Air Canada pilots have ratified the richest contract in the airline’s history, approving the four-year deal 67-33 and avoiding the prospect of a strike or lockout at the country’s biggest carrier.
According to a press release from the Air Line Pilots Association, 98 per cent of the union membership took part in the voting.
“This agreement helps restore what Air Canada pilots have lost over the past two decades and creates a strong foundation from which to build on,” said Charlene Hudy, the head of ALPA’s Air Canada bargaining unit, which has more than 5,200 members.
If the deal had been rejected, Hudy had said she would step down.
In a written statement, Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau said the company was “very pleased” at the ratification.
“This agreement is mutually beneficial and it will keep our pilots the best compensated in Canada and provide the work-life balance improvements they were seeking,” said Rousseau. “At the same time, the agreement gives our company flexibility and creates a framework for future growth of the airline and its network.”
A strike or lockout could have led to more than 600 flights a day being cancelled, and affected more than 100,000 passengers a day.
Before the tentative agreement was reached, business lobby groups in Canada and the U.S. had urged the federal government to step in pre-emptively to prevent a strike.
The four-year deal, agreed to in September, will see pilots get raises of almost 40 per cent.
It includes a 26 per cent raise in the first year, followed by increases of four per cent in each of the following years. Because the old deal expired in September 2023, the first year of the new deal — including the 26 per cent raise — was made retroactive to last year. The new deal expires Sept. 29, 2027.
But the deal still includes a dramatic pay gap between junior pilots and their more experienced peers, with first-year pilots earning as little as $75,700, while experienced pilots on wide-body planes like a Boeing 777 can earn as much as $367,000.
That gap, labour and industry experts said, likely pushed many junior pilots to vote against the deal. Industry sources estimate there are roughly 2,000 pilots who have been hired by Air Canada in the last few years.
“It’s not difficult to see that there are pilots who are younger and newer to Air Canada who are less satisfied with the deal because they had much more ground to catch up,” said Stephanie Ross, a labour studies professor at McMaster University.
Having what are effectively two different wage scales can be a dangerous dynamic for unions who have struck a Faustian bargain over the last two decades, said Ross.
“There’s a whole host of workplaces where there’s a lower tier of workers who are also newer and younger. So it also creates generational divides. It is very corrosive to internal solidarity over the long-term,” said Ross. “To minimize the harm to the current membership, they agreed to new hires being on a lower tier with a longer grow-in. And at the time, those newer members didn’t exist yet, so they’re not a political factor until later. Now is later, and those chickens are coming home to roost.”
Still, imperfect though the new deal may be, it’s still an excellent contract that closes some of the gaps for those junior employees, and also substantially narrows the gap Air Canada pilots had with their American counterparts, said Ross.
“This is still, on the whole, an excellent deal,” said Ross.
It’s also, said McGill University’s John Gradek, a deal the pilots would almost certainly not have gotten with their old union, the Air Canada Pilots Association.
“This would never have happened with ACPA. ACPA was basically an old-boys club, and you’d see a lot of pilots sitting on the management side of the table. They were never going to be aggressive or adversarial,” said Gradek.
