Air travel with a wheelchair in Canada is going through a reckoning. The Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) has fined Air Canada, ordered WestJet to overhaul its policies, and pushed airlines to treat mobility aids as operational necessities rather than awkward extra baggage. Yet wheelchair users are still heading to court, arguing that regulatory penalties don't go far enough.
The litigation centres on Rodney Hodgins, a British Columbia man with spastic cerebral palsy, whose treatment after a flight to Las Vegas led to a C$97,500 CTA penalty against Air Canada in December 2023. That came weeks after a separate C$52,500 fine over a disabled passenger's boarding and the delayed return of a mobility aid. Hodgins has now filed a certified class action against the airline, seeking civil remedies on behalf of a wider group of passengers who say the problems run deeper than individual staff failures.
A second case shifts the issue from airport assistance to the aircraft itself. Timothy Rose, a power wheelchair user, challenged Air Canada over a route flown with a plane whose cargo door was too small for his chair. In March 2025, the Federal Court of Appeal upheld the CTA's finding that Air Canada had not proven undue hardship — meaning the airline can be required to swap in a compatible aircraft when given sufficient notice. In other words, accessibility now touches fleet planning, scheduling and crew logistics, not just the gate.
WestJet faces its own structural problem. It had imposed a 136-kilogram (300-pound) weight limit on mobility aids across most of its fleet, but the CTA ruled the cap created an undue barrier for users of heavier power chairs. The airline must remove the restriction from most aircraft before July 2027, and the agency has suggested engineering fixes such as spreader plates — which distribute a heavy chair's weight across a larger section of the cargo floor, since aircraft care about load concentration as much as total mass. Until then, passengers whose chairs exceed the old limit can be rebooked on other carriers.
The pattern across these cases is the same: accessibility is moving upstream into the guts of airline operations — reservations, aircraft assignment, cargo handling and ground equipment — rather than being handled as a service issue at the departure gate.
For travellers, this matters in practical ways. If you fly with a mobility aid in Canada, airlines are increasingly expected to plan for your chair before you arrive, and you have firmer grounds for complaint when they don't. The CTA can investigate, fine carriers and order changes, while the Hodgins class action may open a further civil route to compensation. Passengers on other routes and in other countries will be watching closely, since the tension between regulators and airlines over wheelchair handling plays out worldwide.
