Air Canada customers looking to lodge a complaint with the regulator over their experience during the recent flight attendants' strike should prepare for a wait.

The Canadian Transportation Agency said its backlog of air travel complaints stood at about 85,000 as of Aug. 14, two days before the strike started.

The agency had received nearly 13,500 complaints this year as of that date, which would not yet have included complaints related to the Air Canada work stoppage.

The backlog has been growing since the federal government passed rules that came into force in 2019 that set compensation amounts for flight delays, cancellations and the like.

The CTA implemented a new system in 2023 to ramp up its capacity to deal with complaints, but the number of gripes being submitted has also swell

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