Air Canada confirmed on Monday that Michael Rousseau, its president and chief executive, will retire by the end of the third quarter of 2026. He will remain in post and on the board until that point. The announcement ends a crisis that escalated with unusual speed following a tragic accident and a badly handled response to it.
On 22 March, an Air Canada Jazz flight collided with a fire truck on the runway at LaGuardia Airport in New York, killing its two pilots, Antoine Forest, 30, and Mackenzie Gunther. Aviation experts credited both men with taking actions that saved passengers aboard.
The company's response was a four-minute video in which Rousseau used exactly two French words: bonjour and merci. The omission was immediately contentious. Air Canada is headquartered in Montreal, where French is the official language under Quebec law. Forest was francophone, as were several passengers. Canada's Official Languages Act requires the carrier to provide public communications in both English and French, a standard reinforced by the company's own internal policy.
Prime Minister Mark Carney said he was "extremely disappointed" and that the address showed a "lack of compassion." Within days, Quebec's National Assembly passed a motion overwhelmingly calling for Rousseau to step down, and the office of the commissioner of official languages had logged more than 2,000 complaints.
Rousseau subsequently issued a written apology, acknowledging that his "inability to speak French" had overshadowed grief for the victims. The admission carried its own political sting: he has lived in Montreal for roughly 14 years, was reportedly studying French for 300 hours before the incident, and had drawn identical criticism in 2021 when he gave a high-profile Montreal speech entirely in English, at the time dismissing the need to learn French as a "testament to the city."
The resignation is the culmination of a governance failure that compounded a safety tragedy. For Air Canada investors, the more pressing questions concern the airline's leadership transition and whether the LaGuardia crash — for which pilots' earlier safety warnings are now reported to have gone unaddressed — generates further regulatory scrutiny.
