Michael Rousseau lasted less than five years as chief executive of Air Canada. His downfall didn’t come from a financial scandal, a safety failure, or a boardroom coup. It came from the language he spoke — or more precisely, the one he didn’t.
In November 2021, Rousseau delivered a speech in Montreal almost entirely in English. When pressed by a francophone journalist about his inability to speak French after living in Quebec for 14 years, he offered a response that would haunt him: he said he’d been “too busy” to learn the language. The backlash was immediate, visceral, and ultimately career-ending.
Now, more than four years later, Rousseau has announced he will step down as CEO effective September 2025. Business Insider reported that the resignation follows a prolonged period of political and public pressure that never fully dissipated after the 2021 incident. Air Canada’s board has begun a search for his successor, and the company says it expects to name a replacement before Rousseau’s departure.
The episode is far more than a corporate personnel story. It sits at the intersection of Canadian federalism, Quebec nationalism, corporate governance, and the legal architecture of bilingualism that has defined the country since Confederation. And it raises a pointed question that Canadian business leaders have largely been able to sidestep for decades: Can you run one of the nation’s flagship companies without speaking both official languages?
The answer, it turns out, is no. Not anymore.
The Political Machinery Behind a Linguistic Reckoning
Air Canada isn’t just any corporation. It was created by an act of Parliament in 1937 as Trans-Canada Air Lines, a Crown corporation designed to connect a vast, sparsely populated country. It was privatized in 1988, but it has never fully shed its quasi-public identity. The airline remains subject to the Official Languages Act, which requires that federal institutions and federally regulated companies provide services in both English and French. For Air Canada specifically, this obligation was reinforced by the Air Canada Public Participation Act, passed at the time of privatization.
So when Rousseau stood before a Montreal audience in 2021 and spoke almost exclusively in English, the transgression wasn’t merely cultural. It was institutional. Quebec politicians from across the spectrum condemned him. François Legault, then the province’s premier, called the situation “embarrassing.” The federal Commissioner of Official Languages launched an investigation. Even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau weighed in, calling it “unacceptable” that the head of Air Canada couldn’t address Canadians in French.
Rousseau apologized. He pledged to learn French. He hired tutors. But the damage was structural. The incident became a rallying point for Quebec’s broader push to strengthen French-language protections — a push that culminated in the passage of Bill 96 in 2022, a sweeping reform to Quebec’s Charter of the French Language that imposed new obligations on businesses operating in the province.
Bill 96 didn’t target Air Canada specifically. But the Rousseau affair gave the legislation political oxygen. It was proof, for many Quebecers, that French was losing ground even in Montreal — a city that was supposed to be the beating heart of francophone North America.
The timeline matters here. Rousseau’s speech happened in November 2021. Bill 96 was introduced in May 2021 but gained enormous momentum through the fall and winter. It passed in June 2022 with support from all major parties in Quebec’s National Assembly. The two events fed each other in a feedback loop that neither Air Canada nor the Quebec government could fully control.
Rousseau’s position became increasingly untenable. His French improved — by most accounts, he reached a conversational level — but it was never enough to erase the original sin. Every quarterly earnings call, every public appearance, every interaction with Quebec media was filtered through the prism of that 2021 moment.
Air Canada’s operational performance during Rousseau’s tenure was, by most financial metrics, competent if unspectacular. The airline recovered from the catastrophic losses of the COVID-19 pandemic, returned to profitability, and rebuilt much of its international route network. Revenue for 2024 came in above analyst expectations. The stock price, while volatile, roughly tracked the performance of other North American carriers.
None of that mattered enough.
In corporate Canada, there’s an unwritten rule that the CEO of a federally regulated company headquartered in Montreal should be functionally bilingual. It’s not codified in law — the Official Languages Act governs services, not the linguistic abilities of executives — but it is deeply embedded in the expectations of shareholders, politicians, regulators, and the public. CN Rail, Bombardier, the National Bank of Canada, Power Corporation: the leaders of these institutions speak both languages as a matter of course. It is table stakes.
Rousseau’s appointment in 2021 broke that norm. He was chosen for his operational expertise — he’d been Air Canada’s chief financial officer and had deep experience in the airline industry. His unilingualism was known at the time of his appointment but was treated by the board as a manageable issue. It wasn’t.
The broader context is the steady erosion of French as a working language in Montreal’s corporate towers. Statistics Canada data from the 2021 census showed that the proportion of Quebecers who speak predominantly French at home declined for the first time in decades. Immigration patterns, the dominance of English in technology and global commerce, and the gravitational pull of English-language media have all contributed to what many francophone intellectuals describe as an existential demographic pressure.
Against that backdrop, a unilingual anglophone running Air Canada wasn’t just a corporate governance issue. It was a symbol.
And symbols, in Quebec politics, have consequences that balance sheets cannot absorb.
The search for Rousseau’s successor will almost certainly prioritize bilingualism as a non-negotiable criterion. Several names have circulated in Canadian business media, though Air Canada has not publicly identified any candidates. The board has retained an executive search firm and has signaled that it intends to move quickly.
There’s a strategic dimension to the transition as well. Air Canada faces intensifying competition from WestJet, which has expanded its international offerings, and from ultra-low-cost carriers that continue to chip away at domestic market share. The airline’s labor relations remain contentious — its pilots negotiated a new contract in 2023 after threatening to strike, and flight attendant negotiations have been similarly fraught. A new CEO will inherit these challenges along with the linguistic expectations.
The Rousseau affair has also had ripple effects beyond Air Canada. Other federally regulated companies have quietly reviewed their own language policies and executive hiring criteria. The federal government, under pressure from the Bloc Québécois and Quebec’s provincial government, has tightened enforcement of the Official Languages Act and signaled that it expects corporate leaders to model bilingualism, not merely comply with service requirements.
For Rousseau himself, the departure is the final chapter of a tenure defined less by what he did than by what he said — or couldn’t say. He will leave Air Canada in better financial shape than he found it. But his legacy will be inseparable from that Montreal podium in November 2021, when the head of Canada’s largest airline told a francophone audience, in English, that he hadn’t found the time to learn their language.
Some mistakes can be corrected. Some can only be survived. And some, in a country built on the fragile architecture of two founding languages, cannot be forgiven at all.
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