In August of 2025 Air Canada’s flight attendants went on strike and all hell broke loose. Many thousands of passengers were impacted, thrown into stressful chaos as they tried to figure out how to preserve their trips without paying last minute booking prices.
Air Canada was required by law to find other seats for each displaced passenger but, even if the Airline Passenger Protection Regulations (APPR) didn’t inexplicably count labor disruption as a act of god (meaning they weren’t really motivated to solve the problem as much as they should have been - probably explaining why they refused to book people on non-partner airlines, and counted delivering Vancouver-destined passengers to Seattle as a job well done) it was basically impossible from the outset.
Air Canada controls approximately 50% of the air traffic in Canada. The math is daunting. Even if all the other airlines were running at 50% capacity (which they desperately try to avoid) the fact it took at least an hour to rebook each group of passengers means Air Canada would have needed 1000s more agents on the phone to offer anything approaching reasonable service. (WestJet gamely added a dozen extra flights per day - I sincerely hope they gouged Air Canada for those seats.)
Whatever your feelings about unions and collective job action, I hope we can all agree that Canada shouldn’t allow its strategic travel infrastructure be crippled because one company can’t manage employee relations properly.
Sure, we could (and probably should) tighten up the APPR to count labor disputes the same as delays due to poor maintenance planning. Maybe that would reduce the frequency of strikes as it makes them so much more expensive for the company. But it would still be a disaster when strikes inevitably occurred.
There is an easy and obvious solution: break up Air Canada into at least two pieces with significantly overlapping territory. If Air Canada had only held 25% of traffic instead of 50% this situation would have been much much easier to manage. Probably want to squeeze WestJet down to 25% at the same time, or at least put in a cap that prevents them from getting any bigger than they are now.
Canadians are not well served by this near monopoly on air traffic. Break up Air Canada.