Summary: Courtready analyzed 38,104 air passenger complaint outcomes published by the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) from September 2023 to September 2025. The trend is worrying: the CTA is issuing fewer decisions, while the wait time from a flight disruption to a final decision is growing, reaching an average of 987 days in September 2025. With a reported backlog of 84,398 complaints as of March 2025, these numbers raise a simple question: what does “access to justice” mean if passengers have to wait years for an answer?
Hi, my name is Tom Macintosh Zheng. I co-founded Courtready.ca because, when I used to practice law, I kept seeing the same problem, over and over: the justice system is hard to navigate if you don’t live in it every day. People get stuck. They miss steps. And sometimes they give up, not because their problem isn’t real, but because the process feels impossible.
Table of Contents
I. What is Courtready?
At Courtready, we build practical tools and plain-language legal education for everyday Canadians. Our goal is simple: teach people how to navigate the system and improve access to justice.
Access to justice can be a buzzword. It can sound abstract. For me, it means three concrete things:
First, people can understand how courts and tribunals actually work, including the procedural steps happening behind the scenes.
Second, people can grasp basic legal concepts (like “service”, “filing” or “motions”).
Third, people can get a decision within a reasonable timeframe.
This post is about that third part: time.
II. Why I’m focusing on time
I’ve always been unusually obsessed with delay – flight delay, court delay, you name it. I know that sounds a bit strange. But even when I practised law as a litigator, I took pride in being efficient and moving things forward. Waiting months (or years) for the next step always felt like the system was doing more harm than good.
So as part of Courtready’s work, we started doing deeper studies on bottlenecks and backlog in parts of the Canadian legal system.
III. Our first deep dive: air passenger complaints at the CTA
Our first dataset focuses on air passenger complaints handled by the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA). You can find the full analysis here.
If you’ve had a flight delay or cancellation, lost baggage, or a dispute about a refund, you’ve probably had the same thought: “Who actually deals with this if the airline won’t fix it?” The answer? The CTA.
The CTA is a “quasi-judicial” body that resolves disputes between passengers and airlines. It enforces obligations under the Air Passenger Protection Regulations and airline tariffs (i.e., the airline’s terms and conditions of carriage).
IV. What we analyzed
Courtready analyzed 38,104 air passenger complaint outcomes published by the CTA between September 2023 and September 2025.
When I say “outcomes,” I mean the published results: what happened to complaints once the CTA reached a resolution and posted it publicly.
Here’s what stood out.
V. Key findings
Fewer airline cases are being processed. Decisions issued by the CTA declined from 7,076 in Q3 2024 to 4,301 in Q3 2025.
The gap between flight date and decision date is growing. In September 2025, the average time between the flight date and decision date reached 987 days (the highest level we observed since January 2024).
Monthly decisions hit a low. In September 2025, decisions fell to 1,348 — about 45% lower than the August 2024 peak of 2,485.
Slightly over half of outcomes end in dismissal. 50.3% of cases were dismissed, 44.9% resulted in compensation (for inconvenience or expenses), and 4.8% resulted in a refund.
VI. What the graphs show (and the limits)
I’m going to walk through some of the key graphs now. To see our full analysis, visit Courtready’s Air Passenger Complaints Tracker here.
Graph 1: Decisions issued each month
The trend is the part that worries me most: the number of decisions appears to be falling over time. That’s happening while the overall complaint volume remains very high. In August 2024, the CTA issued 2,485 decisions. A year later, that number decreased to 1,347.
This graph shows how many decisions the CTA issued on a monthly basis.
For context, the CTA’s own reporting states that, as of March 2025, there were 84,398 complaints waiting to be processed. Some recent media reporting puts that figure closer to the high-80,000s. Even if the CTA could process 3,000 complaints a month, more than twice its current pace, it would still take nearly three years to clear the existing backlog on its own, assuming no new complaints comes in during that time.
Graph 2: Average wait time from flight date to decision date
This graph shows the average number of days between the flight date and the decision date, for decisions issued in a given month. As of September 2025, this gap is 987 days: 2 years and 8 months.
A quick but necessary clarification: this is not the same thing as “how long someone waits after they file a complaint.”
Why not? Because the data published by the CTA does not include a “complaint filed” date that lets us calculate filing-to-decision time.
Still, flight-to-decision is meaningful. It captures how long the full experience can feel for passengers, from the disruption itself to a final order.
Graph 3: Outcomes distribution
This graph shows how outcomes break down.
About half of the complaints (50.3%) end in dismissal. The remaining outcomes fall into categories like compensation for inconvenience (33.1%), compensation for expenses (11.8%), and refunds (4.79%).
One caveat: the data does not let us see the amount of compensation. So, we can’t consistently tell whether someone got a “full win” or a “partial win” from the outcome label alone.
Graph 4: Issues raised
VII. What should we do about the delay?
I don’t think there’s a single magic fix. But two changes would make a real difference.
A. Give the system enough capacity to keep up.
If we want faster decisions, the CTA needs more decision-makers and operational support to process the volume it receives. The CTA received 46,980 complaints in 2024–2025, and the backlog reached 84,398 by March 31, 2025 (source).
When people wait years for a result, the process becomes the punishment. And faith in the system erodes.
B. Make outcomes easier to search and use.
After the backlog comes down, I’d love to see a better public search experience that helps passengers check whether the CTA has already ruled on their flight.
Many passengers have a limited window to act. In flight disruption cases, you generally need to submit a claim to the airline within one year of the disruption (source).
During that window, passengers should be able to look up CTA decisions to see how the CTA has decided similar claims.
For example, some decisions turn on whether a delay or cancellation was “outside the airline’s control.” If the CTA has already found that a specific disruption was outside the airline’s control, that’s a strong signal that passengers on the same flight likely won’t qualify for compensation for inconvenience. Seeing that early helps people decide whether it is worth spending time filing a claim.
Right now, though, the backlog means many published decisions are for flights from 2022/2023. That makes the data much less useful at the exact moment passengers need it most. To guide real decisions in real time, the CTA needs to process and publish cases quickly enough that passengers can actually find decisions about flights from the last year, and not from several years ago.
VIII. What’s next?
In my next post, I’m going to dig into a question many passengers already suspect has an answer: do some airlines do better than others at the CTA? And if so, by how much? I’ll share what we find soon.
If you’d rather explore the data yourself right now, you can filter the dataset here or click on the button below.
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