Every single aspect of airline ops - boarding, loading bags, push back, taxi, de-icing, taxi to arrival gate, deboarding, etc takes AC more time than they allow for it.

It is rare now to see an AC flight begin boarding until after departure time even when the aircraft has been sitting there for hours. Yet no delay will be posted until after gate departure, leaving the downstream consequences unnoticed.

When the delay is posted, it will not allow any time for taxi and takeoff so another delay will be posted once it's in the air.

That delay will assume that landing time at the destination airport is arrival time, despite there not being a ground crew available. So another delay will be posted after landing. And just like that a 1 hour flight blocked for 1.5 hours takes 3 hours.

This also means AC cannot show an accurate arrival time even 5 minutes before arrival. Aircraft sitting on the ground waiting for ground crew are "expected to have arrived."

You can't be on time if you don't even measure time or what is going on with your ops. It's routine now to see AC not even know the status of their inbound aircraft, which means auto rebooking happens only hours later when someone notices that the "expected to have departed" aircraft is still sitting at the gate or hasn't even arrived from its previous flight.

GAs do not appear to have access to any operational info beyond looking at the AC app. They will think they have an inbound aircraft 30 minutes out when a cursory look at free online sources shows it is sitting in a deicing queue hours away. Instead of rebooking people who will 100% misconnect while there's still options, they play on their phones and wait for someone in Montreal to post the delay.

Everyone has delays. AC is the only major airline that appears not to actively track its operations in real time, which makes it impossible to recover from delays. They are just flying planes around hoping for the best and if you aren't where you need to be at the end of the day there's always tomorrow.

And let's not even mention the recent push to gate check bags to "speed up boarding" which just means waiting half an hour for the ramp crew to load those bags after boarding is complete.