Originally Posted by californiadreamin'
Nothing says that AC has to continue serving Canadian city-pairs at all, if it chose not to and if open-skies was to become a reality. After all, Americans who have a choice of flights between US/Canada usually prefer AC, so if AC has access to US city-pairs, what would stop it from moving its larger aircraft south of the border? See what's left then (& what aircraft would be used) to service Canadian city-pairs!
AC of JAZZ will continue to serve every profitable city in Canada, if only to feed onward passengers into the AC NAmerican or international system. The transborder routes will be upgraded as needed to feed American passengers onto overseas flights [we've seen the lower prices ex-US cities].
And AC could fly a number of high density US routes with enough frequency to skim the cream off the US carriers. They would not serve off-line city pairs because the infrastructure costs would be too high. But flying between US cities where it already maintains staff would be the logical way to exploit this type of Open Skies. For example, DCA to ATL or ORD or DFW. It could also fly EWR-LAX or SFO if the market could sustain such service [the problem with NYC is the restriction placed on distance aircraft can fly from LGA, the major hub].
Of course, the CAW is worried about further deregulation as AC is the ony unionized airline [aside from AirTransAt] in the domestic market, and this puts pressure on wages they can negotiate from AC. But they do have a point in that when fares get pushed too low, and airlines cannot make money, losses increase and wages fall. [Even WestJet's profit sharing suffers when that airline's profits are reduced.] This is the scenario that led to the collapse of CP, and C2K/Royal. And is now playing itself out in the US with its legacy carriers. At some point, banks and investors are going to stop throwing good money after bad.