Oh, those unfriendly skies. As of October 30 Air Canada has cancelled its direct flights between Calgary and Ottawa and between Edmonton and Ottawa. Air Canada has also cancelled direct flights from Calgary to Frankfurt and Halifax. Direct flights from Calgary to Honolulu, Los Angeles and Cancun have also vanished as of October 30, just as winter vacation season is about to begin.
Losing all of Air Canada’s direct flights between Alberta and Ottawa is especially exasperating for federal politicians of course, who use those routes to commute. For most Calgarians, though, losing non-stop flights to Hawaii, California and Mexico, right before Christmas, is the unkindest cut.
Air Canada says that in light of an ongoing pilot shortage, it has made a decision to consolidate and concentrate on its three Canadian hub cities: Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. If Albertans want to travel elsewhere in the country or around the world, we’re expected to connect through those three hubs.
Alas, successfully changing planes right now takes nerves of steel and the luck of the gods. Anyone who’s tried to connect through Toronto’s Pearson or Montreal’s Trudeau airport over the last two chaotic years can attest that making a connection, and having your luggage arrive with you, is a smallish miracle. If transferring from one flight to another were a seamless, painless process, then changing planes mid-trip would be a minor inconvenience. But it’s not.
COVID should have taught us we can’t just take our national transportation network for granted.
It’s hard not to be exasperated and offended, as an Albertan, at this slashing of Air Canada services to two of Canada’s largest cities. It doesn’t help that WestJet is also cancelling its only direct flight from Edmonton to Ottawa, as of late October, likewise citing a pilot shortage as its explanation. (My cue to try Porter?)
A pilot shortage may sound like a rather convenient excuse for stranding Alberta travellers—especially when, a week after announcing the Calgary cuts, Air Canada put out a press release about plans to add more direct flights from Montreal and Toronto to Europe. It’s true that there is a pilot shortage in Canada. But Air Canada—and WestJet—are making choices about where to deploy those pilots, choices that don’t favour Edmonton or Calgary.
There’s also a shortage of air traffic controllers, of ground crews, of flight crews—of staff throughout the air sector. According to Transport Canada, the air transport industry expects a shortage of 42,000 workers by 2025 and a shortage of 55,000 by 2035.
There’s also a shortage of railway engineers and conductors. A shortage of long-haul truck drivers. A shortage of workers right throughout the transportation sector. And it’s getting worse.
Transport Canada estimates 43 per cent of the marine workforce will retire within 10 years. It predicts a need to hire some 19,000 new workers in the next decade, or about 68 per cent of the current workforce. The trucking industry estimates it was short 25,000 workers this year, and will be short up to 55,600 workers by 2035.
Many of these projected shortages might be addressed by AI or robotic automation in time—but some jobs truly do require human touch and human judgment.
And we’re already seeing the problems created by these worker shortages not just when we travel but as we try to move freight in, out of and around the country.
This isn’t just a demographic blip, a result of retiring Boomers. It costs a lot to train to be an airplane pilot—about $100,000. There are no college or tech schools to train them. Would-be pilots must pay for private training. And they have no access to student loans or government grants. They must front the costs themselves, and then train for years, flying small planes for small regional carriers until they’re ready to fly big jets.
Truckers have long faced a parallel problem, though the government recently introduced some new programs to support driver training.
Because we don’t have any public post-secondary programs to train budding air traffic controllers, say, or railway engineers or marine pilots, young people may not think to enter such fields—even though the salaries can be quite lucrative. And many transportation sectors have done a poor job of recruiting women or people from minority communities. We don’t show people a pathway to working in these critical jobs, so a generation of young workers has no idea that such rewarding careers could even be available to them.
The supply chain shocks of COVID should have taught us we can’t just take our national transportation network or our transportation workers for granted. If we want to be able to fly from point to point—and move freight from place to place—we need the federal and provincial governments to work together with industry and the secondary and post-secondary systems to ensure that we have the skilled workforce we need to keep our planes, trains, trucks and ships flying, rolling and floating.
Paula Simons is an independent senator and member of the Standing Senate Committee on Transportation and Communications.
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