Canada’s transport regulator has ordered WestJet to scrap the 300-pound weight cap it places on power wheelchairs, ruling on August 20 that the limit creates an “undue barrier” for travellers with disabilities. The case was brought by Winnipeg’s Steven Fletcher, a former federal minister of state for transport, after WestJet refused to carry his custom wheelchair on a flight in early 2025. The Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) gave WestJet until July 2027 to switch to “spreader plates” that better distribute a wheelchair’s weight across the cargo hold floor — nearly a year from now.
A Complaint-by-Complaint Fix, Not a Rule Change
What’s missing from most coverage of the ruling is how narrow it actually is. The CTA’s order applies only to WestJet, and only because Fletcher — and separately, a Saskatoon family whose 14-year-old daughter Georgia was barred from a WestJet flight to Mexico despite having flown with the same roughly 400-pound chair before, including on a Make-A-Wish trip to Paris — filed individual complaints under the agency’s Accessible Transportation for Persons with Disabilities Regulations (ATPDR). Those regulations, in force since 2019, let the CTA fine federally regulated carriers up to $250,000 per violation; it fined Air Canada $97,500 for separate ATPDR violations earlier this year. But this WestJet decision isn’t a fine. It’s a remedial order arising from a complaint, meaning the agency can act only on the specific policy a specific passenger challenges, not issue a blanket rule covering every airline with a similar cap.
Why Flair’s Identical Policy Isn’t Covered
That distinction matters because WestJet isn’t the only Canadian carrier with a 300-pound mobility-aid limit. B.C.-based Flair Airlines, which flies the same Boeing 737 aircraft type WestJet cited in its own technical justification, maintains the identical threshold, according to its website and reporting by The Canadian Press. Flair wasn’t named in Fletcher’s complaint and isn’t bound by the CTA’s order, meaning a wheelchair user could face the same “undue barrier” on Flair the day after WestJet’s fix takes effect, unless and until someone files a separate complaint against Flair specifically and waits out another multi-year process.
The U.S. Already Banned This — More Than a Year Ago
South of the border, the same question was settled by regulation rather than complaint-driven litigation. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s “Ensuring Safe Accommodations for Air Travelers With Disabilities Using Wheelchairs” rule, finalized in December 2024 and in effect since January 2025, requires airlines to carry wheelchairs regardless of weight as long as they fit through the aircraft’s cargo doors. American Airlines had already learned to live with that standard, reversing its own 300-pound cap in 2021 after an advocacy campaign, without needing a formal DOT order to do it. No other major North American carrier operating Boeing 737s maintains WestJet’s threshold, according to John Morris, founder of WheelchairTravel.org, who has tracked the issue since American’s reversal.
Canada’s ATPDR framework gives the CTA real enforcement teeth on paper — a $250,000-per-violation penalty scale, far more than a single stranded traveller could recover through the courts. What this case shows is that those teeth activate one complaint, one airline, and one multi-year timeline at a time, while a comparable U.S. problem was fixed with a single rulemaking covering every carrier at once. Fletcher, who says he flew with power wheelchairs on WestJet for three decades before the cap took effect, put the stakes plainly: “Being able to move around your own country is not a service upgrade, and it is not a courtesy. It is a condition of citizenship.” Whether Ottawa’s regulator moves toward that kind of blanket standard, or leaves Flair’s identical cap for the next passenger to challenge on their own, is the question this ruling leaves open.
via The Canadian Press / BNN Bloomberg (source)
