Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau gives a speech at the Montreal Chamber of Commerce in November, 2021. Mr. Rousseau only spoke two words of French in his four-minute condolence video following Sunday's fatal runway collision at LaGuardia Airport.Mario Beauregard/The Canadian Press
Andrew Miller is a fellow of the Roots of Progress Institute and the author of Changing Lanes, a weekly newsletter on transportation innovation.
Two years ago, TD Bank admitted to facilitating money laundering on a scale that drew more than US$3-billion in criminal penalties. Naturally, its CEO at the time, Bharat Masrani, apologized for the firm’s misconduct. He did so only in English.
If you don’t remember his choice of language being a national scandal, that’s because it wasn’t. It’s an instructive comparison to this week’s events.
Michael Rousseau, Air Canada’s CEO, released a four-minute condolence video following a fatal runway collision at LaGuardia Airport – one that killed two pilots, including a French-speaking Quebecker. But Mr. Rousseau only spoke two words of French, one at the beginning and one at the end of his statement. In response, the Prime Minister said he expects an explanation from the airline’s board; a parliamentary committee has summoned Mr. Rousseau to appear before it; and as of Wednesday afternoon, the federal language watchdog’s office had received nearly 800 complaints.
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What makes Air Canada different? The answer is that the airline started out as a Crown corporation, and when it was privatized in 1988, the sale had strings attached. The Air Canada Public Participation Act preserved several public-interest obligations, including the continued application of the Official Languages Act. The airline did not emerge from Crown ownership as an ordinary private company. It emerged as something stranger: a private firm carrying the statutory obligations of a federal institution.
This isn’t the first time that arrangement has produced a flap. In November, 2021, Rousseau gave his first major speech as CEO, to the Montreal Chamber of Commerce, almost entirely in English. Asked why he hadn’t learned French after 14 years in Montreal, he replied that he had managed fine without it. Over 2,000 complaints followed, then-prime minister Justin Trudeau called the situation unacceptable, and Mr. Rousseau was summoned before a parliamentary committee, where he apologized in laboured French and pledged to improve. In December, 2024, he told another committee that learning French was “difficult” at his age. This week is the third act of l’affaire Rousseau.
If Air Canada were a commercial carrier competing for passengers against WestJet, Porter, and a dozen international rivals, then Mr. Rousseau’s error in judgment would be only a corporate communications failure. Deplorable, and worth internal consequences, but not a matter for Parliament, no more than a similar misstep by a bank or a telecom executive would be.
Canada regulates banks and telecoms heavily, but their CEOs aren’t hauled before committees to explain their choice of language in public communications. Indeed, in 2023, Parliament considered whether to require Air Canada’s leadership to be bilingual, and it declined, making its outrage this week harder to take seriously.
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If, on the other hand, Air Canada is still meaningfully a public institution – an arm of the Canadian state with obligations of representation and accountability – then parliamentary scrutiny would be entirely appropriate. But so would be a great deal else: for one, clear governance requirements, and for another a more honest accounting of what the country owes the airline in return for the obligations it imposes.
Instead, Air Canada bears the full cost of Official Languages Act compliance – bilingual staffing and translation – with no public funding provided to offset those costs, unlike actual federal institutions. Meanwhile, its main domestic competitor, WestJet, has none of these obligations at all.
The result is a hybrid that serves neither interest well. Air Canada is treated as private when it competes and public when it offends. The rules change depending on the political salience of the moment. That is not a stable way to build an airline.
Air Canada occupies this category only because it has been left there, by legal inheritance rather than deliberate policy. The Air Canada Public Participation Act is not the product of an ongoing national consensus, but rather is the residue of a privatization deal struck nearly 40 years ago, preserved by political inertia and only activated by the government when convenient.
Canada can have a national airline, with explicit public obligations, governed in accordance with them … and funded appropriately. Or it can have a private carrier, free to compete on equal terms with its rivals, without public support or obligation. What it can’t, or rather shouldn’t, have is a company held to public standards that it is given no public support to meet, and is punished when it falls short.
Until Parliament resolves this contradiction, the problem will keep emerging, and any successor of Mr. Rousseau’s will eventually find themselves summoned to sit in the same hearing room on the Hill.