I think we need to look at some of the preparations underway at AC today.
Firstly Milton et alles have wrung out some very significant cost concessions from the unions,and despite the wildcat type blips, AC will enjoy a predictable period of wage and labour stability. The costs are low enough that AC, although a full service carrier can compete head to head with the LCC's.
The LCC's on the other hand will only see their costs going up, because the repeat consumers, FF's, will eventually want more. Why is WJ putting in seatback video?? Certainly not to keep their costs down!
Secondly the fleet is being upgraded with several dozen RJ+ type acft and there are more recent rumblings of larger longhaul type acft being added. What that means is there will be some lift capacity that can be used for other routes. My guess is that a reconfigured 762 with all Y seating in 34 pitch and updated IFE could compete quite nicely with a Jet Blue on a YUL-LGA-FLL type route.
The new 70-90 seat RJ's according to AC will be used for direct point to point service on medium density routes like YYZ-ATL, YYZ-DFW etc. so once the new planes come into service, there will be many RJ-200's looking for something to do. I can see many of these bening put into service in the NE feeding traffic into a mini hub like LGA for onward souther connections. If you are living in places like MDT, ASH etc you might be interested in hopping onto a nice shiny AC - RJ200
as the beginning of your trip to points south.
To ensure the viability of cities like ASH, AC could use an RJ200 to operate routes like YQB-ASH-LGA, or YHZ-BGR-LGA etc. In the end it'll be interesting to see what AC comes out with, but I think they can compete head to head with anybody and win. The caveat is that winning a route skirmish and having a long term growth strategy are not the same thing.
DF