This story is part of The Big Spend, a CBC News investigation examining the unprecedented $240 billion the federal government handed out during the first eight months of the pandemic.
Air Canada has received the largest amount of government pandemic aid of all publicly traded companies in Canada that have disclosed their finances to shareholders to date, a CBC News investigation has found.
The country’s largest airline reported that it collected $492 million in public funds through the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS) to pay its employees over a period ending Sept. 30, according to Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) and TSX Venture Exchanges filings.
According to CBC’s findings from information posted to date, that’s roughly four times more than the second-highest sum paid to a publicly traded company through the wage subsidy, which went to Imperial Oil. The Calgary-based energy giant disclosed it received $120 million from CEWS. Linamar, a large automobile parts manufacturer, and Air Transat also received more than $100 million each to help cover salaries.
Air Canada said that at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, it employed about 40,000 people — making it one of the “larger private sector employers in Canada” in an industry hit “disproportionately hard” by the pandemic.
“Put simply, we are by far the biggest company in perhaps the worst industry,” Air Canada spokesperson Peter Fitzpatrick wrote in a statement issued to CBC News.
Despite Air Canada receiving hundreds of millions of dollars to pay its workers, the air carrier is in the midst of private negotiations with the federal government on a possible industry-specific support package. Some experts argue the carrier is using travellers’ demands for refunds for cancelled flights as leverage to pressure the government during the negotiations.
John Gradek, a former Air Canada executive and lecturer at McGill University’s global aviation leadership program, claims the airline industry is “bullying” the government into bailing out the sector, arguing that other countries have already done so. He said Air Canada is playing a “shell game” of its own.
“I think it’s a little bit of gamesmanship that’s being played by Air Canada,” Gradek said. “They’re insisting that those refunds will only be processed if the Canadian government, through the Canadian taxpayer, is providing the funds for those refunds. Not a good thing.”
WATCH | John Gradek on Air Canada pandemic aid and fare refunds:
ohn Gradek, a lecturer at McGill University, says the airline industry is arguing it’s time for the government to bail out struggling airlines since other countries have done so. 0:23
400 private companies reviewed by CBC
CBC News analyzed data from more than 2,000 publicly traded companies listed on the TSX and TSX venture exchanges and identified 400 businesses that have already filed public disclosures indicating they received taxpayer support.
While the figures reviewed by CBC News indicate Air Canada has received the most taxpayer-funded pandemic support of any company to date, there could still be other companies that have received more and have not yet publicly disclosed the sums.
WestJet, Sunwing, Porter Airlines and Flair Airlines all received the wage subsidy to help cover their payrolls; none of them trade on the TSX and none of them have disclosed to CBC News the amount of money they received. Chorus Aviation, which owns regional airlines Jazz and Voyageur, received almost $97 million through the wage subsidy, according to TSX filings.
In total, the federal government spent $1.4 billion helping Canadian airlines pay up to 75 per cent of employee wages during the pandemic, according to the federal government’s fall economic update, released last week.
‘The biggest company in perhaps the worst industry’
No one from Air Canada would sit for an interview with CBC News. In a media statement, the airline said it received a substantial amount for the wage subsidy because it employs so many people, and “as much as 95 per cent of our revenue disappearing virtually overnight, which is why the government is now looking at specific sectoral support for our industry, just as governments around the world have already done for their airlines.”
“Given this, it is only to be expected that we are a relatively large user of CEWS — our next biggest domestic competitor was less than one-third our size in terms of employees at the outset of COVID,” Fitzpatrick said.
As the pandemic crushes airline industry revenue, passengers — many of them struggling financially — have been angrily demanding that the federal government force airlines to refund them for cancelled flights.
More than 100,000 Canadians have joined petitions calling for government action on refunds, and several class-action lawsuits have been filed against airlines.
Air Canada holding $2.3B in revenue from ticket sales
Air Canada’s president and CEO, Calin Rovinescu, told Bloomberg News earlier this month that despite the financial hit, his airline has already paid back $1.2 billion in refundable airfares.
Rovinescu told Bloomberg on Nov. 18 that he has “no quarrel” at all with refunding customers for non-refundable flights, “assuming that the terms of the support package are adequate and the terms are appropriate and reasonable.”
Air Canada has reported that, as of the end of September, it had $2.3 billion in revenue on hand from ticket sales — about 65 per cent of which came from non-refundable fares.
Air Canada president and CEO Calin Rovinescu told Bloomberg earlier this month it had one of the strongest balance sheets in the global airline industry heading into the pandemic. (Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press)
Gradek argues that Air Canada has the money to pay the refunds but is using it as a bargaining chip in bailout negotiations with the federal government.
