Sharan Kaur: Language rights are important. So are the system failures that cost 2 lives at LaGuardia

Political analyst Raphael Melancon speaks about Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau's English-only condolences and the political fallout.

Sharan Kaur served as the deputy chief of staff for former Liberal finance minister Bill Morneau and is currently a principal at Navigator.

Like many of you, I watched the footage and listened to the audio from the devastating Air Canada crash at LaGuardia Airport in a state of disbelief. Two people are dead. Families are shattered. Dozens are injured. An entire industry is shaken.

I have spent years preparing leaders and companies for high-stakes crises. The airline industry is at the top of the risk hierarchy. It is a zero-margin of error sector. The risk is absolute, the stakes are measured in human lives, and there is no such thing as being over-prepared. Which is why what has unfolded in the days since this tragedy has genuinely disappointed me, not just as a crisis professional, but as a person.

Following the horrific collision on the LaGuardia runway, Air Canada’s leadership moved quickly in the immediate aftermath, issuing a public statement in line with standard crisis protocol. But they made a serious and avoidable error: the message was not properly communicated in both official languages.

At one of the most scrutinized moments in the company’s recent history, they failed a basic and foundational obligation. The criticism directed at them for this is entirely fair. They should answer for it, and they should do better.

I also want to say this clearly: While I may not agree with the over politicization by summoning the CEO and demands of resignation, I understand why our politicians responded the way they did.

The French language in Canada is not simply a matter of policy or statute. It is the product of a long and painful history of suppression, assimilation, and institutional neglect. For francophone Canadians, and for Quebec in particular, vigilance around language rights is not political sensitivity for its own sake. It is the hard-won lesson of generations who watched their language, their culture, and their identity eroded by indifference.

When a federally regulated national carrier fails to communicate in French during a moment of national crisis, it lands differently here than it might anywhere else. It reopens something that never fully closed.

Politicians who represent francophone communities do not have the luxury or political flexibility of letting that go. Nor should they. The language obligations of Air Canada are enshrined in law precisely because we, as a country, decided that equal standing in both official languages is non-negotiable. When those obligations are violated, elected officials are right to say so, loudly and publicly. That is their job. That is the appropriate exercise of democratic accountability.

The harder questions we’re not asking

So let me be honest about what I am not saying. I am not saying the language conversation is unimportant. I am not saying francophone Canadians should set aside a legitimate grievance to make room for a different one. And I am not saying our politicians were wrong to respond.

What I am saying is that there is a time and place in extreme circumstances and we cannot lose sight of the human pain of two lost lives by shifting focus to another grievance. Because somewhere between that legitimate grievance and today, we lost the thread.

The language debate, valid as it is, has become the entire story. And while it consumes our airwaves and our feeds, the harder questions are being whispered. We are not focusing our outrage on the FAA and on what went wrong in those final moments.

We are not loudly demanding the examination of the systemic conditions at one of the world’s most chronically under-resourced major airports. We are not following the documented evidence on air traffic control staffing shortages, on LaGuardia’s aging infrastructure, on the gap between known risks and political will to address them. We are not building the case that might actually prevent the next crash.

Two people died. And the national conversation has narrowed to a CEO’s French proficiency.

This is where I think we have a collective responsibility to do something difficult: to separate the political from the urgent, not by dismissing one, but by refusing to let it crowd out the other.

The francophone community’s anger at Air Canada is legitimate and it should have a home in this conversation. But it belongs in a formal complaint to the Commissioner of Official Languages. It belongs in parliamentary committee hearings. It belongs in the ongoing, structural accountability that language rights require. It does not belong as the primary lens through which we examine why two people boarded a flight and did not come home.

There are moments when politics and crisis overlap, and that overlap demands careful navigation. A plane crash is not the moment to abandon our values. But it is also not the moment to perform them. The families sitting with unimaginable grief right now did not ask to become the backdrop for a debate we were already having. They deserve better than that.

What they deserve is a full, transparent, binational safety investigation. They deserve political will directed at the FAA, at airport infrastructure, at the staffing and resourcing conditions that experts have flagged for years. They deserve to see the grief of a nation channelled into something that might actually protect the next passengers who board that route.

That is what I would say to any leader I work with in the aftermath of a crisis: do not let the noise pull focus from the facts. Acknowledge every legitimate grievance, because they are real and they matter. But do not let the performance of accountability replace the substance of it.

We are a country capable of nuance. We have navigated harder tensions than this. We can hold the language conversation and the safety conversation at the same time, as long as we are honest about which one has a body count attached to it right now.

We owe the two lives lost and the dozens hurt more than a debate about language.

More from Sharan Kaur:

• Canada’s most embarrassing maintenance problem
• PM Carney was right to walk back support for a war with no exit strategy