In March, two Air Canada pilots were killed when an Air Canada Express flight crashed at LaGuardia Airport. The loss devastated their families, colleagues and the airline. The company’s CEO, Michael Rousseau, recorded a condolence message. He delivered it almost entirely in English, with French subtitles, speaking two words of French: bonjour and merci.
Eight days later, the board announced his retirement.
The easy read of what happened is a language story. The useful read, for anyone responsible for an organization’s crisis readiness, is a preparedness story, because the defining fact of this case is not what Rousseau said in that video. It is that everyone involved had five years of warning that this exact moment was coming.
An Air Canada Vulnerability Named Years in Advance
Rousseau had been here before. Air Canada appointed him to lead the airline in early 2021 and he pledged at the time to learn French. By that November, he faced sustained public criticism over his inability to speak the language as chief executive of a Montreal-headquartered airline with a large francophone workforce. He apologized and recommitted publicly to learning it. By his own account, he took years of lessons with private tutors. Five years later , at the moment it mattered most, he could not move beyond basic phrases.
That is not a personal failing worth dwelling on. Language acquisition in your sixties while running an airline is genuinely hard, and the effort appears to have been real. The failure that deserves attention is organizational. The company already acknowledged the CEO’s vulnerability in public, and it had already produced one reputational crisis. And in five years, nobody built a contingency for the day it would intersect with a moment of genuine consequence.
The Air Canada Scenario Was Foreseeable. The Plan For It Was Not.
Because that day was foreseeable, Air Canada knew a moment would eventually arrive when the chief executive needed to address francophone employees and the Quebec public about something that mattered deeply, and his French would not be up to it. That scenario had answers available, such as a bilingual senior leader delivering the message alongside him. The airline also could have created a protocol, agreed in calm times, for who speaks and how when the audience is grieving in a language the CEO does not command. Any of these would have cost almost nothing to prepare. None of them existed.
Crisis planning tends to organize itself around unknown unknowns: the breach, the leak, the accident and the executive scandal that arrives without warning. Those scenarios get the simulations and the binders. The more dangerous category is usually the known vulnerability. It is the thing everyone inside the organization can name, that has been criticized before, survived before, and gradually reclassified from risk to background condition.
What A Crisis Does To Time
The other lesson in this case is about what a crisis does to time. Under normal circumstances, the gap between what a company promises and what it delivers gradually erodes its reputation. Stakeholders notice, tolerance erodes gradually, and the organization absorbs it. Grief changes the math entirely.
In moments of mourning, the gap between words and actions becomes disqualifying overnight because audiences expect organizations to live up to the values they have publicly embraced. They are evaluating whether the leader standing in front of them understands what the moment requires. Crises do not create vulnerabilities. They collapse the time available to manage them.
Mitigation Is Not Contingency
There are two practical tests for communicators reading this regarding their own organizations. First, name the known vulnerability. Every leadership team has at least one, and everyone in the room already knows what it is. Second, ask what the contingency is for the day that vulnerability collides with a moment of real consequence. Be precise about the answer. If it amounts to “we are working on the underlying issue,” that is mitigation, and mitigation is worth continuing. It is not a contingency. Mitigation is the plan for making the vulnerability smaller. Contingency is the plan for the day it shows up anyway, at full size, in the worst possible circumstances.
Air Canada had mitigation and years of it. The moment at LaGuardia required a plan for the absence of fluency, built in advance, by people thinking clearly about a risk everyone could see. Air Canada never built the plan, and when the moment came, the consequence of not having it cost more than reputation.
Callum Haney is a senior strategic communications and public affairs professional based in Ottawa. He advises brands and institutions on reputation and public trust, and is a former Press Secretary and senior advisor to Canadian Cabinet Ministers.