Air Canada and American Airlines: former Air Canada CEO on the 1980s UK-Canada bilateral dispute

On 30-Nov-2011, CAPA published an article by Chris Lyle entitled American Airlines Goes Broke: Can a National Airline be allowed to Fail?

Here former Air Canada President and CEO, Pierre Jeanniot, offers an alternative view of realpolitik and corrects the record on one of the more contentious bilateral disputes of all time - between Canada and the UK in the 1980s. The Canadian government has not always displayed the protectionist face it does today and in that confrontation, the UK government showed how it too could look after its own in a good old-fashioned tit-for-tat battle. One outcome was that Canada took the extreme step of withdrawing from the 1944 International Air Services Transit Agreement, thus removing British airlines' privileges to overfly Canadian territory en route to the US. Sanity eventually prevailed.