Drones, Air Mobility, and the Law — Canada's Part IX vs FAA Part 108

The legal architecture of autonomous airspace is being written right now — on both sides of the 49th parallel, but not at the same pace. Canada's CARs Part IX reform is in force in 2025. The U.S. FAA Part 108 rule is still in its comment window, with operational timelines pointing at 2026 at the earliest. For operators, infrastructure developers, and counsel, that gap is the entire planning horizon.

This is the brief I delivered to the Canadian Bar Association in Vancouver this spring. The full slide deck is linked at the bottom of this post — it is, I think, the most useful single artifact for understanding what changed, what hasn't yet, and where the live legal questions sit.

What Part IX actually changes

Part IX is a structural shift, not a tweak. Three things matter most:

• Tiered, scalable BVLOS authorization. Beyond Visual Line of Sight is no

longer the regulatory bottleneck it has been for the last decade. Operators earn authorization through risk-tiered approval rather than one-off special flight operations certificates.

• The Remotely Piloted Operator Certificate (RPOC). Accountability moves

from the individual pilot to the corporate operator. That brings safety management systems, recordkeeping, and operational control under formal oversight — the way airline operations have been regulated for decades.

• A legal framework that anticipates autonomy. Part IX is written with

remotely piloted, optionally piloted, and increasingly autonomous systems in mind. It is the first North American framework that treats autonomy as an engineering reality rather than a regulatory exception.

Where the U.S. is going — and isn't

Part 108 is performance-based and architecturally interesting. It contemplates Approved Detect and Avoid (DAA) standards, Remote ID as the spine of airspace identification, and a class of third-party Automated Data Service Providers (ADSPs) that operate as the connective tissue between operator, infrastructure, and regulator.

But it isn't in force yet. Operators planning U.S. operations in 2025–2026 should expect the existing Part 107 / waiver path with all its limitations, not a clean Part 108 runway. Cross-border operators in particular need to plan for two regulatory regimes in parallel, with different certification, liability, and data obligations on each side.

The questions that aren't settled

The interesting legal work is not in the rule text. It is in the questions the rules don't answer:

• Should airspace traffic management be a public utility or a regulated

private platform?

• Who owns low-altitude airspace data — the operator, the ADSP, the state,

or the landowner below?

• How is liability allocated when an AI-driven system makes the flight

decision that causes harm?

• Will Canada and the U.S. need new bilateral treaties to govern cross-border

drone corridor operations? The Warsaw and Montreal Conventions don't reach this layer.

These are not academic. They are the live legal issues showing up in boardrooms, courtrooms, and regulatory proceedings today.

The bigger picture

Society has regulated roads, railways, telecommunications networks, and satellites. We are now writing the rules for autonomous infrastructure in the sky. Lawyers — and the operators they advise — are not late to this conversation. They are early. Canada gave them an eighteen-month head start.

Read the full deck

The full CBA Vancouver 2026 deck — including the side-by-side comparison table, the liability mapping across manufacturer / software / operator / ADSP / TM, and the four open questions for technology and aviation lawyers — is available here:

Download the deck (PDF)

If you'd like to discuss what this means for your operation, jurisdiction, or client, contact us or reach me directly at kayre@cayres.ca.