Air Canada CEO to retire later this year in wake of criticism over lack of French

Air Canada chief executive Michael Rousseau will leave the company later this year after coming under fire last week for his failure to deliver a video condolence message in French following a plane crash that killed two Air Canada Express pilots.

Rousseau has told the board he will step down before October, the airline said Monday. He is expected to continue to lead Canada’s largest carrier and serve on its board of directors until they part ways.

The announcement leaves Air Canada scrambling to find a replacement amid the challenge of soaring fuel prices and depressed cross-border travel, and follows a half-decade marked by both COVID-19 hurdles and profit wins under the watch of a CEO known more for his financial finesse than fine-tuned community relations.

Rousseau, 68, was widely criticized for his lack of French in the four-minute condolence video posted online that included only two words in the language -- “bonjour” and “merci.”

Prime Minister Mark Carney said last week the decision to release the video message only in English showed a “lack of judgment and lack of compassion.”

“It is essential that the next CEO of Air Canada is bilingual,” he told reporters on Monday.

“It’s the right decision at the right time,” he added, qualifying that Rousseau was an “effective operator of the airline.”

Quebec Premier Francois Legault called the video disrespectful to the airline’s employees and its francophone customers. The Quebec legislature on Thursday voted overwhelmingly in favour of a motion calling on Rousseau to resign.

As recently as last Wednesday, Air Canada told media he had no plans to do so.

Nonetheless, Rousseau apologized for his linguistic shortcomings the next day, stating he was “deeply saddened that my inability to speak French has diverted attention from the profound grief of the families and the great resilience of Air Canada’s employees.”

The airline says Rousseau has taken some 350 hours of languages courses and spent another 250 hours in practice scenarios to bolster his speaking skills.

The three Air Canada CEOs who preceded Calin Rovinescu, Rousseau’s bilingual predecessor, all came from the world of U.S. aviation and spoke mainly English.

The resignation announcement comes the same day Air Canada filed documents revealing the chief executive received a $2.8-million bonus for 2025, a 43 per cent jump from the previous year that increased his total compensation to $13.1 million, up from $12.4 million in 2024.

Despite having launched an “external global search” for potential CEO candidates in January, the country’s largest carrier now finds itself in a hurry to hire a new head. And the pool may have shrunk significantly due to criteria mandating the “ability to communicate in French” -- fluently or otherwise.

“What Air Canada should be looking for is someone who’s fluently bilingual, so that rules out the United States -- but that is not necessarily a bad thing,” said Richard Leblanc, professor of governance, law and ethics at York University.

Tapping talent with a sensitivity to the linguistic and cultural particularities of the country could have upsides, especially as Canada looks to distance itself from its southern neighbour.

“This desire to be self-reliant should include executive talent as well,” Leblanc said.

“I see this with American directors and American CEOs that are in Canadian boardrooms. The culture, the dynamics, the context, it’s just not there.”

Jacques Roy, a retired professor of transport management at HEC Montreal business school said a chief executive’s job goes beyond strategy and accounting because they represent the face of the company and shape how consumers and governments perceive the brand. Rousseau tended to shy away from the public eye, appearing rarely at industry discussion panels and holding no more than a handful of press conferences over the past five years.

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“The job of a leader in charge of Air Canada and any large company working in a similar environment, they have to be sensitive to this environment and it’s part of their skills to be able to deal with all of these stakeholders. Obviously he was not up to it,” Roy said.

Rousseau was appointed CEO of Air Canada in February 2021 after serving as deputy chief executive and chief financial officer.

He took on the CFO job in 2007 on the cusp of the financial crisis that kicked off that year, overseeing the company’s books as travel demand plummeted amid the Great Recession.

Rousseau is widely seen as playing a key role in changing Air Canada’s financial trajectory by boosting its profit margin, share price and pension plan, which moved from a $3.7-billion deficit in 2013 to a $2.6-billion surplus in 2019.

Board chair Vagn Sorensen thanked Rousseau for his contributions at the airline.

“We are grateful for the determined leadership he has provided not only in steering our company through the 2007-2008 financial crisis, COVID and other challenges, but also in capturing opportunities such as the acquisition of Aeroplan, in restoring the solvency of our pension plans and in advancing customer centricity and employee well-being priorities,” Sorensen said in a news release.

However, his track record on the service side and, more recently, the airline’s stock value, trail those of some competitors.

Its on-time performance remains relatively poor, with the company placing ninth out 10 large North American airlines last year, according to aviation data tracker Cirium.

Its share price, hovering around $17.50, still sits one-third below that of five years earlier -- during the depths of the pandemic. And it remains way down from the heights of January 2020 when it breached $52. Meanwhile, other carriers on average enjoy roughly the same the stock price they had in early 2021, according the S&P 500 passenger airlines index.

Relations not just with Quebec’s francophone community -- the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages had received 2,195 complaints about Rousseau’s video as of last Friday -- but with labour unions proved uneven for the CEO as well.

The company cancelled thousands of flights in August 2025 during a three-day strike by flight attendants who disobeyed a federal directive to go back on the job, catching Rousseau off-guard.

The controversy over the collision condolence video message also wasn’t the first time Rousseau’s dearth of French landed him in trouble.

Following a speech in 2021 given almost entirely in English to the Montreal chamber of commerce, he told reporters he did not need to learn French to get by in Montreal -- comments that sparked a backlash and for which he apologized the next day.

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Rousseau pledged at that time to improve his French.

As a former federal Crown corporation, Air Canada is subject to the Official Languages Act, which requires that it offer services in French for routes that include airports in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick.

The Air Canada Express flight that crashed was flying from Montreal to New York’s LaGuardia Airport, and many of the travellers and crew -- including Antoine Forest, one of the two pilots killed -- were French-speaking Canadians.

Forest and fellow pilot Mackenzie Gunther died when the aircraft collided with a fire truck on the runway at LaGuardia.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 30, 2026.