Air Canada may have to pay more than the $18,000 it was found liable for in connection with the $20 million in gold and cash that was stolen from its cargo facilities at Toronto Pearson airport three years ago. Canada’s largest airline confirmed it settled a dispute in the federal court of appeal with Brink’s, the company that commissioned the shipment of some 400 kilograms of gold and 53 kilograms of bank notes from Switzerland to Toronto in April 2023. “We can confirm the appeal has been discontinued. We are pleased the matter has been resolved,” Air Canada’s director of media relations, Sean Davidson, said to CTV News in a statement this week. Neither company would confirm the amount of the settlement, which brings to an end one court fight over the theft, while several criminal cases continue to proceed in a Brampton, Ont., courthouse, including that of two former Air Canada employees. In a court filing, Brink’s said it paid millions back to its Swiss clients, Raiffeisen Schweiz, a retail bank, and Valcambi SA, a precious metals refining company, and blamed Air Canada for lax security measures. The court case took a surprising turn when a federal court judge found Air Canada was liable for around 1/1000th of the value of the goods it was transporting. The court found that Brinks didn’t declare a value on the shipment, so an international treaty limited Air Canada’s liability to about $40 a kilogram, the same rate as if an average passenger lost an average suitcase. “I can understand that most viewers might be surprised to learn about this, but Brink’s should not have been surprised to learn about this,” said trade lawyer Gavin Magrath of Magrath’s International Legal Counsel. Magrath said if a customer doesn’t declare the value of a shipment, a default amount specified by the Montreal Convention applies. “The carrier does not know what they are carrying, and you can’t ask a trucker or a plane or a steamship to have unlimited liability. They would only discover that your cargo was worth $20 million when there was an accident,” Magrath said. Brink’s appealed the judgement last year, saying they declared the value in other ways by using the “AC Secure” service, using words like “valuable,” “special supervision,” and the word “Gold” repeated at least 13 times. In the appeal, Brink’s proposed to publicly disclose Air Canada’s confidential security process and “highly commercially sensitive” confidential rates, their notice of appeal says. Then the case went silent, with no word from Brink’s on why. Air Canada confirmed the settlement to CTV News this week. Magrath said even though the treaty is clear, a settlement may have been a smart move. “Even if there’s only a five per cent chance that we lose, now we’re on the hook for $20 million. A reasonable party looking at that economic situation would have a strong incentive to pay a significant sum of money to avoid that risk,” he said.
