In light of recent accessibility shortfalls, Air Canada has apologized and pledged to speed up its previously announced three-year accessibility plan.
Ottawa summoned the airline last week following several events involving passengers with disabilities, including Canada’s chief accessibility officer and one man who had to drag himself off a plane in Las Vegas due to a lack of assistance.
Air Canada representatives met with the federal transport and diversity, inclusion and persons with disabilities ministers on Thursday morning.
“The first thing we told Air Canada was that was unacceptable what happened and they agree with us,” said Transport Minister Pablo Rodriguez.
“We told them that they need a clear plan on the short term and long term. We’re going to meet again in December to see how things improve.”
In the meeting, Air Canada notified the ministers of its plan to introduce immediate measures that update its boarding process, training and the way mobility aids are stored, while introducing an app feature that will allow passengers to track their wheelchairs in storage.
“We just would like to apologize to any customers that we’ve let down. We know that we need to do better,” said Tom Stevens, Air Canada’s vice-president of customer experience and operation strategy.
“That accessibility plan has been built with consultation with advocacy groups, with our own customers and external consultants to ensure that we’re getting at the challenging areas that our customers need us to improve in.”
Stevens added that the airline does not provide service to customers with accessibility needs “because we have to,” but rather “because we want to.”
Transport Minister Pablo Rodriguez and Diversity, Inclusion and Persons with Disabilities Minister Kamal Khera respond to questions from the media after speaking with Air Canada, Thursday, November 9, 2023 in Ottawa. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld
Disability advocate Maayan Ziv said one of the biggest problems is that airlines treat mobility devices like baggage, instead of an extension of the passenger.
“There is a very big difference between losing a suitcase and losing your independence and your mobility,” said Ziv, who had her wheelchair “damaged beyond repair” during a flight last year.
“This continues to happen every single day to people with disabilities everywhere.”
Gábor Lukács, president of Air Passenger Rights, believes further protections need to be put in place across the country, including regulations that force airlines to pay a minimum fine every time a wheelchair is lost or damaged.
“Good intentions are not enough. What needs to happen is that profit has to be tied to morally good behaviour. That is the whole idea of regulatory law,” he said.
WIDESPREAD ISSUES ACROSS CANADIAN AIRLINES
Data from the Canadian Transportation Agency shows nearly 1,100 passengers have submitted accessibility complaints over the last five years, including 224 in the 2023-24 fiscal year. In total, 16 wheelchairs have been reported damaged by airlines since 2018.
Sarah Turnbull’s four-year-old daughter, Blake, has been living without the comfort of her own pediatric wheelchair for more than a month.
A rim on her wheelchair was bent, according to Turnbull, while the device was stowed away under the airplane on their WestJet flight from Regina to Toronto in early October.
It is an incident Turnbull said she was prepared for, but it is still frustrating.
“I put a wheelchair in and out of a van five or six times a day, but I don’t break a wheelchair every time we go in and out of the van,” she said.
Turnbull was flying with Blake, her two-year-old son and her parents.
Blake, who has spina bifida, which is a neural tube defect, and her grandmother, Elizabeth, both require a wheelchair. When the plane landed, Turnbull and her father went to retrieve the chairs and assemble them, while the rest of the family waited on the plane.
“The plane hostesses kept asking us to leave. Then the pilot asked us to leave the plane,” Elizabeth said.
“We had little choice but to disembark.”
The Turnbulls flew from Regina to Toronto on Oct. 4. (Courtesy of Sarah Turnbull)
Turnbull’s toddler had to walk off the plane himself, while Blake crawled down the aisle.
“They called my daughter a salamander as she was crawling, wriggling off the plane,” Turnbull said.
“I was really upset because my daughter has two medical openings on her stomach and it’s just really filthy.”
Turnbull filed a claim with WestJet, but delays on parts have the family still waiting for the wheelchair to be repaired. It is expected to be fixed in the next two weeks, she said.
In the interim, the Turnbulls were fortunate enough to source a loaner chair from a friend to allow Blake her independence. But Turnbull said not everyone is that lucky.
“You don’t have multiple backup wheelchairs when the first wheelchair already cost you like $7,000,” she said.
WestJet apologized to the family and said it is working on the claim and will cover the costs of the parts and adjustments needed for Blake’s loaner chair.
“We sincerely apologize for the handling failures the Turnbull family had while flying with WestJet. This is not the standard we aspire to deliver,” a WestJet spokesperson said in a statement emailed to CTV News.
“Upon gaining a fulsome understanding of the severity of the situation, we engaged our disability assistance team to conduct a thorough investigation and review of the incident.”
Turnbull said the incident will not prevent her and her family from flying in the future. However, the fear of having a mobility device damaged does make some wheelchair users hesitant about flying.
“Every time that I have an incident, it just adds to that overall anxiety that I experience,” Ziv said.
“Every time I get on a flight, I know that something could potentially go wrong because we just don’t have the proper infrastructure, training or systems in place to protect people like myself from experiencing the type of barriers that we do.”
