The Southwest story is a little stale within the investment community ever since the legacies, and esp Delta and apparently AAG, figured out how to run their business properly, (ditch the ersatz LCC's, get the costs down across the board, focus on hub and spoke flying and nothing else, keep capacity growth in line with economic growth and maintain a consistent brand and product) and are now printing money.

Southwest needs to come up with something to satisfy the appetites of the quarterly earnings junkies so they roll out the expansion story. This is not the first time we've heard it and it won't be the last.

Yep. I can sure see Southwest making use of precious, and very expensive LGA or DCA slots to operate their typical high frequency model to YYZ, with connecting service from FLL, MCO, TPA, RSW etc

Why fly non-stop to Florida when you can connect at one of the most congested airports in the US for the same price?

Lest anyone forget, almost 40% of Southwest traffic is through or connecting. WestJet is probably a little more.

I doubt Air Canada or WestJet are going to feed Southwest any passengers. Conversely, I doubt either CDN carrier is kept awake at night worrying that Southwest might corner the connecting market from Tucson, Albuquerque, El Paso, Charleston or Omaha to Canada.

The key markets they'd be interested in are the ones that have a strong mix of both leisure AND business traffic.

In the US, Las Vegas, Florida, SoCal and Phx are both leisure and business. From Canada, they are much more heavily slanted to leisure.

That's not really what Southwest needs to make their model work.

I doubt SW is going to change their m/o in order to enter the Canadian market that is less than a tenth the size of the US market, yet already has a dedicated collective LCC fleet, (excluding what ever definition you choose to give Rouge), about 25% the size of SWA already flying n/s to the places they'd want to go.

Naturally, all trans-border fees and charges, not to mention excessive Cdn airport charges and AIF's, not to mention all other costs of operating in Canada will be waived allowing SW to be able to undercut Canadian domiciled carriers.

Cheaper fuel can be tankered in, but that option is available to Cdn carriers on short haul routes as well, esp on routes where aircraft are all but close cycled.

Southwest isn't a big fan of contracting out above or below wing functions in order to maintain consistency of their product and brand, so they'll have to start with a critical mass of flights from where ever they begin operations. Last time I checked, Southwest contracts basically prohibit redeye flying. Southwest isn't going to operate one flight a day from Winnipeg to Orlando or Moncton to Fort Lauderdale. They like to dominate whatever they take on, and that won't be easy in Canada. They don't like to go head to head with other LCCs. If you overlay the SW route map and the AirTran route map, there was very little overlap. That would not be the case in Canada.

Outside Texas and the few remaining Air Tran markets, Southwest doesn't pay much attention to markets smaller than 750,000 people. That doesn't leave a lot of possibilities in Canada. Trying to find the sorts of routes they like, with the sorts of frequencies they require to make it work in markets where they can achieve any sort of meaningful cost advantage is going to be a pretty tough task.

It would have been a heck of a lot easier in 2002.

It's a nice story to excite the market, but when one takes a hard look at all the factors and pieces that would have to fall into place to make it work, of which only a few are mentioned above, and knowing how fixed and stubborn SWA are in their ways, I'd be very surprised to see SW cross the border north anytime soon.

...figured out how to run their business properly, (ditch the ersatz LCC's,...)

More than two million Canadians flew out of Buffalo last year.

In 2013, it [YYZ] handled 36,109,469 passengers