Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where a country long known as boring keeps spicing things up, though mostly in ways no one asked for. ISIS brides fly business class and drink wine at our expense, Ottawa needs a Trump-style cleanup, and oligopoly ruined my vacation. Let’s get to it!
This week was supposed to mark my grand return to the Bavarian Alps for the first time since 2019. Instead, thanks to the Air Canada flight attendants’ strike, I’m out $2,000 of my hard-earned money on flights, hotels, and bookings that couldn’t care less about the strike. Even though an agreement to end the strike was announced early Tuesday, my “vacation” is now the usual sightseeing tour: junkies, hookers, and petty crooks right outside my window in Ottawa. (I’ll have more to say about my city—a G7 capital—and neighborhood in just a bit.)
Talks between Air Canada and the flight attendants were nothing short of nasty. The sticking points were wages and the union’s push to be paid for “groundwork”—or all the pre- and post-flight duties that flight attendants now do for free. They are paid only from takeoff to landing. How these sticking points were resolved in the new deal wasn’t immediately clear.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government stepped in with binding arbitration to end the strike on August 16, but the union said that it would continue to defy the back-to-work order, resulting in more chaos for travelers like me. It might take “a week or more” to restore service fully, Air Canada’s chief executive said.
Alex Whalen of the Fraser Institute, a think tank in Vancouver, told me that when it comes to the airline industry, the federal government stacks the deck by erecting barriers to entry, shielding incumbents, and shutting out foreign competition.
The Air Canada strike wasn’t an outlier. It’s a snapshot of the Canadian economy. I’ve been banging on this drum for a while.
