Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau resigned after his English-only condolence message following a fatal LaGuardia crash sparked backlash in Quebec, where French is official. TJ Walker argues language fluency is a hard executive skill, not optional, and that ambitious leaders in multilingual countries must learn their constituencies' languages.
Chapters
Ultimize. Did you see the latest from Air Canada? Their CEO just got the boot. This Air Canada story is one of the clearest reminders I've seen in years that communication is not some decorative extra for CEOs. It's not frosting. It's not a soft elective. It's not the thing you work on after you master the spreadsheet. Sometimes communication is the job. And in this case, The numbers were not the problem. It's common for CEOs to get canned when they don't hit their numbers, but that's not what happened here. Air Canada just reported 2025 operating revenue of $22.4 billion, operating income of $918 million, adjusted EBITDA of $3.1 billion, $3.7 billion in operating cash flow, and $747 million in free cash flow. Those are not distressed company numbers. Those are the finance team did its homework numbers. And yet the CEO is leaving. Why? Because a CEO cannot run a major public company as though human beings are a rounding error. Michael Rousseau is retiring after the backlash over his English-only or near English-only condolence message after the fatal air crash Air Canada crash at LaGuardia. Prime Minister Mark Carney said the message showed a lack of judgment and compassion, and said it was essential that the next CEO be bilingual. Air Canada itself said French ability will be a part of the successor search. That's the whole lesson right here. You can have record revenue, you can have positive cash flow, you can buy back stock, and still lose the room because you never learned how to connect with actual human beings, especially in their language. A balance sheet can tell you whether the airline made money. It cannot tell you whether the country feels respected. Now, most Americans do not realize how charged this is because they hear Canada and they think one big polite English-speaking snow globe with better manners and more hockey. But Canada has two official languages. English and French under the Federal Official Languages Act, and Quebec is not just another province with a cute accent. French is the common and official language of Quebec, and Quebec law says people have the right to be informed and served in French. Statistics, here they are. Canada says 82.2% of Quebec's population had French as its first official language spoken. This is as of 2021. That means this was not some obscure etiquette error like using the wrong salad fork in Montreal. This was the CEO of the country's flagship airline headquartered in Montreal stumbling into one of the most sensitive identity issues in Canada. Reuters notes that frustration over the dominance in English helped fuel the rise of separatist Parti Quebecois, and forgive me because I don't speak French, Quebecois in the 1970s, and I'm sure I botched that, apologies. AP notes that Quebec's identity has been contentious since the British takeover of what had been New France in the 1760s. A little bit of history here. In other words, this is not just about vocabulary, it's about history, power, respect, and whether French-speaking people in Quebec are being treated as central to the country or as subtitles. And that's why this became a leadership story, not just a language story. If you are a CEO of a Montreal-based airline and you still treat French like an optional app you forgot to download, you're telling people something. Not with words, with your priorities. Now, to be fair, this is a— there is a serious counterargument. Some people say, I would rather have the CEO focus on safety, operations, fleet, margins and labor than spend time conjugating verbs. I understand the argument. It sounds practical, sounds hard-headed. It sounds like the sort of thing a spreadsheet would say if a spreadsheet could talk. But leadership is not just optimization. Leadership is trust, and trust is built through symbols, empathy, and cultural fluency. When there's a tragedy, people are not grading you on your route network. They're asking a much more basic question. Do you understand who we are? Carnegie said companies have a responsibility to communicate in both official languages regardless of the situation. In a crisis, especially a fatal one, that's not a side issue. That is the moment. And this is where the so-called soft skills become very hard skills. Call them soft if you want. I think that's one of the dumbest phrases in business. If a missing communication skill can help end a CEO's tenure at a company with strong financial performance, that's not soft. That is a core executive competency. Cultural literacy is not a garnish, it's a part of the engine. Because let's be honest, and this was not an impossible assignment. Rousseau became CEO in 2021 and had already drawn criticism then for not speaking French. AP reports Quebec Premier François Legault noted that Rousseau promised to learn English when he was appointed. Oops. Reuters reports Rousseau apologized again in 2026 after delivering only 2 French words in a 4-minute video. And that's the killer point for any ambitious executive watching this. Nobody was asking him to become 100% fluent. Nobody needed him to start writing French poetry by candlelight. If you're the CEO of Air Canada and you lived in Montreal for years, half an hour a day— make that 10 minutes a day— of disciplined language study over a decade is not some unreasonable burden. That is one less doom scroll session. That's one less executive dinner. That is one less round of, "Let's circle back." Over that span, he could have been comfortably bilingual. He could have delivered condolences fully in both languages. He could have sounded like a national leader instead of a visiting consultant who took a wrong turn off the highway. That's what people miss about executive presence. Executive presence is not just a low voice or a navy suit and the ability to say synergy without laughing. Sometimes executive presence The essence is simply this, you bothered to learn how people speak in their own words. And that's the broadest lesson for you CEOs. Yes, know finance. Yes, understand operations. Yes, master capital allocation. But if you want to lead at the highest level, especially in a multinational, multilingual, culturally loaded environment, you also have to study people. Study history, study symbols, study what your employees, customers, regulators, and citizens hear when you open your mouth. Because anyone can learn a discounted cash flow model. Far fewer people learn how to avoid telling millions of customers, employees, and politicians all at once, I still do not really understand you. And that in the end is why this story matters. Air Canada's latest financials say the business was strong. This resignation says something even more important. A CEO cannot live on numbers alone. If you neglect the human element long enough, eventually the human element sends you an early retirement package. Okay, let me be clear here and transparent. I'm awful at this. I'm the typical ugly American, not ugly Canadian, but ugly American, and that I only speak English. And I realize that's a flaw of mine, but since I live in America and America is a big market, and because of England's domination of the world a couple of centuries ago, English is a pretty good language to speak if you only speak one. It has been to my benefit, and I'm just lucky. But if I were going to try to represent a whole lot of constituents or most of my customers spoke another language, I would learn how to do that. Now I've tried to do some workarounds. My digital AI clone at tjwalker.ai can speak in 32 languages. It's my voice, it's my ideas, but it instantly speaks in these other languages. Now that can work for me as a trainer, doesn't really work for a CEO of a gigantic publicly traded company. So those of you who are wildly ambitious and wanting to become CEOs of huge publicly traded companies or take your own company public one day and you have some geographic positioning that makes you really related to a particular people, you need to learn how to speak their language. That's really the bottom line. Now, I throughout my own career have worked with presidents and prime ministers and business leaders, members of parliament around the world where I've had to train them and they do practice their speeches, their meeting interviews in foreign languages. Sometimes I use translators. Most of the time the people I'm working with speak English. I do my part in English. They do their answers or their speeches in other languages and it's worked out. But would I also be more effective if I spoke a bunch of languages? Yeah, I would. They just ultimatize.
