Air Canada’s CEO will step down this year following criticism over his English-only condolence message in response to a deadly collision in New York last week.
Michael Rousseau faced backlash for not issuing a statement in French: The country’s largest airline is based in French-speaking Quebec, and one of the pilots killed in the crash was a French-speaking Quebecer.
Prime Minister Mark Carney said the message showed “a lack of judgment,” and a Montreal historian called it “one of the most tone-deaf and ill-conceived public relations efforts in Canadian corporate history.”
Rousseau had previously boasted about living in Montreal for more than a decade without speaking French (he had to apologize for that as well).