Lost wallet lands traveller in bureaucratic no man's land
Property went missing during screening at Ottawa airport
Carleton University student Kyle Boulay says at this point, he isn't too bothered about losing his money and ID, he's more upset over the poor assistance he received from authorities in trying to find his wallet.
Photograph by: Bruno Schlumberger, The Ottawa Citizen
Kyle Boulay got a lot of bad advice about what he should do after he lost his wallet at a pre-boarding gate at Ottawa airport last summer.
Six months later, he's still being pointed in different directions.
What bothers Boulay isn't the cash that he lost or the inconvenience of having to have his credit, bank and ID cards re-issued. He says "it's just the fact that there's so little accountability" over the lousy help he received from authorities in trying to find the wallet.
Boulay, a Carleton University student who was embarking on an agricultural exchange trip -- first to the Gaspé Peninsula in eastern Quebec, and then to the African country of Mali -- barely made his Montreal-bound flight after going through pre-board screening at Ottawa airport. He couldn't get through the metal detector because it kept sounding off. At least three times, he was sent back to find and remove from his clothing whatever was setting it off. The harried Boulay finally got through and made it to his plane just minutes before it was to take off for Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport in Dorval.
Oops, he thought, as he took his seat. "I don't have my wallet."
Boulay, 23, remembered placing it on the conveyor belt after the detector sounded a third or fourth time. He retrieved his other belongings, but figured he missed the wallet because he had not placed it in a bin.
He managed to speak to the pilot. Too late, he was told, but he could go to airport security at Pierre Trudeau and have his problem relayed to Ottawa.
Boulay says he was told at the Dorval airport by security that all their Ottawa counterparts would have to do if they hadn't already found his wallet was review video from closed-circuit cameras.
"They said: 'We would just take the camera. It would take two seconds. It wouldn't be a problem, but that's what we would do. We can't speak for Ottawa, but I don't see why that would be a problem'," Boulay told The Public Citizen.
If the wallet hadn't been found, Boulay was hoping the video would show someone pocketing it.
Boulay phoned Ottawa airport security from the Air Canada counter, and says he was able to provide a "10-minute window" of when he went through the security gate. A wallet had not been turned in, he was told, and before airport security could review video, authorization was required from Ottawa police. Pressed for time because he had another plane to catch, he decided to wait until he got to Amqui -- the first stop on his exchange trip -- to call police. But police say Boulay's call came a week after he left Ottawa and he couldn't say where in the airport he had misplaced the wallet.
"I guess it was a civilian I was speaking to," Boulay said, adding the man didn't sound too interested in the problem. He was told the information would be passed on, but if the police didn't get anywhere with it, Boulay just wouldn't hear anything more.
Boulay was given a case number. He didn't hear from police for the duration of his four-month trip.
He called police in late January after returning to Ottawa from Mali. He was told his file was closed, as an officer determined there wasn't any evidence to warrant checking the camera. But when Boulay finally made contact with the officer a couple of weeks ago, he was told that it had been his own responsibility to call airport security with the case number to have the video reviewed.
The officer gave him a number for airport security. They told Boulay the opposite. Police have to provide case numbers directly to airport security before anything is done, he was informed.
Regardless of who was supposed to do what, it's too late to do anything, as that video is long gone. Video from pre-boarding gates is only kept for about 15 days.
Too bad so much time has passed, says the Canada Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA), which is responsible for pre-board screening at Canadian airports. It would have gladly reviewed the video if Boulay had spoken to staff back when he lost the wallet.
Authority spokesman Mathieu Larocque says the security personnel Boulay spoke to at the Dorval airport appear to be the only ones who knew what they were talking about.
Larocque says he can only guess that Boulay was not directed to the CATSA office at the Ottawa airport when he called there between flights last August and again this month.
Larocque says there are procedures in place when CATSA gets a complaint from a passenger about a lost item or even rude security staff. A report is taken and the video is reviewed to see if an investigation is warranted.
In the case of Boulay's wallet, Larocque says if the video showed it had been pocketed, the thief would have been identified from pre-boarding records. The information would then have been turned over to police.
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