By: Sasha Rubick, SFU Student

The Air Canada strike may be over, but the lingering reasons for the strike aren’t resolved — or are they? Recently, 10,000 flight attendants hit the bricks in protest of low wages and unpaid labour, amidst new contract negotiations. The federal government ordered them back to work only hours later. The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) announced their intention to defy the back-to-work order. At the end of the day, a tentative agreement was signed, ending the labour dispute.  

In the aftermath, Prime Minister Mark Carney raised some eyebrows with his Labour Day address, where he suggested artificial intelligence (AI) could replace the flight attendants entirely and prevent future labour turbulence. 

“My time at Goldman Sachs gave me a grounded — no pun intended — perspective on the lives of Canadian workers. They’re such couch potatoes,” Carney said in his remarks. “You know, I go to work every day, and you don’t see me striking. We all have to sacrifice just a teeny tiny bit. You might call it austerity, I call it sucking it up. And trust me, I know what it’s like to be paid unfairly — I learned about it in a sociology class at Cambridge (which my dearest paPA paid for).”

Carney then outlined a plan for Air Canada to replace its flight crew and gate agents with AI, and decided to “just throw in the pilots too, for good measure.” This cost-cutting method would save Air Canada a couple of dollars a year in wage payments. According to an anonymous source, the airline is considering using this money for more pertinent expenditures, such as providing coffee, during executive meetings.

99% of Canadian boomers who voted for the Liberals in the last election support Carney’s latest proposition. In a statement to The Peak, one respondent said: “I’ve thought for years that it’d be impossible for Air Canada’s customer service to be worse. Now that it is, I don’t seem to mind. Our beloved prime minister knows best! Maybe those flight attendants ought to keep their elbows up and shut up instead of putting picket lines up.”  

Air Canada appears ready to move forward with Carney’s plan, but says it will need to change the prices of their flights. “We’re making up for a possible future deficit of about $2 billion for insurance payouts,” explained a representative, “just in case that AI pilot thing doesn’t work out.” The airline will add a $700 AI fee to all future flights, mimicking their current business model. The company has notoriously balanced deceptively inexpensive base fares with add-on fees: $200 for checked bags, $50 for pretzels, and $300 for premium-quality elbows up couture oxygen masks. 

Generously, Air Canada will allow customers to opt out of AI assistance and the associated fee if they’re willing to store 10 other passengers’ luggage in the overhead, train the stranger next to them on how to put on an oxygen mask, and accept the risk of guaranteed death by hyperventilation during mild turbulence.     

“Mark Carney is a national treasure,” a spokesperson for Air Canada announced in a press release this morning. “We can learn a lot from the recent election. The Canadian public wants to be served by opinionless robots. Slap a maple leaf on an android and call it a day. And that’s exactly what we shall do. We all have to make sacrifices, so if the flight attendants don’t want to work, we’ll just replace them all with AI. Simple as that.” 

Carney doubled down on his proposal this evening. “What’s best for Canada is whatever gets our planes in the air again,” he said. “As your prime minister, I’m an expert on filling an important job position with a crappy substitute. If we did it in government, we can do it for air travel.”In a statement to The Peak responding to these newest developments, CUPE simply typed “sigh.”