“Air Canada does have the cash,” he said, pointing to the airline’s $8 billion in unrestricted liquidity as of September. “Air Canada does not need government funding in order for it to process those refunds.”
No more sectoral support without refunds, says Garneau
Transport Minister Marc Garneau said he has made it clear to airlines that they must pay out the refunds before they can get any more government aid.
“We said very clearly no — until they commit in writing to refund passengers, they will not get a cent from the Canadian government,” he said.
When asked by CBC News whether Ottawa would allow airlines to use taxpayer dollars to refund passengers, Garneau said he would not go into details since the negotiations with the airlines are confidential.
But he did suggest that if airlines meet the government’s requirements for financial support and commit in writing to refunding passengers, carriers could qualify for help. The government has imposed conditions on bailing out air carriers that require them to issue refunds, maintain air connections throughout Canada and honour any orders placed with Canadian aerospace companies.
“It takes a while to do that refunding because there are quite a few passengers, but once the refund agreement is signed — a very specific undertaking by both sides — then they’ll be in a position to receive our assistance as they begin the refunding process,” Garneau said.
WATCH | Transport Minister Marc Garneau on sectoral aid for airlines:
Transport Minister Marc Garneau said the government is currently in confidential talks with major airlines about an industry-specific aid package contingent on a number of strict conditions. 0:32
‘I’m extremely upset about it’
Air Canada customer Calvin Hill said he feels like a “hostage.”
He and his wife said they are out $4,000 for Air Canada flights they never took. They said they’re sleeping in their daughter’s basement in Medicine Hat, Alta., and are helping her out with her kids. The couple said the money could have covered roughly four months’ rent.
“I’m extremely upset about it,” Hill said. “Then to find out that the airlines want to turn around and have us Canadian taxpayers bail them out while they refuse to turn around and refund the monies back to us — it’s very upsetting.”
Hill, who retired last year, planned to take the trip of a lifetime to Asia with his wife. Then the pandemic hit and the government told all Canadians to come home in March.
Air Canada wouldn’t allow the couple to board their original flights out of Bangkok to get home due to travel restrictions on one of their layovers, Hill said. As a result, he and his wife had to pay for flights home with another carrier.
Hill claims an Air Canada agent promised to refund their tickets, but he’s still fighting for the money more than eight months later. He said he’s out roughly four months’ rent.
“They’re holding us as people with outstanding vouchers or refunds hostage unless we tell them, ‘Well, you give me a dollar in my left hand and I’ll give you a dollar back in my right hand to pay for it,'” he said. “Which I think is ridiculous.”
Calvin Hill and his wife Janice have been fighting for months for a refund for Air Canada flights they couldn’t board. (Submitted)
Major gap in Canada’s Air Passenger Protection Regulations
Air Canada said it’s offering non-refundable ticket holders travel credits with no expiry date that can be transferred to others or to “convert their booking to Aeroplan points and with an additional 65 per cent bonus.”The airline said this option is in line with direction given by the Canadian Transportation Agency.
Scott Streiner, chair and CEO of the Canadian Transportation Agency, testified in front of MPs last week that there is a gap in Canada’s Air Passenger Protection Regulations that no one saw coming. Canadian airlines are not obligated to refund passengers if cancellations are out of a carrier’s control, he said.
“[The regulations] refund obligation applies exclusively to flight cancellations within airlines controls,” Streiner told the transport committee on Dec 1. “We now know the gap highlighted by the pandemic is significant.”
Streiner said if and when the CTA gets authority to fix that gap, “we’ll fix it.”
In contrast, Air Canada is offering customers who flew out of Europe a refund for non-refundable tickets after “extensive discussions” with European Union members.
Air Canada in talks with government
Air Canada’s third-quarter results report to investors shows the dramatic impact the pandemic has had on the company. The airline says it saw an 88 per cent drop in passenger traffic due to the pandemic and travel restrictions.
The airline did earn $757 million in the third quarter, but that represented an 86 per cent drop of $4.7 billion from its earnings in the same time period in 2019.
Bleeding cash, Air Canada took what it called “the painful step” of cutting half of its workforce in June — 20,000 jobs — and indefinitely suspended 30 domestic regional routes. The carrier also retired some planes early and postponed or cancelled the delivery of some new aircraft, according to the company’s financial records.
Wesley Lesosky is the president of the Air Canada component of CUPE, which represents 6,000 laid-off flight attendants. He said Air Canada should have kept those people employed through the wage subsidy program, as other airlines did.
Lesosky is also the president of the union’s airline division, which represents 15,000 flight attendants at other airlines, including Air Transat, Sunwing and WestJet.
