of a complex machine like Pearson, for good or ill. When you finish all of that reporting, does it make you more empathetic for what the airport is dealing with and the people they are dealing with? Or does it make you more frustrated because you know you can see what these problems are and there are ways to solve them?

Richard Warnica I have a ton of sympathy and empathy for the people on the ground working like the actual airline employees. I mean, it sucks to fly through there a couple of times a year right now. Can you imagine that’s your job every single day, and there are stressed out, tired people screaming at you, and it has nothing to do with anything you’ve done? So a ton of sympathy for the actual workers on the ground. I don’t know. I had a line in my story about how this seemed quintessentially Canadian to me, in the sense that you know I kept on asking people who were responsible for making sure that Pearson, which is by far the most important transport hub in Canada, you know it’s where $45 billion in trade goes through every year, was ready to reopen after the pandemic. And again and again, people would either laugh or they’d say, well, that’s the question, because there wasn’t anyone body responsible for this, right?

Jordan Right.

Richard Warnica I mean, I spend a lot of time reporting on institutions that are full of good people that haven’t been well served by government and kind of fell down during the pandemic and this one kind of stacked onto that list for me. And because they have this quasi-independent body, the GTAAA, I think government just feels like they can dodge the responsibility a little bit, but fundamentally, at the end, the federal government is the regulator. This is a massive piece of economic and national security importance to this country. And it just kind of reiterates some difficult feelings I would say I have about the state of Canadian institutions generally coming out of COVID.

Jordan The only thing more Canadian will be when we form a committee to study exactly what went wrong here.

Richard Warnica Oh well, maybe we’ll have a royal commission and just wrap it all together. And then I can see you in line for the royal commission doing daily stories on that for another three years.

Jordan I’ll read the Redacted report. Thanks so much, Richard.

Richard Warnica Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me.

Jordan Richard Warnica, writing in the Toronto Star. That was The Big Story. For more, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. Find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. You can of course email us [click here!] and you can call us 416-935-5935 and leave us a voicemail. You can get The Big Story wherever you get podcasts, Apple, Google, Stitch or Spotify, doesn’t matter, you pick. Listen there. Rate us, review us, say nice things, and we’ll be forever grateful. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow. Back to top of page