LETTER — Asking more from airlines

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/01/2024 (600 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sunshine, warmth, a break from reality — all things your average Canadian might be longing for come this part of the winter. The cold has set in, deeply in some places. With the cold comes the snow, and the dreaded slush.

And let’s not forget about those lucky Canadians, of whom I am one, who find themselves having to plug their car into an outlet every time they park, a harsh reminder that even machines freeze to death in our unforgiving winters. And that, dear readers, is why I wanted to go to Florida.

Like many working professionals in Canada, I am tired. Between high-intensity work and training environments, a viral pandemic that made everything just a little bit harder, and a crumbling economy, the wins can feel few and far between.

I happen to work as a physician, and I have been a first-hand witness to the changing nature of the front lines. Fewer people are being burdened with more, higher-intensity work than ever before, and it’s contributing to burnout. We see doctors who choose to retire instead of continuing to work, and nurses who change fields altogether. I worked 21 straight days over Christmas and New Year’s, and didn’t see my family. I know colleagues who have done the same or more.

Yes, we are paid well for what we do, but everyone has their breaking point. In health care, many have reached that breaking point, and surpassed it, and this has manifested as an unprecedented exodus from the health-care workforce in Canada.

So what do we do about it?

Health care is a high-intensity field of work where, literally, peoples lives are in your hands. Health care is growing increasingly complex as the science of medicine changes, and people live longer with more and more comorbidities.

Our population, and patient volumes, are increasing, while the workforce relatively decreases. Fewer people are asked to do more of the work, which drives people away from the field and exacerbates the problem. I am not going to pretend to be able to solve all of the systemic problems with health care, of which there are many, but what I can propose is another way of looking at this — optimizing the breaks.

There is a growing understanding of the role of “time off,” or, “vacation in the workplace,” as it pertains to employee performance, and that is equally true of health-care providers. Leonard Bernstein first wrote about that in the New York Times in 1971. All work and no play makes doctor a dud, you might say.

There is a limited amount of things we can do to reduce patient volumes, or train more professionals. Even if we could do those things, they take time, and investment. It will likely be half a decade or more before we even start to see any benefit from increasing the training or recruitment of nurses and doctors. In the immediacy, what we can do, is work on staff retention, and an undeniable part of that, is increasing the quality of vacationing available to staff when they have time off.

For many freezing Canadians who are fortunate enough, the opportunity to vacation, go down south, and do something somewhere warm — you know, without a parka on — can be the only reprieve on the horizon of a day gone far-too-long. In Canada, this necessitates working with the villain of our story — the airlines of Canada.

I know I am not alone in saying this — Canadian airlines suck. I have been flying for 15 years, and it has been tragic to see the steady decline of once reputable, high-class airlines, to the money churning, unreliable service they provide today. Flight fees are higher than ever, for less leg room than ever. They’ve even stopped giving out those cheap biscuits.

While those service reductions are relatively frivolous, more tangible reductions in service have been felt by many Canadians, including the closure of an unprecedented number of previously well-serviced routes, initially under the guise of COVID, now hoping to be forgotten in the noise. Even for those peripheral routes left open, service can be shoddy, and must not be relied upon under any circumstances. Have any of you tried to fly out of Windsor, Ont., or Brandon lately?

Nowadays, I take the train to Toronto or drive to Winnipeg in fear of my peripheral leg of the trip being cancelled and derailing the entire itinerary.

People see this. They recognize the injustice. And they are angry. Angry enough, in fact, to compel the government to act, and so was born the Air Passenger Protection Regulations. And all was good, right?

Wrong.

We are now four years into the APPR, and things are just getting worse. Flights are cancelled more than ever, to the point that the operation of one of Canada’s largest airports has become an international joke. It’s now more uncommon for your flight to leave on time, than not. There have been reports, and I have personally witnessed, the reason for a flight delay changing minute-by-minute, presumably in an effort to reduce culpability of the airline under the APPR.

The APPR is also somehow supposed to justify this total waste of your valuable time by compensating you, but only if you have the hours and hours to spend on hold, agitated, and trying to eventually advocate for yourself if and when you reach someone. Even then, you will likely be drastically under-compensated for your expenses, time, and emotional injury. Not to mention, I didn’t need the money. I needed the vacation.

Most astounding is the government’s seeming inability to ask more of our airlines. They know it’s a problem, and they know that Canadians are mistreated and gaslighted as a rule by our monopolized industry. Where is the anger? For the most part, it’s directed toward the unwitting, unequipped front-line customer-service workers hired by the airline.

In medical education literature, we talk a lot about burnout — there’s actually a recipe, believe it or not. To create burnout, all you need to do is burden someone with a high amount of responsibility and give them no ability to do anything about it. I write this article as my flight to Florida, for a three-day vacation, has been cancelled due to a pilot shortage. A quick Google search has indicated to me that the Air Canada pilot shortage is nothing new and something they should have known about at least days ago, if not weeks.

I’m going to carry on, and enjoy the one and a half days in the Sunshine State I will be able to squeeze in. My flights are now all booked at an ungodly hour, early in the morning, and I cannot fathom how I will return from this trip rested.

I am burned out. The helpless Air Canada customer service rep I was helplessly rude toward is burnt out, Canadians are burnt out. We expect more.

DR. TRAVIS BARRON, MD, CCFP

Brandon