“If the government’s going to give an employer that amount of assistance, which is quite high, it should have conditions tied to it where the workers are actually protected,” he said.
Air Canada, meanwhile, told CBC News that Canada is “somewhat of an outlier among developed nations in not having a targeted, sectoral support program for the aviation industry.”
The carrier points to the International Air Transport Association’s chief economist, who stated recently that more than $160 billion US in government aid has gone to airlines globally.
The U.S. and some European countries have given billions in financial aid to airlines. In some cases, there were strings attached to that aid, such as governments taking equity stakes in the airlines and requiring them to issue refunds.
HALIFAX – When legal scholar Elaine Craig started researching pornography, she knew little about websites such as Pornhub or xHamster — and she did not anticipate that the harsh scenes she would view would at times force her to step away.
Four years later, the Dalhousie University law professor has published a book that portrays in graphic detail the rise of ubiquitous free porn, concluding it is causing harm to the “sexual integrity” of girls, women and the community at large.
The 386-page volume, titled “Mainstreaming Porn” (McGill-Queen’s University Press), begins by outlining how porn-streaming firms claim to create “safe spaces” for adults to view “consensual, perfectly legal sex,” as their moderators — both automated and human — keep depictions of illegal acts off the sites.
But as the 49-year-old professor worked through the topic, she came to question these claims. Depictions of sex that find their way onto the platforms are far from benign, she says.
“Representations of sex in mainstream porn … that weaponize sex against women and girls, that represent it as a tactic to be deployed against unconscious women or unsuspecting ‘daughters’ when their mothers are not home … do not promote sexual integrity and human flourishing,” she writes in her closing chapter.
Joanna Birenbaum, a Toronto-based lawyer who has worked with sexual assault victims for 20 years, said in a recent email that Craig’s work is the first to “really make the connection between porn, its impact on women and girls … and the ways in which it has evolved to become part of the tech industry.”
“It is eye-opening because it is so frank and concrete … for those who are unaware of what can be found on these mainstream platforms.”
For example, Canadian criminal law is clear that when a person is asleep, they lack the capacity for sexual consent. But Craig’s online searches of porn platforms found “countless videos” depicting the perpetration of sexual assault on “sleeping or unconscious women.” The difference in the pseudo-reality of porn was the women were almost always depicted as pleased and accepting.
Meanwhile, the book finds that “incest-based” porn — and the associated “tags” designed to draw viewers — are “as prolific as they are popular.” Craig said during an interview at her campus office that she believes a subset of this category, showing male family members having sex with female performers depicted as girls, meets the definition of child pornography.
Then there are the depictions of the surreptitious filming of sex without the knowledge of those being recorded, “another relatively common phenomenon on porn-streaming platforms,” she writes. In her closing chapters, she urges all provinces to pass laws to allow rapid removal of such material from sites.
For Craig, a mother of two boys, her journey into this world was draining. After writing the chapter on incest-themed porn, she had to take three months away from the project. “I found it challenging to watch some of it,” she said.
In her book, Craig notes how last year, after a judge sentenced an Ottawa man to seven years in prison for posting secret sex videos, a vice-president with Ethical Capital Partners — which owns Pornhub’s parent Aylo — said the site no longer allows individuals to search for videos under the tag, “hidden camera.”
But when Craig checked she found that, while the term “hidden camera” yielded no videos on Pornhub, using just the term “hidden” did produce results. Titles on the first page of her search results included, “Dragged a sexy classmate into bed and filmed sex on a hidden phone.” Other categories including “secret voyeur,” “real amateur hidden” and “spy” also yielded videos.
A Pornhub spokesman said in an emailed statement this week that the company has a list of more than 35,000 banned keywords and millions of permutations “that prevent users from trying to search for words that may violate our terms of service.” He said the list is “constantly evolving, with new words regularly added in multiple languages.”
In her closing chapters, Craig questions whether using criminal law to go after the producers and possessors of the porn she considers illegal will be effective. Instead she prefers a human rights approach that identifies “hateful” porn and monitors remedies over time.
Her research found that certain graphic slurs directed at women yielded links to hundreds of videos last year on Pornhub, and Craig argues these expressions can be seen as part of a “taxonomy of misogyny and racism” that the sites are building.
She argues for federal legislation to prohibit streaming companies from promoting videos with titles, tags and categories that meet the definition of hate speech — “vilification and detestation on the basis of sex or race, for example.”
The author notes that the Online Harms Act — currently before Parliament — would create a digital safety commission and impose a “duty of responsibility” on porn sites to prevent harmful content toward children. However, Craig calls for the same approach to be applied to “the unique harms” the streaming platforms are creating for women.
