As you might imagine, I am not winning any popularity contests within my own pilot group. The poll that we conducted gave us results of about 4 to 1 against changing the Age 60 limit.
Almost everyone who signed on knew what to expect when they accepted the job. But that doesn't change the fact that a company and its pilot union can't "contract out" of the human rights legislation.
The Complainant, in our case, never made it to Captain status, primarily because he was denied a job in 1974 on the basis of his age (he has a letter from the VP expressly stating that he would have been hired, but for his age). When he was eventually hired, twelve years later, after the passage of the Human Rights legislation prohibiting discrimination on the basis of age, he had to comtemplate his impending forced retirement, at the same time that pilots of other Canadian airlines of his age were expecting to continue working.
The major problem we are having internally is not the substance of the dispute, but the emotion of the dispute.