Statement | Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project welcomes final report of Competition Bureau airline market study

June 19, 2025 [OTTAWA, ON] – The Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project (CAMP) welcomes today’s release of the Competition Bureau’s long-awaited final report on Canada’s airline market, confirming what Canadians already know: the airline industry and existing consumer protections are failing travellers.

“CAMP endorses the Bureau’s clear acknowledgement that Canada’s airline market is not delivering for Canadians,” said CAMP executive director Keldon Bester. “Successive federal governments have given the green light to harmful mergers and allowed passenger complaints to skyrocket without resolution. Canadians deserve better. The cozy duopoly that divides the country rather than competes for it needs immediate and meaningful government action.”

The report marks an important milestone as the first market study to occur under the Bureau’s new powers to compel information from companies instead of relying on insufficient voluntary disclosures by the very companies being studied.  

CAMP is encouraged that the Bureau adopted several recommendations from its own submission to the study, including:

• Reducing the reliance on user fees biased against smaller players to fund the air travel system.
• Increasing the allowed level of foreign ownership of airlines from 25% to 49%.
• Publishing a wider range of public data on the air travel system. 

Unfortunately, missing from the Bureau’s recommendations was a plan to improve competition for the rural and remote communities that need it most and a plan to ensure Canadian travelers have recourse when things go wrong. 

To address those fundamental gaps, CAMP recommends the Government of Canada:

• Explore a regulatory model that provides routine, utility-like service to rural and remote communities that depend on air travel.
• Increase funding for the Canadian Transportation Agency to clear the existing complaint backlog and ensure timely resolutions going forward by streamlining the complaint process under the Air Passenger Protection Regulation (APPR).
• Avoid relaxation of restrictions on domestic operations of foreign carriers absent reciprocal relaxation or investment on the part of foreign air carriers, following the models of Australia and Chile.

Through meaningful reform and targeted investment that supports competition, the Government of Canada can transform Canada’s underperforming airline market into a critical component of its nation-building efforts connecting us from coast to coast to coast.