Air Canada has ground to a halt as more than 10,000 flight attendants walked off in the middle of the summer crush, triggering a 72-hour strike and the carrier’s first industrial action by its flight crews since 1985. The stoppage began in the early hours and is expected to stretch through the holiday window. Normally, the airline ferries about 130,000 passengers a day, Rouge included, but service has already been pared back in the run-up to the walkout. Jazz, PAL Airlines, and Air Canada Express remain in operation, but protests swelled as the dispute with CUPE intensified. The government tried to intervene, with Labour Minister Patty Hajdu urging a swift resolution, though CUPE rejected a government-brokered conciliation that would suspend the right to strike. Air Canada’s latest offer—38% in total over four years—was dismissed by the union, which says an 8% lift in the first year is more in line with inflation. Analysts warn the disruption will last through the holiday period, leaving travelers scattered around the world.

One must admire the theater of it all. Here we have a polished, cash-flushed consortium of a company trying to calm nerves with a neat bundle of numbers while the masses lecture that inflation somehow requires more, more, more. The 38% over four years sounds robust enough to a spreadsheet-worshipper, yet the union snarls that eight percent in year one is what inflation actually warrants—how enchanting that their arithmetic never seems to threaten their aura of indispensability. And then the state swoops in, waving a conciliator’s wand as if private accord were a mere utility to be regulated by ministers and ministers’ aides. The real question, of course, is who really carries the burden here: the traveling public, desperate for a schedule they can trust, or the self-important factions across the negotiation table who mistake a delay in a timetable for a tragedy of civilization. Through the holidays, expect more noise, more posturing, and more promises that the skies will someday return to normal—promises that, in truth, only the pockets of those who fund these operations can ultimately decide. If one must choose, let the market — not the melodrama of demonstrators or the lumbering state — determine the pace and price of air travel. For those of us who travel for pleasure or purpose, the rest of this spectacle is merely a passing flourish in the grand opera of modern commerce.