Obese Have Rights in Canada

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Obese people have the right to two airline seats for the price of one on flights within Canada…because they are “functionally disabled.”

The decision, made by the Canadian Transportation Agency, was appealed by the major Canadian carriers, who lost their final appeal last week.

The question is what the definition of functionally disabled means. People ask often if obesity, which is epidemic in the United States and many other industrialized nations, is a disabled, or a sign of lifestyle that can be changed.

We choose not to open that can of worms. We will say what we have said in the past. The litmus test of fairness is people. An airline seat should be designed to comfortably fit the standard deviation from the mean…essentially, the size range of the majority of people that constitute the airline’s passengers. Since people are taller and fatter than they used to be, and seats are generally not keeping pace, the airline industry can be said to be unfair in this regard.

Someone else, hopefully a government official with regulatory powers, will set this as a reasonable standard in air travel. The standard now is one person, one fare, with some exceptions.

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