Tausi Insider

Toronto Pearson International Airport saw passenger volumes rise by 135 per cent in the three months ending on Sept. 30, as the operator of Canada’s busiest airport rode a tumultuous return to travel. Toronto Pearson’s operator, the Greater Toronto Airports Authority, made a profit of $73-million in the third quarter, reversing a loss of $58-million in the same period a year ago. Revenue rose by 72 per cent to $422-million. The financial results released on Thursday underscore the size of the wave of pentup demand for travel unleashed by the easing of pandemic and related restrictions. The GTAA said the number of travellers rose by 6.5 million to 11.2 million, compared with the year-earlier quarter. This lags the prepandemic third quarter of 2019, when 14.2 million passengers travelled through Toronto Pearson. Toronto Pearson, other Canadian airports and airlines were ill-prepared for the wave of 2022, as travellers faced delays, congestion and lineups due to a lack of workers in air...

Transport Minister Omar Alghabra appears as a witness at the Public Order Emergency Commission, in Ottawa, on Nov. 23. PATRICK DOYLE/The Canadian Press Transport Minister Omar Alghabra met with members of the air transport sector to discuss measures to modernize and digitize the industry and to learn from the mistakes that led to major travel disruptions this summer. Alghabra, alongside minister Randy Boissonnault and parliamentary secretary Annie Koutrakis, led a national summit on the recovery of the air sector Thursday to discuss improvements to Canada’s air transportation, including transparency, accountability and passenger rights. Alghabra says that after the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, last summer the air industry faced a new crisis of congestion and delays. He says government officials and air transport actors discussed plans to improve ahead of the winter travel surge including modernizing the security screening process and digitizing the sharing of information. Over th...

A passenger makes their way through Toronto's Pearson International Airport. The percentage of cancelled and delayed flights at Canadian airports has declined since the summer, but remains elevated. Cole Burston/The Canadian Press Air passenger volume this holiday season is poised to reach prepandemic standards, but whether Canadians are in for the normal level of peak travel stress or a repeat of the mayhem that unfolded across the country’s major airports over the summer remains unclear. Despite a slew of backlog-busting initiatives by airport authorities, some experts still see a significant risk of widespread cancellations and delays. John Gradek, co-ordinator of McGill University’s aviation management program, points to a “very real possibility” of holiday flight cancellations if airlines’ travel schedules turn out to be more ambitious than what airports can handle. While the percentage of cancelled and delayed flights at Canadian airports has declined since the summer, it r...

Passengers line-up at Pearson International Airport, in Toronto. Aaron Vincent Elkaim/The Canadian Press With the holiday travel season around the corner, Canada’s busiest airport is looking to redeem itself from a reputation of cancellations and delays this past summer. Toronto Pearson International Airport released its travel tips for passengers Tuesday. The airport said the week leading up to Christmas is expected to be the busiest time to travel as well as the days around Jan. 9, when many children return to school. In preparation for the spike, the airport has introduced an online security reservation system, YYZ Express, that lets customers on select flights reserve their security screening spot in advance. In September, the airport launched an online dashboard so that passengers can receive live wait times on security screening, customs, airline counters and baggage carousels. The airport peak times dashboard is another function Pearson recommends customers use that shows the ...

Statistics Canada says November saw the lowest number of employment insurance beneficiaries on record in 25 years. The federal agency says November marked the lowest number of people receiving EI since comparable data became available in 1997, with the exception of the summer of 2020 when the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit was in place. The unemployment rate in November was 5.1 per cent. Statistics Canada says the number of people receiving regular EI benefits that month fell in eight provinces. The agency says fewer men and women in all age groups collected regular EI benefits in November. The agency’s Labour Force Survey found the number of core-aged people who left a job involuntarily in the past 12 months was down 3.2 per cent in November compared with a year before, and down 18.6 per cent compared with November 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic. “This decline in the number of people leaving a job involuntarily could have contributed to the historic lows in the number of peo...

The European Central Bank (ECB) is set to raise interest rates by 50 basis points in both February and March and will continue to raise rates in the months after, ECB governing council member Klaas Knot said in an interview with Dutch broadcaster WNL on Sunday. “Expect us to raise rates by 0.5% in February and March and expect us to not be done by then and that more steps will follow in May and June,” Knot said. In a separate interview with Italian newspaper La Stampa published on Sunday, Knot said it was “too early to tell” if the ECB could slow down the pace of its rate increases by the summer. “At some point, of course, the risks surrounding the inflation outlook will become more balanced,” he said. “That would also be a time in which we could make a further step down from 50 to 25 basis points, for instance. But we are still far away from that.” https://www.tausiinsider.com/european-central-bank-set-to-raise-interest-rates-by-50-basis-points-in-both-february-and-march-knot-s...

Passengers line-up at Pearson International Airport, in Toronto. Aaron Vincent Elkaim/The Canadian Press With the holiday travel season around the corner, Canada’s busiest airport is looking to redeem itself from a reputation of cancellations and delays this past summer. Toronto Pearson International Airport released its travel tips for passengers Tuesday. The airport said the week leading up to Christmas is expected to be the busiest time to travel as well as the days around Jan. 9, when many children return to school. In preparation for the spike, the airport has introduced an online security reservation system, YYZ Express, that lets customers on select flights reserve their security screening spot in advance. In September, the airport launched an online dashboard so that passengers can receive live wait times on security screening, customs, airline counters and baggage carousels. The airport peak times dashboard is another function Pearson recommends customers use that shows the ...