Canada’s Air Transat shuts Vancouver base, sheds more crew

Air Transat (TS, Montréal Trudeau) will close one of its three bases, at Vancouver Int’l, until further notice, as its flight attendant members drop to 117 for November 2020, down from 355 cabin crew working in August and 2,000 before the covid-19 pandemic, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) said in a statement on October 16. The union released the figure for November, which represents a drop of about 94% from the pre-covid figure, after 128 Air Transat flight attendants were notified they would be temporarily laid off and that the carrier’s Vancouver base would shut down as a stop-gap measure. Christophe Hennebelle, vice president of human resources and corporate affairs at the airline’s parent Transat AT, told the Canadian Press news agency that the company was processing “a number of temporary layoffs” but that no cabin crew had been made permanently redundant. He confirmed that the 128 employees had been informed the previous week, blaming the decision on a lack of improving prospects for the industry. Transat staff numbers have fallen from a pre-pandemic workforce of 5,100 to around 1,700 active employees. The CUPE highlighted in its statement that “Air Transat flight attendants are safety professionals whose primary role is to protect passengers,” adding that they have been divided into three local unions corresponding to their three bases, at Montréal Trudeau, Toronto Pearson, and Vancouver. Julie Roberts, president of CUPE’s Air Transat component, commented: “All of our information indicates that Air Transat’s resumption of activities in the summer and fall of 2020 was totally safe for passengers and staff. A rapid screening system that provides pre-boarding results would be a crucial addition for reviving the airline industry. We sometimes forget that more than 600,000 jobs in Canada depend on this industry, directly or indirectly. What we need is an efficient federal screening program.” The union, which represents around 15,000 members in the air transport sector in Canada, said it had organised “a broad coalition of aviation employees” to demonstrate outside Canada’s parliament in Ottawa on October 20 demanding concrete measures from the government to ensure the aviation industry’s recovery.