Shareholder - never really get the chance to see the manifest on YYZ hops, but I'm sure you are right. I have funny travel patterns so I tend to miss peak flights where perhaps you might get disproportionate numbers of SE/E but my point was that the figure of 1 SE per 100 seats seems in the right ballpark, certainly to an order of magnitude. So even without your authoritative confirmation I'd have guessed 10k SEs rather than 1000 or 100k, and 100k Elites rather than 10k or 1M.

Somebody with the time should do the same calculation for other airlines - all you need is the number of planes/seats in the fleet (for AC total seats 46201, 382 aircraft from their website) and some reasonable guess at utilization (I used 50%), plus your gut feeling of number of elites per 'average' flight.