Posted Jul 29, 2023 5:24pm ET
Updated July 29, 2023 5:58 PM ET
People queue before entering security at Pearson International Airport in Toronto, August 5, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette
The number of passengers traveling through Canada’s airports more than doubled in 2022 compared to the previous year.
But air travel is still below pre-pandemic levels, the latest data from Statistics Canada shows.
A report by StatCan on Friday found that nearly 117.3 million passengers were boarding and disembarking planes at Canadian airports in 2022.
This compares to the almost 46.3 million passengers in 2021 when many COVID-19 travel restrictions were still in place, an increase of more than 153 percent from the previous year.
“Two years after the COVID-19 pandemic brought global air travel to its knees, Canada’s aviation industry continued to recover in 2022,” the report said.
But while air travel in Canada continued to grow over the past year, passenger numbers were still just 72 percent of the 162.9 million in 2019.
Canada eased its COVID-19 travel regulations in March last year and later ended the country’s travel restrictions in October. However, significant disruption would ultimately dictate both the summer and winter travel seasons.
“The unexpectedly large increase in passenger traffic during the busy summer travel season posed challenges for some major airports, largely due to staffing issues,” the StatCan report said.
A recent analysis also found that Canada’s two largest airlines — Air Canada and WestJet — had a larger proportion of their flights delayed this summer compared to US carriers.
COMPARISON OF FOUR MAJOR AIRPORTS
According to StatCan, the country’s four largest airports — Toronto Pearson International, Vancouver International, Calgary International and Montreal Trudeau International — accounted for more than 70 percent of all air passenger traffic in Canada last year.
Passenger numbers at Toronto Pearson rose nearly 181 percent to 34.7 million, Vancouver International Airport saw a 165 percent increase to 18.5 million passengers, and Calgary International Airport saw nearly 13.9 million passengers, an increase of around 136 percent.
Montreal Trudeau saw the largest increase of the four passengers, at 206 percent, and recorded more than 15.3 million passengers in 2022.