If there’s one highly concentrated industry that the federal government refuses to address (perhaps more so than others), it’s airlines. It’s why Canadians pay some of the highest prices to fly and suffer under some of the weakest passenger protections in the world.
Over just the past year, the government has ignored a major report issued by the Competition Bureau that recommends solutions to the problem. The passenger complaint backlog continues to mount and sits at close to 100,000, with each individual issue taking years to resolve. And worse still, the feds are actively delaying making airlines pay for that complaints system.
With such inaction and even complicity by officials, other resistance emerges. Enter Gabor Lukacs.
For nearly 20 years, this one name has been striking fear into airlines by becoming synonymous with air passenger rights – in fact, Air Passenger Rights is his group, which has more than 274,000 members on Facebook.
Lukacs has fought – and won – dozens of court battles with the industry, getting passengers justice and the money they’re owed. He’s a fixture in virtually every news report on airline misdeeds, which is to say he’s on TV a lot. He’s the nation’s veritable avatar of discontent.
But who is Gabor Lukacs? Why has he taken up this crusade? What drives him?
A math prodigy from the beginning, Lukacs along with his father escaped an abusive mother in Hungary when he was just eight years old, setting a precedent in international child abduction law in the process. Then, he moved to Canada when he was just 16 to begin a PhD before becoming an extraordinarily young math professor.
He joins Do Not Pass Go this week to share his remarkable story and how it fuels his crusade for the justice that the government refuses to deliver.
For more, check out airpassengerrights.ca.
