Lockdowns are over, travel restrictions are being lifted, and Canadians are using the opportunity to take well-deserved trips. Flights have jumped to levels that haven’t been seen since before the pandemic. But the transition has been far from smooth. Private airlines have completely failed at managing the surge in demand and the industry is buckling under the pressure.
Toronto Pearson International Airport has a newfound reputation as “the worst airport in the world.” Out of the top 100 busiest airports on earth, Pearson airport has been experiencing the highest rate of delayed flights at 57 per cent. Montreal-Trudeau International Airport trails close behind at the number two spot, with 53 per cent of their flights delayed. On some days, up to 70 per cent of Air Canada flights have been delayed.
Airlines have responded to this by canceling thousands of flights in an attempt to scale back to capacity. Air Canada plans to cancel or has already canceled almost 10,000 flights this summer. But far from solving this issue, this has only created more chaos. Many travelers have been left stranded by last-minute cancellations and have been forced to resort to expensive taxi and bus trips to get home. One family coming back from a trip to Costa Rica found out at the airport that not only was their flight canceled, but their airline no longer offers any flights back home.
How did we get here?
The basis for this crisis stems from the beginning of the pandemic and how the industry responded to the lockdown. Back in summer of 2020, still during the first few months of lockdown, Canada’s biggest airlines instituted massive cuts to compensate for the drop in demand for flights. Air Canada laid off 20,000 of its 38,000 workers and WestJet retired 30 per cent of its total fleet.
At the same time, the federal government provided the industry with massive corporate handouts, wage subsidies, and dirt-cheap loans. After Air Canada laid off more than half of their employees, the federal government gave them $656 million through its wage subsidy program, and just last summer, the government cut the company a cheque for $5.9 billion.
Ostensibly, this money was intended to preserve the industry through the lockdown. It should have been used to keep workers on retainer and create a plan for reopening once the lockdown was lifted. But where’s all that money now? How can airlines possibly justify the state they’re in after they were given billions of dollars by the government to maintain themselves?
The truth is the money went straight into the pockets of the bosses. From the very beginning of the pandemic, the airline executives did everything they could to place the financial burden of the lockdown onto the shoulders of the working class. While they were firing workers by the tens of thousands, they were getting taxpayer-funded government handouts to pay for $10-billion bonuses for their top executives.
Even now, airlines are trying to get other people to pay for their own disaster. Companies like WestJet, Flair, and Air Canada have been outright refusing to provide compensation for canceled and delayed flights. Air Canada has been getting away with this through a policy loophole. Under federal regulations, carriers don’t need to provide compensation if a flight is canceled or delayed because of safety concerns. So they’ve been saying that flights have been canceled or delayed due to staff shortages, and these shortages are a safety issue. But who caused these staffing shortages to begin with? Air Canada! They were the ones who laid off most of their own workforce and did not rehire them, and now they’re claiming that this is outside their control.
Likewise, many of these cancellations have been due to airlines selling more tickets than they can possibly accommodate. As Air Passenger Rights president Gabor Lukacs said, “Nobody held a gun to any airline CEO’s head and said, ‘You have to sell this many tickets,’ knowing full well that the capacity to operate those flights is not there.”
Expropriate the airlines!
We’re always told that capitalists have a right to profit off of business because they take on all the risk. But what this whole fiasco has proven is that capitalists take none of the risk. The minute airlines took a hit to profitability, they made workers suffer while keeping their own wallets fat.
Flying isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity. That goes especially for such a large and spread-out country like Canada, where flying is often the only viable means of travel. Our airlines shouldn’t be run with the narrow aim of creating profit. They should be run as a public utility and managed to fit public needs. If airlines were publicly managed, it would have been possible to create a plan for reopening and avoid this mess.
Back in November of 2020, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers called for the re-nationalization of Air Canada. This is a good start, but we need to go further. The entire airline industry needs to be taken out of private hands, nationalized, and democratically run to respond to the needs of society. No longer should such a vital industry be used to feed a layer of greedy parasites. Instead, it should be managed by the working class, and run to the benefit of society as a whole. Only a socialist plan for transportation, connected to a larger socialist planned economy, can guarantee basic infrastructure while protecting jobs.
