Interest in Canadian flights out of Lebanon last year waned quickly, documents show

A Middle East Airlines airplane flies over Beirut as smoke rises from Israeli airstrikes in Dahiyeh, Beirut on Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)

OTTAWA — Documents detailing Canada’s efforts to help citizens and permanent residents leave Lebanon last year show an initial swell of interest in charter flights out of the country dropped off dramatically.

In the end, Canada spent nearly three times as much to keep chartered planes on standby on the ground than it did to fly people out on them.

The documents, obtained by The Canadian Press through the Access to Information Act, offer a glimpse into efforts at Global Affairs Canada, GAC, to assist Canadians looking to flee fighting between Hezbollah and Israeli forces in 2024.

They show Canada spent more than $14 million to help Canadians, permanent residents and their family members leave Lebanon last year. That sum included about $4 million to fly 844 Canadian citizens, permanent residents and their family members to Istanbul. The nine flights left between Oct. 3 and Oct. 12, 2024.

The documents do not report the exact cost due to privacy laws on procurement contracts.

Most of GAC’s nine charter flights had the capacity to carry 291 passengers, and while about 300 foreign nationals were given seats on those flights, hundreds of seats were left empty.

Much of the expense came from contingency plans that were in place for nearly two months before cross-border hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah reignited in late September. Canada spent $11 million to keep charter planes on standby starting as early as Aug. 3, 2024, as part of a 90-day retainer agreement.

“Given the rising insecurity in the region and the need to be ready for different contingencies, GAC had to plan for a number of possible scenarios,” a GAC spokesperson told The Canadian Press.

GAC urged Canadians in Lebanon to leave as Israel and the militant group Hezbollah traded missile strikes across the Israel-Lebanon border.

In the summer and fall of 2024, Canada identified 25,000 Canadians in the region through its Registration of Canadians Abroad service, and sent call-outs to all of them offering information on GAC’s efforts.

About 7,400 people filled out intake forms for emergency assistance but just 1,200 took the government up on the offer. They included the 844 who flew out on one of the chartered flights, and another 467 people who left on commercial flights in seats reserved by GAC.

Passengers on commercial flights paid the airlines directly for the cost.

The documents also suggest some of the lessons the government learned from the Lebanon assisted departure program.

While Ottawa initially relied on the Registration of Canadians Abroad to estimate how many people it might need to help in the event of a full-scale military evacuation, the documents suggest officials found the online intake forms to be a more accurate way to predict how many people would want to leave.

The GAC official said the online forms also offered more information on people who might need extra help, including passport information for pre-screening.

A GAC official said unlike the case of the military-assisted evacuation of Lebanon in 2006, GAC was told to run this operation on a cost-recovery basis. The 2006 evacuation, which saw about 15,000 Canadians flee the country, cost taxpayers $94 million.

A July 30, 2024 memo signed by David Morrison, the deputy minister of foreign affairs, said that deploying such an evacuation — known as a non-combatant evacuation operation, or NEO — in 2024 would be “the most significant Canadian civilian evacuation operation ever conducted.”

But GAC never did trigger the NEO. Instead, it booked blocks of seats on Middle East Airlines flights to Istanbul, and then later used the charter flights.

Canada reserved 100 seats on the first commercial flight on Sept. 29. While all of them were booked, there were a number of no-shows and duplicate bookings.

“This reflects insecurity/transportation challenges for clients — and the very difficult personal decision to leave given uncertain future,” wrote Sebastien Beaulieu, GAC’s director general of emergency management and travel advice, in one of many daily updates sent throughout the operation.

One of Beaulieu’s later updates suggested some people were reluctant to flee because of worries about extended family members, tenuous ties to Canada and a fear of abandoning their property.

GAC’s first charter flight on Oct. 3, was full, with 254 passengers.

The Canadian Embassy was flooded with hundreds of calls and thousands of online intake forms from people asking about departure options, which GAC used to rationalize its decision to mobilize further charter flights.

“In order to ensure that we have provided options to all interested Canadians who filled an intake form, we recommend to pursue our approach of (charter flights) on Oct. 5-6,” Beaulieu wrote on Oct. 4

But the demand didn’t last long. Beaulieu’s update two days later indicated uptake was only at 20 per cent of those who were “interested” in options to leave the country. He said people found the commercial options more flexible.

In another update, Beaulieu reported nearly 50 people who paid for charter seats asked for refunds because they didn’t want to leave or preferred another option.

Global Affairs did achieve what Beaulieu described as a “major innovation milestone” by implementing a Shopify-based payment solution to process payments for its charter seats.

“This will have implications for crises around the world which entail cost-recovery, starting with Lebanon. And it can be scaled, as a model for the collection of a range of consular service fees around the network,” he wrote on Oct. 8.

Until then, he explained, credit card payments could only be done by phone or in person at Canadian missions — which led to multiple errors.

Canada ultimately recovered $318,693 of the charter costs by charging passengers US$330 a seat, equivalent to the approximate cost of a commercial flight at the time.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 15, 2025

Nick Murray, The Canadian Press