Craig argues against an “absolutist” ban on porn, making the case that this is unrealistic, but she calls for a landscape where “sex should not be mean” and where parents and schools start to educate teenagers about the harmful forms of sexuality they may encounter on the free platforms.
“Mainstream porn-streaming platforms should be held more responsible for preventing these harms and for bearing their costs when they fail,” she writes.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 13, 2024.
WASHINGTON – Donald Trump’s second administration is filling up with some of his most loyal supporters and many of the people landing top jobs have been critical of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and security at Canada’s border.
One expert says there are not many Canadian allies, so far, in the president-elect’s court.
“I don’t see a whole lot of friends of Canada in there,” said Fen Hampson, a professor of international affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa and co-chair of the Expert Group on Canada-U.S. Relations.
As the Republican leader starts making crucial decisions about his administration, designations for foreign policy and border positions have sent signals to Canada, and the rest of the world, about America’s path forward.
Trump campaigned on imposing a minimum 10 per cent across-the-board import tariff. A Canadian Chamber of Commerce report suggests that would shrink the Canadian economy, resulting in around $30 billion per year in economic costs.
The president-elect is also critical of giving aid to Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression and has attacked the United Nations, both things the Liberal government in Canada strongly backs.
Trump tapped Mike Waltz to be national security adviser amid increasing geopolitical instability, saying in a statement Tuesday that Waltz “will be a tremendous champion of our pursuit of Peace through Strength!”
Waltz, a three-term congressman from Florida, has repeatedly slammed Trudeau on social media, particularly for his handling of issues related to China.
He also recently weighed in on the looming Canadian election, posting on X that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was going to “send Trudeau packing in 2025” and “start digging Canada out of the progressive mess it’s in.”
Like Trump, Waltz has been critical of NATO members that don’t meet defence spending targets — something Canada is not doing, and won’t do for years.
Trudeau promised to meet the target of spending the equivalent of two per cent of GDP on defence by 2032.
Immigration and border security were a key focus for Republicans during the election and numerous key appointees have their eyes to the north.
It’s been reported that Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a vocal critic of China, is expected to be named Secretary of State.
Rubio has pointed to concerns at the Canada-U.S. border. He recently blasted Canada’s move to accept Palestinian refugees, claiming “terrorists and known criminals continue to stream across U.S. land borders, including from Canada.”
Trump’s choice for ambassador to the United Nations, New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, has also focused on the border with Canada.
Stefanik, as a member of the Northern Border Security Caucus, called for Homeland Security to secure the border, claiming there had been an increase in human and drug trafficking.
“We must protect our children from these dangerous illegal immigrants who are pouring across our northern border in record numbers,” she posted on X last month.
Stefanik has little foreign policy experience, but Trump described her as a “smart America First fighter.” She repeatedly denounced the UN, saying the international organization is antisemitic for its criticism of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
U.S. media reports say longtime Trump loyalist Kristi Noem, South Dakota’s governor, has been chosen to run Homeland Security. She was on the shortlist to be vice-president until controversy erupted over an anecdote in her book about shooting a dog.
“She doesn’t seem to have very warm feelings (toward Canada),” Hampson said
Last year, she claimed to be having conversations with a Canadian family-owned business looking to relocate to her state because of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.
But Noem has also said that the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement, negotiated under the first Trump administration, was “a major win.”
The trilateral agreement is up for review in 2026.
Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s former trade representative , has been an informal adviser for the president-elect’s transition and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said they remain in contact.
He has been touted by analysts as an option for several jobs in Trump’s second administration, including a return to the trade file, though Hampson said he is unlikely to go back to the trade representative role.
Hampson said there are still significant questions about how sweeping the tariffs could be and if there will be carve-outs for industries like energy. Trump and his team may also hang the tariff threat over upcoming trade negotiations.
“Is he going to stick us with a tariff Day 1 or shortly after?” Hampson asked.
Some experts have called for Canada to remain calm and focus on opportunities rather than fears. Others have called for bold action and creative thinking.
Canada revived a cabinet committee on Canada-U.S. relations a little more than 24 hours after Trump’s win was secured.
Trudeau said Tuesday in Fredericton that under the first Trump presidency, Canada successfully negotiated the trilateral trade deal by demonstrating that the country’s interests and economies are aligned.
“That is going to continue to be the case,” he said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 13, 2024.
The Toronto Sceptres have opened training camp for the upcoming PWHL season, with a new logo, new colours, new jerseys and a new primary venue in Coca-Cola Coliseum. The team has a lot to look ahead to after a busy off-season and successful inaugural campaign. (Nov. 12, 2024)