TOKYO (AP) — Japanese technology group SoftBank swung back to profitability in the July-September quarter, boosted by positive results in its Vision Fund investments.
Tokyo-based SoftBank Group Corp. reported Tuesday a fiscal second quarter profit of nearly 1.18 trillion yen ($7.7 billion), compared with a 931 billion yen loss in the year-earlier period.
Quarterly sales edged up about 6% to nearly 1.77 trillion yen ($11.5 billion).
SoftBank credited income from royalties and licensing related to its holdings in Arm, a computer chip-designing company, whose business spans smartphones, data centers, networking equipment, automotive, consumer electronic devices, and AI applications.
The results were also helped by the absence of losses related to SoftBank’s investment in office-space sharing venture WeWork, which hit the previous fiscal year.
WeWork, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2023, emerged from Chapter 11 in June.
SoftBank has benefitted in recent months from rising share prices in some investment, such as U.S.-based e-commerce company Coupang, Chinese mobility provider DiDi Global and Bytedance, the Chinese developer of TikTok.
SoftBank’s financial results tend to swing wildly, partly because of its sprawling investment portfolio that includes search engine Yahoo, Chinese retailer Alibaba, and artificial intelligence company Nvidia.
SoftBank makes investments in a variety of companies that it groups together in a series of Vision Funds.
The company’s founder, Masayoshi Son, is a pioneer in technology investment in Japan. SoftBank Group does not give earnings forecasts.
Shopify Inc. executives brushed off concerns that incoming U.S. President Donald Trump will be a major detriment to many of the company’s merchants.
“There’s nothing in what we’ve heard from Trump, nor would there have been anything from (Democratic candidate) Kamala (Harris), which we think impacts the overall state of new business formation and entrepreneurship,” Shopify’s chief financial officer Jeff Hoffmeister told analysts on a call Tuesday.
“We still feel really good about all the merchants out there, all the entrepreneurs that want to start new businesses and that’s obviously not going to change with the administration.”
Hoffmeister’s comments come a week after Trump, a Republican businessman, trounced Harris in an election that will soon return him to the Oval Office.
On the campaign trail, he threatened to impose tariffs of 60 per cent on imports from China and roughly 10 per cent to 20 per cent on goods from all other countries.
If the president-elect makes good on the promise, many worry the cost of operating will soar for companies, including customers of Shopify, which sells e-commerce software to small businesses but also brands as big as Kylie Cosmetics and Victoria’s Secret.
These merchants may feel they have no choice but to pass on the increases to customers, perhaps sparking more inflation.
If Trump’s tariffs do come to fruition, Shopify’s president Harley Finkelstein pointed out China is “not a huge area” for Shopify.
However, “we can’t anticipate what every presidential administration is going to do,” he cautioned.
He likened the uncertainty facing the business community to the COVID-19 pandemic where Shopify had to help companies migrate online.
“Our job is no matter what comes the way of our merchants, we provide them with tools and service and support for them to navigate it really well,” he said.
Finkelstein was questioned about the forthcoming U.S. leadership change on a call meant to delve into Shopify’s latest earnings, which sent shares soaring 27 per cent to $158.63 shortly after Tuesday’s market open.
The Ottawa-based company, which keeps its books in U.S. dollars, reported US$828 million in net income for its third quarter, up from US$718 million in the same quarter last year, as its revenue rose 26 per cent.
Revenue for the period ended Sept. 30 totalled US$2.16 billion, up from US$1.71 billion a year earlier.
Subscription solutions revenue reached US$610 million, up from US$486 million in the same quarter last year.
Merchant solutions revenue amounted to US$1.55 billion, up from US$1.23 billion.
Shopify’s net income excluding the impact of equity investments totalled US$344 million for the quarter, up from US$173 million in the same quarter last year.
Daniel Chan, a TD Cowen analyst, said the results show Shopify has a leadership position in the e-commerce world and “a continued ability to gain market share.”
In its outlook for its fourth quarter of 2024, the company said it expects revenue to grow at a mid-to-high-twenties percentage rate on a year-over-year basis.
“Q4 guidance suggests Shopify will finish the year strong, with better-than-expected revenue growth and operating margin,” Chan pointed out in a note to investors.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
TORONTO – RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust says it has cut almost 10 per cent of its staff as it deals with a slowdown in the condo market and overall pushes for greater efficiency.
The company says the cuts, which amount to around 60 employees based on its last annual filing, will mean about $9 million in restructuring charges and should translate to about $8 million in annualized cash savings.
The job cuts come as RioCan and others scale back condo development plans as the market softens, but chief executive Jonathan Gitlin says the reductions were from a companywide efficiency effort.
RioCan says it doesn’t plan to start any new construction of mixed-use properties this year and well into 2025 as it adjusts to the shifting market demand.
The company reported a net income of $96.9 million in the third quarter, up from a loss of $73.5 million last year, as it saw a $159 million boost from a favourable change in the fair value of investment properties.
RioCan reported what it says is a record-breaking 97.8 per cent occupancy rate in the quarter including retail committed occupancy of 98.6 per cent.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
