I'm more shocked by AC's apparent admission that they didn't really have a solid plan in place.

Posturing and negotiating strategy aside, you would think that somewhere in AC's filing cabinet there would be some dusty, well thought through document that would describe the entire plan on how to deal with various labour / weather / whatever disruption sceanrios. A plan "ready to go at a moment's notice".

I get that when your capacity goes to near zero, during the busy Summer travel season, that your ability to arrange for alternate flights becomes inordinately time consuming and difficult. But you have to have a plan and you have to try. It's not even about customer service, it's about eventually getting back to earning full revenue too.

I tend to look at business from the perspective of scalability, but resiliency should be something that's just baked into the culture of an operations-focused company like Air Canada. But maybe the one guy who owned this got fired during one of the management purges. Because it sure as heck wasn't any of the people who Air Canada trotted out for the press.