Air travel may be back, but passenger traffic is still uneven across the country. Here’s why

This holiday season, a few things are guaranteed to unfold at airports across the country: There will be lines. There will be delays. There will be grumbling. And the uneven post-lockdown recovery at Canada’s busiest hubs will widen even further.

The number of passengers going through security screens at the eight largest airports has fully rebounded from the lows seen in 2020 and early 2021, according to Statistics Canada’s compilation of traveller stats from the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority. But beneath the surface, the recovery varies widely.

Passenger traffic at Pearson in Toronto and at Vancouver International Airport is roughly flat from where it was in the fall of 2019. Meanwhile, the number of travellers passing through Calgary’s international hub is up 10%, even as Ottawa’s Macdonald–Cartier has seen a drop of nearly 14%.

The divergence reflects a few things, namely how the economic recovery has unfolded and how the world of work has changed.

Calgary’s economy has rebounded better than many cities in Canada, thanks to higher oil prices and an influx of people fleeing stratospheric home prices in B.C. and Ontario. At the same time, one big block of travellers is missing from Ottawa’s terminal gates: federal employees travelling for business. The government has been pushing for workers to return to the office—the city has the highest rate of remote work in Canada—but the flip side is that more civil servants are doing business virtually rather than flying across the country.

There are few signs either of these trends are about to reverse.

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