It doesn't really matter if Calgary has more HQ than Vancouver or not. YYC is home of WS and it would be costly for AC to set up a hub there if it cannot grow to a scale that can effectively compete with WS.

A really smart guy I used to deal with was COO of a large public Canadian Company that had sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars once told me a story. The company got a new CEO (as happens) and during their first meeting the new CEO asked him what his biggest hurdle was in his current position. He replied to the new CEO “You are.” (Paraphrasing) ‘You’re going to come in here thinking you can do things better than we can, and I’m going to have to spend the next 18 months explaining to you that we know what we’re doing and finally, when you get it, the board will toss you and I’ll have to start all over again with another new CEO.’

If AC is smart (and recent history shows they are ) the new CEO will let the smart people with real data making decision keep on doing their job.

If a new CEO comes in thinking that YYC needs more traffic, or SFO needs more J that CEO is dead in the water.

AC has smart people swimming in tons of data and, every day ,getting better and better tools to help them analyse the data and make these decisions.

Let smart people do their jobs, make sure they have the tools and environment to do their job and stay out of their way is what a good CEO should do. And certainly don’t listen to anybody here.

YYC-FRA is rumoured to come back eventually. It's been mentioned multiple times on here (I believe it to be true) that it was handed over to Lufthansa/Discover temporarily while AC focuses on YYZ/YUL/YVR. I've heard that it will come back when enough 787-10 come online.

There probably is a reason why they have not closed the YYC FA base. They could have closed it during the negotiations in 2025, they didn't.

I would not be so sure about that.
AC has arrogant people who think they are smart. They may have data but between having them and drawing the right conclusions there is a big gap. Problem with data is you have tons of them, and what you get from them ends up depending on too many assumptions. Allowing for significant wishful thinking left or right.
The way they handled the pilot strike was anything but smart. would not have happened when Rovinescu was still around. Or with Ben Smith.

You hear everyday of large corporations with supposedly smart people and tons of data which end up making huge mistakes. That happened to AC and to CP back in the nineties when they ended up in mutual destruction. Sure, you won;t have the same scenario again. Also, look at a that other smart guy, that German nobility who now presides upon WS. I don't think he handled their strike terribly well either. Nor the recent spat with the new configuration with unreasonably lowered seat pitch. Which they ended up backing away from.

Exactly. YYC sounded more like "we have limited aircraft, so we can either keep operating YYC, or massively strengthen our major hubs", and they decided the latter was a better business strategy. They used "data", but I have no idea how successful that decision was. I'm not even sure if they'd have the data to make really informed conclusions.

In my industry, if you want to test something, you run it in parallel with the alternative. Then it's very clear to see that A makes more money than B.

If you just try option A, then even if it performed better than pre-A, you don't know if it's better than B.

And if you switch from A to B, it's very hard to isolate other factors.

What if they had pulled out of YYC in February 2020. Would it be fair to say, two years later, based on "data", that it was a bad decision, because they've lost a ton of money since then? Obviously not. But not every external factor is as visible as COVID.

"Data shows that either option should improve things over the current state, but it's unclear which would be better". A new CEO very well may make a different choice there.