In an industry in which competition is legislated out of existence, it’s no wonder that Canadian airlines are little more than poorly run, expensive public utilities that excel at fleecing consumers. The government would rather preside over this sorry state of affairs than, God forbid, allow foreign airlines to offer services within Canada.
Budget airline Swoop will shut down later this year and have its operations folded into WestJet, the company announced Friday.
The merger into WestJet’s operations is expected to be completed by Oct. 28, the Calgary-based airline said. Swoop will operate its existing network until then, and Swoop employees will move to WestJet once the merger is completed.
When the Liberal’s announced $70M of taxpayer money to fix the backlog of 40,000 customer complaints against domestic airlines the CBC’s guest-SME said that excess profits was the problem. It never occurred to him or the CBC interviewer that increased competition could fix the problem at no cost to taxpayers.
Excess profits??? Canadian airlines???
They rarely make any profit. Air Canada lost 2.2 billion dollars in the last 2 years. WesJet is privately owned so its numbers are not public. Even so, its owner is Onex corporation which is currently losing money and which has lost 30% of its market value in the last 5 years.
Liberals use too many drugs.
About 20 years ago, Air Canada stock was depressed, so I bought some rationalizing that it was too important to actually go bankrupt. What happened was they reorganized and issued new stock. All the current shareholders received 2% of the new issue and an angel investor from Asia got the rest. The price rebounded and shortly thereafter the new owner started divesting his holding through the normal, ongoing operation of the market. And the whole “rinse/repeat” cycle started again.
The other thing that surprised me at the time was how small the market capitalization of the company was. The billions upon billions of dollars worth of aircraft are all leased. The actual company is comprised of the liabilities arising from the non-responsive legacy union contracts involving everyone but senior management; and not much else.
Customer service at Air Canada is so bad that I won’t fly them on principle. Beyond that, I don’t care what logo is on the tailplane as long as the aircraft is well maintained, the service is efficient and the cost is reasonable. Anyone who can consistently deliver on that should have unfettered access to the domestic Canadian market IMHO.
The airlines operating in Canada are a total embarrassment. As are our airports. Can PP fix this? Might be enough to get him elected.
Offer to spend some of our own money here in this country.
PP could easily fix this by ending any and all barriers to entry ex foreign investment restrictions. His idiotic stance on Glenncore shows he is not about actually getting rid of gatekeepers. He is all talk.
In the case of Westjet and Swoop, my understanding is the union forced the move. When I watched the story on BNN, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe Westjet was attempting a double breasted organization and the union caught on and stomped it out like the organized criminal organizations they are. That’s my theory until I am better informed.
You are correct. A friend of mine is a pilot and he says the major point of the strike was to get the pilots of the discount lines, Swoop and Sunwing, paid as well as the WestJet pilots.
same thing happened with whatever Air Canada is calling their budget airline now.
I’m sure both Porter and Flair are the next targets
Porter? I thought they have no budget airline?
The poorer Canadians get, the less demand there will be for air travel. This is all part of the plan to change the weather back to what it is already like.
“The poorer Canadians get, the less demand there will be for air travel.”
There’s a symbiotic relationship involved in the air passenger business that our “ideological betters” aren’t quite smart enough to grasp: the entire international air transportation industry is configured on vast through-puts of travellers and cargo. If you reduce this dramatically, it effects every aspect of the industry.
Ultimately, there can be no first or business class if there are no commercial airlines, and private jets won’t get manufactured because they too implicitly rely on the larger global aviation infrastructure to operate.
“Canadian airlines are little more than poorly run, expensive public utilities”
Indeed. Along with all the rest of Canada’s hospitality and travel industries they kow-towed and bowed to turdo and zealously enforced all his Wuhan flu bullshit. Nary a word of protest from their unions or associations.
They truly deserve the futures they’ve created for themselves.
West Jet and Air Canada are two peas in a pod. WS was ruined years ago by expansion and an operation base in Toronto. Now out west we have lazy, angry unionized flight attendants. Watch out for Toronto based crew, miserable bi$ches. It’s almost as bad as boarding an Air Canada flight in Toronto to Vancouver being greeted in French in the business class cabin by a k-bécer. Tabernac!!
Emirates and Singapore don’t go for that overpaid, unionised nonsense. Funnily enough they keep going.
“Right to work” legislation would take care of so many of Canada’s ills, as would western separation, & fully privatising the CBC
The only thing that would fix Canada is a separation, with one part much freer than now, and the other can remain a socialist shithole. Ambitious self starters would migrate to one, and the useless and weak would head the other way.
Trudeau did very little right, but he did raise the foreign ownership limit to 49% of an airline early in his reign.
What an asinine comment.
From a real a$$ too. His level of stupid is UN-mistakeable.
There used to be Canadian Airlines International which was a merger over time of Pacific Western Airlines, Canadian Pacific Air Line, Eastern Provincial Airways, Wardair, and Nordair. Instead of helping create a competitive market the idiot Chretien allowed Air Canada to buy it.
Sounds a lot like the Canadian communication business where they keep issuing new licenses to create competition and then they allow Bell, Telus, and Rogers to buy the startups. Canada is a place where Liberals look after their rich friends.