As the ALPA Canada President, I spend significant time advocating for our profession’s concerns before Parliament, agencies, and our regulators. Recently, we successfully challenged and had the WestJet Group senior management rescind their efforts to deploy temporary foreign workers at WestJet Encore. Unfortunately, that action is not the end of the issue, as this situation highlighted our need to seek governmental changes to how the program is supposed to operate.

 

Besides this work, the ALPA Canada Officers also focus our efforts on protecting Canadian pilots from the obstacles routinely placed before us. One area that I am particularly proud of is the work that our ALPA Air Safety Organization (ASO), the largest nongovernmental aviation safety organization in the world, accomplishes for our members. We take great pride within the Association of the work we do to promote safety, security, pilot assistance, and the jumpseat.

Within the Pilot Assistance group of the ASO is an important program designed to assist our Canadian members: the Canadian Aeromedical Support Program (CASP), available to all ALPA members.

As ALPA's presence in Canada has grown immensely in recent years, so too have our resources for Canadian members. They say, "If you build it, they will come," and we’ve built up our offerings tremendously, including the CASP.

This program is comprised of the ALPA Canada aeromedical advisor, pilot health consultants, pilot volunteers, and ALPA Canada support staff, and is designed to support members with aeromedical health issues or concerns that affect their Transport Canada Civil Aviation medical--at no additional cost.

It’s not a replacement for your personal CAME, but rather a resource of experienced aeromedical consultant physicians that can answer your medical questions and assist you with individual pilot medical certification issues.

ALPA members can self-schedule a virtual appointment with a designated aeromedical consultant physician to answer their questions. The program also offers the opportunity for help in navigating your interaction with Transport Canada Civil Aviation Medicine--though we note it’s not a "fast track" for your file, it does provide another resource advocating on your behalf which can make the process go more smoothly and quickly.

Finally, CASP has developed initiatives and collected resources for preventative health and enhancing the long-term well-being of members, including in areas such as fumes events, hypertension, ADHD, Type 2 diabetes, and more.

The CASP is just one of the many resources available through ALPA membership, and another wonderful example of how by banding together we can achieve so much more than we’re able to achieve separately.

If you haven’t done so yet, I encourage you to fill out an ALPA membership card. I look forward to soon welcoming the Porter pilots into ALPA as a single unified group, and working with you in the future. I strongly believe that we each do better when we all do better.

Cards can be submitted by any of the following methods:

In Unity,