Originally Posted by YYZC2

For all the automation the airline industry has introduced, baggage handling is still a very manual process, especially when you are talking about bulk-loaded aircraft.

I'm willing to bet a steak dinner your delay came down to manpower. With most AC hubs' regional ops you have very tightly-scheduled ground crews who usually work full turns (ie they marshal in the inbound and load and dispatch the outbound of the same aircraft), which is very rare for mainline ops as the turns are longer. In most cases those crews are also responsible for delivering the local bags (note: I have never worked at YVR, so I'm not 100% positive that is the case there).

Ask any ground ops person what their number one job is when a plane comes into their station late and they will all tell you the same thing - "minimum turn or less". That means do anything safely possible to get the plane out as close to original sked as possible and shave a little time off the downline delay.

The ground crew *probably* offloaded, loaded and pushed the plane in one shot, neglecting to run the local bags in immediately, which *probably* was the least worst option operations-wise, assuming there was no additional manpower available.