This was a fascinating read indeed. I'm kind of impressed by the adjudicator for getting up to speed on Air Canada's operational systems (though he did seem to make a couple typos mixing up flight numbers and departure times).

The claimant's experience also reminded me of my own YOW-YYZ-MEX journey last July, when a delay of the YOW-YYZ flight (AC439) left me with 8 minutes to make a domestic-to-international connection that should have taken 27 minutes. In my case, I pleaded with the Concierge team to somehow intervene to not let the system prematurely offload me from my original YYZ-MEX flight (AC991), because the next one (AC993) was scheduled for 12 hours later. I'm not sure if they ended up doing that, but the gate agents for AC991 were both aware of my delayed arrival and extremely shocked that I made it in time.