On the other hand...

AC149 Jan 20 during boarding, dude sitting in 1D was almost bumped by an FA. The gate agent came in and told the dude he would have to deplane and he was confirmed on the next YYZ YVR flight. There was an FA who was assigned his seat and there was some mixup. After he started to retrieve his belongings (and grumbling under his breath, rightly so), he was given 1C but the FA who originally had 1D let the dude just take it back as a swap.

Anyway, I still stick to my answer of "true" since I've seen gate agents do things differently on a consistent basis.

Edited to add: This scenario happened because of the wildcat strike and we had alot of people backlogged onto AC149... so there seems to be some legitimacy.. but the correct thing was to at least put the dude in Y and bump some non-status low-fare pax... OR put the FA in Y and bump some non-status low-fare pax... so many better outcomes.