YOWgary

And then we pull back the curtain just an inch, and see:

GRU - YUL Jan 2: J9 C9 D9 Z9 P0 R1 O9 E9 N0 Y9 B9 M9 U9 H9 Q9 etc.
one-way business seat selling for $6,465.

GRU - YYZ Jan 3: J4 C0 D0 Z0 P0 R0 O2 E0 N0 Y7 B6 M6 U5 H4 Q3 etc.
one-way business seat selling for $10,423.

It's going to be the best and the most frustrating thing about the new pricing model - under the old program, an award search would simply have showed no seats available on that Toronto flight, because it's nearly full a month before departure, and they can probably sell at least some of the remaining seats for cash.

Now, we see 600,000 points and it looks like an outrageous gouge.

Honestly, "500,000 miles" is another way of saying "there are no award seats left on this flight", but AC committed to "every seat, every flight" no matter what, and they appear to be sticking to it, but it's not like that was ever going to mean "every seat, every flight, for cheap" any more than the same is true of cash fares.

Where AC have really backed themselves into a corner with that policy, though, is the sheer number of times when a full flight makes it look like points seats are expensive. Once the world gets back to normal, for example, it's reasonable to predict that you'll never find a cheap J award on a YYZ-YVR widebody at 6PM on a Friday, any more than you'll be likely to find 4 cheap J seats on YVR-HNL the first day of Spring Break.

The rumour between August and November this year was that the supply of flights at the cheapest price levels was likely to resemble the supply of Classic Award seats in the old program, and so far that seems to be borne out by facts.

Honestly, right now a lot of award prices are better than we were told to expect - whether you believe that's a side-effect of COVID killing demand, or you go with AC when they say they're trying to "underpromise and overdeliver" is a matter of opinion.