WestJet flight cancellations affect tens of thousands of passengers

TORONTO (AP) — A strike by aircraft mechanics forced Canada’s second-largest airline, WestJet, to cancel hundreds of additional flights Sunday, upending the plans of nearly 110,000 passengers over the Canada Day long weekend and prompting the carrier to demand action from the federal government.

About 680 workers, whose daily inspections and repairs are essential to airline operations, went on strike Friday evening despite a directive for binding arbitration by the Labor Secretary.

“WestJet has received a binding arbitration order and is awaiting urgent clarification from the government that a strike and arbitration cannot co-exist; this is something they have committed to addressing and like all Canadians we are waiting,” WestJet Airways President Dedric Bean said in a statement on Sunday.

Since Thursday, WestJet has canceled 829 flights scheduled to fly between then and Monday — the busiest travel weekend of the season.

The vast majority of Sunday’s flights were canceled as WestJet reduced its 180-plane fleet 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 flights were canceled less than a day earlier.

“We’ll have to wait it out,” said Temple Murray, a resident of Lethbridge, Alberta, who was waiting in a car with his wife and two-year-old son in the parking lot of Victoria Airport in British Columbia. They were trying to board a plane bound for Calgary.

Their flight was cancelled at 6:05 p.m., and they didn’t know until the evening whether the flight scheduled for 7 a.m. the next day would go ahead.

“There are a lot of angry people out there,” Temple Murray said, pointing to the station.

Nearby, Marina Cebrian, a 10th-grader exchange student, said she was supposed to return home to Spain early Sunday but now won’t be home to her family until Tuesday after suffering three flight cancellations.

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

Both WestJet and the Fraternal Order of Aircraft Mechanics accused the other side of refusing to negotiate in good faith.

The union’s goal remains to reach an agreement through bargaining rather than through an arbitrator – a path the union has opposed from the beginning.

The union says its wage demands will cost WestJet less than C$8 million ($5.6 million) above what the company offered for the first year of the collective agreement — the first contract between the two sides. It has acknowledged that the gains will exceed compensation for its industry peers across Canada and be more on par with its U.S. counterparts.

WestJet says it offered a 12.5% ​​pay increase in the first year of the contract, and a 23.5% compound pay increase over the rest of the 5 1/2-year contract term.