Air Canada says it will make “an important announcement concerning air service to Yellowknife” in the city on Friday afternoon.
What will be announced is not yet clear. In a city where various airlines’ levels of service have recently fluctuated, this time the news on the way is understood to be good for travellers.
An advisory from Air Canada stated that one of the airline’s executives will be joined in Yellowknife by the city’s mayor, Rebecca Alty, NWT infrastructure minister Diane Archie and NWT Tourism boss Donna Lee Demarcke. (In a later amendment, after this article was first published, Air Canada said tourism minister Caroline Wawzonek would attend, not Archie.)
Air Canada has rarely held this kind of staged announcement in Yellowknife.
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More: This announcement has now been made, here’s what’s happening
The airline, like rival WestJet, has had an on-off relationship with the territorial capital in recent years, largely driven by the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on both air travel and northern tourism.
At the start of 2021, Air Canada dropped all service to Yellowknife – citing “the effect of stifled demand from ongoing travel restrictions and blanket quarantine rules” – before gradually resuming flights later that summer as restrictions began to ease.
Direct Air Canada flights from Yellowknife to Edmonton and Vancouver resumed in 2022, only for the airline to suspend direct flights to Calgary and Edmonton in September last year, leaving many of its passengers facing a cross-Canada slog to Vancouver for flights to and from the NWT.
Air Canada non-stop service to Edmonton has since returned. The Calgary route remains out of commission but Canadian North moved to fill that gap earlier this year, launching its own direct Calgary-Yellowknife service, a route also served by WestJet.
