More WestJet flight cancellations as Canadian airline strike hits more than 100,000 travelers

TORONTO — A strike by aircraft mechanics forced Canada’s second-largest airline, WestJet, to cancel hundreds more flights Sunday, upending the plans of about 110,000 travelers over the Holiday long weekend. Canada and encouraging the carrier to demand action from the federal government.

Some 680 workers, whose daily inspections and repairs are essential to flight operations, walked off the job Friday evening despite a binding arbitration directive from the labor minister.

“WestJet has received a binding arbitration order and is urgently awaiting clarification from the government that a strike and arbitration cannot exist simultaneously; this is an issue they are committed to addressing and, like all Canadians, we are waiting,” WestJet Airlines President Diederik Pen said in a statement on Sunday.

Since Thursday, WestJet has cancelled 829 flights scheduled between then and Monday, the busiest travel weekend of the season.

The vast majority of trips scheduled for Sunday were canceled as WestJet reduced its fleet of 180 planes to 32 active aircraft and topped the global list of cancellations among major airlines over the weekend.

Trevor Temple-Murray was one of thousands of customers who rushed to rebook after their trips were canceled less than a day in advance.

“We’ll have to wait,” said Temple-Murray, a resident of Lethbridge, Alta., who was waiting in a car with his wife and two-year-old son in the parking lot of the airport in Victoria, B.C., as they tried to catch a plane to Calgary.

Their 6:05 p.m. flight had been cancelled and they would not know until the evening whether a flight scheduled for 7:00 a.m. the next day would take place.

“There are a lot of angry people in there,” Temple-Murray said, pointing to the terminal.

Nearby, Year 10 exchange student Marina Cebrian said she was supposed to return home to Spain early on Sunday, but will now not return to her family until Tuesday after experiencing three flight cancellations.

“It’s painful,” she said. “I was supposed to be home today, like seven hours ago, but I’m not.”

WestJet and the Airplane Mechanics Fraternal Association have accused the other side of refusing to negotiate in good faith.

The union’s goal remains a negotiated deal rather than an arbitrator, a path it has opposed from the start.

The union says its wage demands would cost WestJet less than C$8 million (US$5.6 million) above what the company offered in the first year of the collective agreement — the first contract between the two sides. It acknowledged the gains would exceed the pay of industry colleagues across Canada and be more comparable to their U.S. counterparts.

WestJet says it offered a 12.5 per cent pay increase in the first year of the contract and a compounded 23.5 per cent pay increase for the remainder of the five-and-a-half-year term.