Air Canada learned nothing during the five years since its last French scandal

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Taylor C. Noakes is an independent journalist and public historian.

News of Michael Rousseau’s forthcoming retirement comes as hardly a surprise given the Air Canada chief executive’s penchant for making a bad situation worse.

It makes you wonder what he got up to over the course of the last five years, after Mr. Rousseau had similarly gotten in trouble over language. He doesn’t seem to have been practising his French.

Much like Air Canada’s LaGuardia crash currently under investigation, there are doubtless many contributing factors that led to one of the most tone-deaf and ill-conceived public relations efforts in Canadian corporate history.

Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau to step down

While one may have reservations about over-focusing on domestic language policy in the wake of an international aviation disaster, we should not overlook the poor choices made by people who ought to have known much better.

To begin with, it is as astonishing as it is perplexing that Mr. Rousseau was allowed to make the offending statement in the first place. The video in reaction to the LaGuardia crash, in which he said only two words of French, was overly technical and lacking in emotion. The video crucially failed to convey a sense that Mr. Rousseau was taking charge of the situation. It came across as neither particularly sympathetic nor reassuring to the flying public.

But I suspect that none of these problems with his initial statement would have been quite as pronounced had Mr. Rousseau made an effort to speak French, as he promised to do back in 2021. Mr. Rousseau, when asked about his lack of bilingual skills at the time, made a flippant remark about having resided in Montreal for years without ever bothering to learn Quebec’s lingua franca.

Sure, learning a new language is hard, but Mr. Rousseau didn’t even try. Even if he had butchered the language in the LaGuardia video, attempting to communicate in the mother tongue of one of his deceased employees (and many of his injured customers, as the affected flight had come from Montreal) would have conveyed earnestness and humility – qualities in short supply these days.

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It’s also about knowing your customers, which ought to be an elementary concern for any chief executive. Practically speaking, this is a far more important reason a CEO of any national corporation – not simply one subject to the Official Languages Act, such as Air Canada – should be bilingual. In this country, knowing your customers means understanding and appreciating the perspective, culture and society of between 20 per cent and 30 per cent of the population.

It is worth considering that Air Canada is based in Montreal, and its public relations team is presumably fluently bilingual and cognizant of the importance of the French language. Are we to believe that these people signed off on Mr. Rousseau’s unilingual statement? If so, Air Canada’s management may have bigger problems than a CEO who can’t speak both official languages. If not, we have to wonder what would lead an experienced CEO to dismiss the valid concerns of other senior managers.

Either way, though the LaGuardia accident doesn’t appear to be the fault of Air Canada, it has nonetheless revealed other serious problems in the upper echelons of Canada’s national airline.

Is there no one available to coach the CEO through a three-minute public statement (in a language that he, as a long-time resident of Montreal, must be at least able to read phonetically)?

Opinion: Air Canada’s CEO once again misses the boat on bilingualism

What if – God forbid – this had been a bigger disaster with a greater number of casualties, or one in which Air Canada bore greater responsibility, one for which government inquiries were required? Would the CEO’s inability to speak French dictate Air Canada’s public relations strategy and the public’s right to know?

We have two official languages in Canada, and it’s a good policy to have: Not only does it open doors for the individual, it fosters an open-mindedness in our society. Executives of national corporations need to take this stuff seriously because Canadians do.

And yes, there is a higher bar for Air Canada than any other corporation. It’s not just that they’re the national flag carrier, this is a former Crown corporation that has received a considerable amount of public support – through bailouts as much as indirect government support – over the course of its existence.

Respect for their customers and employees is the least of what Air Canada’s CEO owes the Canadian public.