Air Canada abandons 14-year old at Toronto airport after cancelling her flight

Diomerys O'Leary was already nervous about letting her 14-year-old daughter fly alone to visit her dad in the Dominican Republic, but she never imagined Air Canada would abandon the girl in Canada's biggest airport after cancelling the last leg of her trip home.

An email on Jan. 18 notified O'Leary that her daughter Eva's flight from Toronto's Pearson International Airport to St. John's was cancelled due to a labour disruption at the Newfoundland and Labrador airport, and rescheduled for two days later.

Then came the flood of texts from her panicked daughter, saying Air Canada told her she was on her own to find a place to sleep, food and transportation.

O'Leary told her daughter to go back to the Air Canada counter and ask for help again, but says staff turned the girl away a second time.

"She was crying and desperate, asking me 'What do I do?' … I just couldn't believe it," O'Leary told Go Public.

That was the beginning of a 24-hour ordeal, as O'Leary scrambled from more than 2,000 kilometres away to find a place for her daughter to stay, and something to eat.

"What did they [Air Canada] expect for her to do? Sit on a bench, and sleep there for days and not even give her food, or anything?" O'Leary said.

A passengers' advocate who was part of the government consultations that led to the Air Passenger Protection Regulations says the airline's own rules allow it to avoid taking responsibility.

"[This will come] as a pretty big surprise to a lot of adults if they do send their child on a plane … because under Air Canada's own rules, they could be abandoned," said Ian Jack, vice president of public affairs at the Canadian Automobile Association.

"You would expect that the carriers would have good procedures in place for this." 

Like other airlines — WestJet and Air Transat among them — Air Canada offers a for-fee service subject to certain conditions, where staff help kids flying on their own. But that service is not available for multi-leg trips like Eva's.

In those cases, the airline said in an email its practice, "is to give priority assistance to certain passengers travelling with us, such as disabled, elderly and young people," but says, that day, it was dealing with "unexpected and abrupt" flight cancellations and "hundreds of customers requiring assistance." 

O'Leary spent hours on the phone and online trying to organize help for her daughter, while the girl waited alone at the Toronto airport.

Hotels would not take an underage teen. She didn't have any cash for food and her Apple Pay app was not working.