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An Air Canada airport line.
Hard Numbers: Air Canada to answer for sky-high baggage fees, Biden sets clemency record, Ottawa sanctions Chinese officials over Xinjiang abuses, Most Americans want feds to guarantee health care, Trump promises to “To ROCK” for a billion dollars
25 and 36: Think those additional carry-on baggage fees on airlines are getting out of hand? You’re not alone. Canadian lawmakers are set to grill Air Canada CEO Mike Rousseau about it on Friday after the nation’s flagship carrier hit low-fare travelers with new fees of $25 on their first carry-on, and $36 on their second. The CEOs of WestJet, Porter, and Air Transat Airlines will also be questioned. Airlines say that extra fees like this have become an indispensable source of revenue as cutthroat competition drives down profit margins.
1,500: US President Joe Biden on Thursday commuted the sentences of nearly 1,500 people in the largest act of clemency ever by a modern US president. The commutations applied to people who were placed in home confinement during the COVID pandemic when authorities sought to thin out crowded prison populations to slow the spread of the virus. Biden also pardoned 39 people who had been convicted of non-violent drug-related offenses. In case you are wondering: Commutation reduces a prison sentence, while a pardon erases a criminal record entirely.
8: Canada this week placed sanctions on eight Chinese government officials over alleged human rights abuses against the Uighurs, a Muslim minority, in China’s far western province of Xinjiang. The Chinese government stands accused of arbitrarily detaining more than a million people there, many of whom were subjected to psychological torture or forced labor in camps. Beijing denies the allegations.
62: A new poll shows nearly two-thirds of Americans, or 62%, think the federal government should ensure that people have health care coverage, the highest mark since 2006. As always, the partisan split is stark: 90% of Democrats agree with the idea, a 60-point gap compared to Republicans. Americans are split nearly evenly on whether insurance should be provided by the government or the private sector. A narrow majority of Americans support the Obama-era Affordable Care Act. There too, nearly all Democrats are pro-ACA, against just a fifth of Republicans and barely half of Independents.
1 billion: Got a billion dollars to invest in the United States? If so, President-elect Donald Trumpwants to roll out the red carpet for you – or at least grant you “expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals.” He made the pledge in a Truth Social post. It’s unclear what that will entail or how it will work, but it’s part of Trump’s plan to boost investment in the United States by slashing onerous permitting requirements that have come in for bipartisan criticism in recent years. “GET READY TO ROCK!” wrote Trump.
An Air Canada plane is seen in the air after departing from Pearson International Airport in Toronto, Ontario, Canada May 16, 2022.
Keeping your promises
In 2022, a grieving passenger went on Air Canada’s website and asked its AI-powered chatbot about the airline’s bereavement policy. The chatbot said yes, there are reduced fares if you’re traveling after the death of a loved one and you have 90 days after taking the flight in order to file a claim. The problem: That’s not Air Canada’s policy. The airline specifically requires passengers to apply for and receive the discount ahead of time — not after the flight.
Now, a Canadian court says that Air Canada has to honor the promises made by its AI chatbot, even though they were incorrect and inconsistent with the airline’s policies.
“While a chatbot has an interactive component, it is still just a part of Air Canada’s website,” the judge in the case wrote. “It should be obvious to Air Canada that it is responsible for all the information on its website. It makes no difference whether the information comes from a static page or a chatbot.”
It’s a big ruling that could set new precedent, at least in Canada, that AI companies — or their clients — are legally liable for the accuracy of their chatbots’ claims. And that’s no simple thing to fix: Generative AI models are notorious for hallucinating — or making stuff up. If using AI becomes a major liability, it could drastically change how AI companies act, train their models, and lawyer up.
And it would immediately make AI a tough product to sell.
An Air Canada Boeing 777-300ER aircraft approaching the runway at Heathrow Airport in London.
Hard Numbers: Air Canada pilots hit eject button, empty homes “jeopardize” US-Canada ties, Gujarati smugglers charged in deaths, Canada's new methane migraine
4,500: Air Canada’s roughly 4,500 pilots metaphorically flung open the emergency exit this week by opting out of their current contract in order to force new wage negotiations this summer. The pilots at Canada’s largest carrier have gotten 2% annual raises since 2014, but their counterparts at several US airlines recently won far heftier raises.
1: A new 1% tax on vacant or underused housing in Canada is putting US-Canada relations “in jeopardy,” according to a bipartisan group of US lawmakers. The legislators want Ottawa to exempt US citizens from the tax, which imposes the additional levy on residential properties that sit unused for more than half of each calendar year.
3: Authorities in the Indian state of Gujarat have charged three human traffickers in the deaths of a family they tried to smuggle across the US-Canada border in January 2022. The victims, who froze to death in the province of Manitoba, included an infant, a teenager, and their parents.
0.2: Canadian energy firms may struggle to meet new US and EU regulations that require that only 0.2% of the methane produced during oil and gas production escapes into the atmosphere. Canada has ambitious targets for reducing methane overall, but experts say many of its energy companies would struggle to meet these particular “methane intensity” requirements. That could be a problem if the US and EU decide to demand that their energy trade partners, which include Canada, abide by the rules.