Frosty Trudeau, empty airports await incoming Air Canada CEO

It’s a difficult time to be running an airline anywhere. For Michael Rousseau, the incoming CEO of Air Canada, the job comes with a unique set of complications. Air travel in Canada hasn’t even begun to bounce back from the Covid-19 crisis. Passenger traffic at airport checkpoints in January was just 13% of last year’s levels, versus 38% in the US, according to data from the countries’ transportation authorities. The situation for airlines is getting worse, even though virus cases are dropping. A rebound is nowhere in sight. The government of Justin Trudeau, which barred most foreign travelers from entering the country last March, just made the rules even tougher. It’s also explicitly telling Canadians not to leave. In the first week of February, air travel was less than 9% of year-earlier levels. The government has offered no dedicated aid package for airlines. The result has been deep cuts across the industry. Air Canada has furloughed or dismissed more than 20,000 workers and used loans, equity offerings and aircraft sale-leaseback deals to raise billions of dollars. The challenge for Rousseau, who starts in the top job Monday after more than 13 years as chief financial officer, will be to balance cash-preservation with the ability to meet rising demand once travel restrictions are relaxed, said Dan Fong, an analyst at Veritas Investment Research Corp. “They’ve been very effective in the past at scaling up and scaling down,” he said. “The key, though, will be beyond the pandemic, because if you cut too deeply you’ll have a tougher time participating in the recovery.”<br/>