Competency Is A "Given"
I hope that the thread doesn't get too far off track...
In our hearings before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, competency was not in issue, it was a given. The reason being that professional pilot competency is not generally the domain of those deciding the mandatory retirement age, if any.
In Canada, there is no regulated mandatory retirement age. There hasn't been since the passage of the federal law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of age, decades ago. Because licensing is determined by the regulator through the use of frequent and recurrent tests of both medical and professional competency, there isn't a need for a "blanket" age prohibition based on assumed (lack of) competency.
So the issue here is not whether age affects competency--competency is assumed. The issue the I posed at the outset is, how are companies changing their mandatory retirement policies re age, where those policies exist, as a result of the industry changes, and in particular, as a result of the ICAO changes re Pilot-In-Command, that were made effective in November, 2006?
Perhaps a separate thread on the competency issue would be a good place to debate that issue.