Air Transat pilots notch big wage gains in deal where income was biggest hurdle

MONTREAL — A tentative deal has yielded big wage gains for Air Transat pilots, the culmination of nearly a year of bargaining and 10 straight days of intense negotiations that saw wages emerge as the main sticking point.

The agreement in principle announced Tuesday evening narrowly averted a costly work stoppage for Transat A.T. Inc., which owns the struggling leisure airline, and a major disruption for thousands more travellers on the cusp of the holiday rush.

The deal the pilots will vote on in the coming weeks includes a wage hike of more than 60 per cent on average over five years, according to Transat spokeswoman Andréan Gagné.

The boost also means an extra $100,000-plus per year for most captains by 2030, she said.

Transat declined to offer more precise details around compensation or the broader collective agreement before it’s ratified. “We’re not disclosing where we landed,” Gagné said.

Bradley Small, who heads the union’s Air Transat contingent, would not confirm the figures. But he said the deal puts his colleagues in the same ballpark as pilots at WestJet and Air Canada, who achieved big wage gains in 2023 and 2024, respectively.

“Before we were at the bottom of the barrel, and now we’re aligned with them,” Small said in a phone interview.

Union leaders are set to present details of the deal to members next week in Toronto and Montreal, followed by a vote that will wrap up on Jan. 6, he said.

Wages proved the big hurdle in the final two days, with most other issues such as scheduling, insurance and benefits largely sewn up, both sides said. All that remained was compensation.

“The last couple of hours were especially on those increases,” Gagné said. “And we closed the gap.”

“We were creative in certain areas on how we could structure the deal and also help the company,” added Small. “We know they’re fragile.”

Small said his negotiating team shook hands with Transat CEO Annick Guérard and other executives shortly before 7 p.m. on Tuesday at a downtown Montreal hotel, flanked by three federal conciliators.

The mood inside the room — “white wall, nothing fancy” — changed immediately, Gagné said.

The Transat team felt “relieved,” she recalled. “Relieved and happy to go back to normal for our customers.”

“Everybody was extremely tired,” Small added.

“There was a lot of coffee, a lot of DoorDash and Uber Eats.”

The showdown came at a particularly fraught time for Transat as it struggles to manage a large debt load, turn an annual profit for the first time since 2018 and fend off a coup attempt from an activist investor.

Last week, media mogul Pierre Karl Péladeau — who is Transat’s second-biggest shareholder with 9.5 per cent the company’s shares — demanded a strategic overhaul and a board shakeup that would give him and two allies seats in the boardroom.

Tuesday’s deal prevented a fresh round of flight cancellations, Gagné said.

Eighteen flights had already been scrapped in a precautionary wind-down ahead of a Wednesday morning strike deadline from the Air Line Pilots Association, which represents Air Transat’s 750 aviators.

The previously suspended trips included destinations in Mexico, the Caribbean and Peru as well as London, Paris, Spain and Portugal.

All 18 were either to or from Toronto or Montreal and scheduled for Tuesday or Wednesday.

Over the preceding week and a half, the two sides had routinely talked off and on until about 2 a.m. as bargaining intensified, with negotiators spread out across three conference rooms on various floors, according to officials from Transat and the Air Line Pilots Association.

Common ground on wages first began to emerge Monday, but by the early hours of the morning the bargaining teams needed a break.

“When you’re talking about negotiating hundreds of millions of dollars, you’ve got to be very vigilant that you don’t start making crazy and rash decisions,” Small said.

The labour dispute would have marked the third strike in a year and a half in Canada’s airline sector, as workers seek to make gains that match those achieved elsewhere in North America amid the rising cost of living.

Last year, Air Canada pilots notched a wage hike of nearly 42 per cent over four years. The increase outstrips major gains won the previous year by pilots at the three biggest U.S. airlines, where pay bumps ranged between 34 and 40 per cent — although they were starting from a higher baseline.

On the assumption that pilots work roughly 75 hours per month — a common baseline in the industry — newer Air Canada recruits earn between $75,700 and $134,000 versus almost $187,000 in year five, and more than $367,000 for an experienced captain flying a Boeing 777.

In 2023, WestJet pilots secured a 24 per cent pay bump over four years.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 10, 2025.

Companies in this story: (TSX:TRZ, TSX:AC)

Christopher Reynolds, The Canadian Press