What Air Canada Reveals About the Risks Companies Tolerate
On March 22, a regional jet operating as Air Canada Express Flight 8646 collided with a fire truck on the runway at LaGuardia. Both pilots were killed and dozens of passengers and crew were injured. An NTSB investigation is underway to determine what led to the tragedy.
But a second story overtook the first almost immediately. Within 48 hours, Canadian front pages had moved from the crash to a national debate about whether the CEO of the country’s flagship airline was equipped to lead.
Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau’s condolence video drew fierce criticism. Not for what he said, but for the language he said it in. Air Canada carries bilingual obligations as a Canadian company, and Rousseau delivered his message to grieving families almost entirely in English. The Prime Minister called it a “failure of judgment and compassion,” and legislators in Quebec demanded his resignation.
Days later, Air Canada’s Board announced Rousseau would retire by the end of the year. They also stated, for the first time, that the ability to communicate in French would be a key criterion in their search for a successor. The Board said the transition was planned and that a search had been underway, but to most observers, the timing was too much of a coincidence.
This is less a story about one executive’s shortcomings and more about what happens when a known limitation meets a moment that won’t accommodate it.
In this case, the limitation wasn’t a surprise. In 2021, Rousseau delivered his first major speech as CEO to the Montreal Board of Trade entirely in English. That generated nearly 2,700 complaints to the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages, reportedly among the highest totals for any single incident. Parliamentary committees got involved and government correspondence was exchanged.
Ultimately, Rousseau kept his job, and the language issue became little more than background noise. It was a known challenge, occasionally raised by critics, but never treated as disqualifying.
This is a familiar pattern. Leaders are often elevated for a specific operational strength because a pressing problem needs solving. Deficits in other areas, especially areas that look soft until they aren’t, like communications, get treated as acceptable tradeoffs.
Not every limitation is dangerous, and most aren’t. A limitation is a missing capability. A credibility gap forms when that limitation stays visible long enough that stakeholders start treating it as evidence about the leader’s priorities, judgment, or fitness. And even then, organizations often decide to live with it.
A limitation is a missing capability. A credibility gap forms when that limitation stays visible long enough that stakeholders start treating it as evidence about the leader’s priorities, judgment, or fitness.
In baseball, they’re the weak fielder you tolerate because the bat is too good. You hope the ball isn’t hit their way, but in crisis, the ball tends to find them. Sometimes the exposure is spectacular, as it was here. More often, these gaps corrode effectiveness over time until they become impossible to ignore.
This was not an unforeseeable complication layered onto an unforeseeable tragedy. It was exposure that should have been scenario-planned long before a crisis arrived. The risk was visible, and because it was visible, it was governable. And because it was governable, it should have been either addressed directly or planned around.
The Board could have treated French fluency as a requirement earlier or scenario-planned for a situation requiring bilingual communication, deciding in advance who would speak and how. None of that would have required extraordinary foresight.
We call this pattern a dormant vulnerability: a known leadership limitation that an organization lives with during calm conditions but that becomes destabilizing during a crisis. Most organizations have at least one, and most don’t find out which matter until it’s too late.
Boards usually see these risks and actively discuss them. And more often than anyone likes to admit, they decide to live with them. The organization is performing and the limitation can be worked around. Raising it feels disproportionate when things are going well. Nobody wants to destabilize a leadership team over a hypothetical.
But the hypothetical is only hypothetical until it isn’t. By the time the moment arrives, the window to address it has closed. Consider: how many boards are carrying similar risks right now, assuming they’ll have time to address them before the moment that forces their hand?
Most organizations invest in standard crisis toolkits that include tabletop exercises, media training, holding statements, and more. That work is critically important, but it’s focused on what the organization will say and do when something goes wrong.
The harder task is deciding who will say it, and perhaps more importantly, whether that person has the credibility to be heard.
Which limitations are containable in normal conditions? Which ones become untenable under pressure? And critically, for known limitations, which scenarios would turn them into credibility gaps?
Those gaps aren’t invisible. They show up in stakeholder research, in the distance between what leaders say and what their constituencies experience, and in the things known internally but not yet acted on. The question is whether anyone is looking before the crisis that makes them impossible to miss.
Rousseau’s apology itself was solid by reasonable standards. He acknowledged the harm, took responsibility, and committed to do better. But it wasn’t enough because it simply wasn’t credible. Five years of evidence said otherwise, and no single statement, however well-constructed, was going to overcome that.
That’s the real lesson: You can’t manufacture credibility in the moment you need it. You draw on what you’ve built, or you discover it simply isn’t there.
You can’t manufacture credibility in the moment you need it. You draw on what you’ve built, or you discover it simply isn’t there.
For leaders, the most important crisis preparation is the daily work of closing the gaps between who you are and who your stakeholders need you to be. For boards, it means recognizing the difference between a development opportunity and a risk that needs to be planned around.
Air Canada arrived at that distinction under pressure. You’d rather arrive on your own terms.
