Air Canada’s CEO announced his retirement from the airline Monday after his inability to speak French earned him the ire of Canada’s prime minister and French-speaking Quebecers.
The Montreal-based airline said Michael Rousseau, who had worked in senior leadership at Canada’s largest airline for nearly two decades and served five years as CEO, would step down by the end of the third quarter of 2026 following outrage over an English-only video published last week in which he expressed his “deepest sorrow” for all those affected by the deadly crash of an Air Canada regional jet with an airport fire truck at LaGuardia Airport earlier this month.
The nearly four-minute video, in which Rousseau spoke only in English, had French subtitles. The only French words the CEO said were “bonjour” at the beginning and “merci” at the end.
“I am 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,” Rousseau said in a video following outrage over the initial English-only video.
Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney criticized the video and said he was “disappointed.” Carney noted that the country has two official languages and Air Canada especially has a responsibility to communicate in both languages. Quebec’s National Assembly also voted 92-0 in favor of a motion to call for Rousseau’s resignation.
The Official Languages Act (OLA), first passed by Canada’s parliament in 1969 and strengthened in 2023, enshrines English and French as Canada’s two official languages. The law requires federal institutions to serve the public in both languages. Air Canada, as a former state-owned company, has been bound by it since it was privatized in 1988-1989.
Some citizens of the French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec, which includes Air Canada’s home city of Montreal, claimed Rousseau’s English-only message was insulting, especially as one of the two pilots who died in the incident, Antoine Forest, was a French-speaking Quebecer. Mackenzie Gunther was the other pilot who passed in the crash.
In addition to the pilots, several passengers were injured last week after an Air Canada regional jet operated by Jazz Aviation collided at about 130 miles per hour with an airport fire truck on the runway. No passengers died, yet the incident shut down LaGuardia Airport for several hours.
Rousseau said in a statement last week that despite “many lessons over several years” he could still not express himself adequately in French. Quebec Premier François Legault, the leader of the province, said Rousseau had promised to learn French when he became CEO in 2021.
Despite days of scandal and repeated calls for his ouster from Québécois politicians, Rousseau apologized but did not commit to stepping down, that is, until Monday.
In 2021, after he was criticized for giving a speech to Montreal business leaders entirely in English, Rousseau implied he was too busy running Air Canada to learn French. Although he said his family had a “French background,” he said he had lived in Montreal for more than a decade without speaking French. At the time, Rousseau apologized and committed to improving his language skills.
Since then, the Air Canada CEO has taken around 300 hours of French lessons, according to Air Canada.
Air Canada in a Monday press release announcing Rousseau’s departure said it has been working on succession planning for two years. One of its criteria for a new CEO? “The ability to communicate in French.”
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