Just after midnight on Sunday, the busiest travel weekend of the Canadian summer fell silent. Roughly 150 WestJet aircraft that should have been shuttling holidaymakers between Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and a long list of sun destinations stayed exactly where they were: parked, dark, and going nowhere.

At 12:01 a.m. local time on 2 August 2026, roughly 4,400 WestJet flight attendants walked off the job, and Canada’s second-largest airline shut its mainline operation down almost entirely. The carrier normally runs about 600 flights a day. On the first day of the strike, virtually all of them were cancelled.

We flagged this one on Friday, when WestJet was bracing for a long-weekend walkout. Now it has arrived, and it is the biggest disruption Canadian aviation has seen since the Air Canada cabin-crew strike a year ago.

Why 4,400 flight attendants walked out

The fight comes down to a word most passengers never think about: boarding. For decades, cabin crew across North America were paid only from the moment the aircraft door closed to the moment it reopened. All the work before that — greeting passengers, hauling bags into overhead bins, running safety checks, sitting through ground delays — was effectively unpaid.

That model is finally cracking industry-wide, and it is the heart of this dispute. CUPE, the union representing WestJet’s mainline cabin crew, argues that the current credit-hour system leaves its members working roughly 35 hours a month with no pay. On 30 July, members of CUPE Local 8125 voted 99.4% in favour of strike action on a 97.3% turnout — about as lopsided a mandate as a union ever gets.

WestJet, for its part, says it put a “transformational” offer on the table, including a wage increase of roughly 13%. The two sides could not close the gap. The union’s bargaining committee returned to the table on Sunday morning, but by the evening there was still no agreement and the jets stayed on the ground.

The timing could hardly be worse for travellers. Early August is peak leisure season in Canada, and WestJet built much of its network around exactly this weekend — families heading to cottages, cross-country reunions, and the transatlantic routes the airline has pushed hard in recent years.

What it means if you are booked on WestJet

If you are flying WestJet mainline in the next few days, assume your flight is cancelled until the airline tells you otherwise, and do not go to the airport on spec. WestJet has extended its flexible change and cancel policy through 6 August, letting affected guests rebook or cancel at no extra cost.

There is one bright spot: most flights operated by WestJet Encore, the regional arm flying the smaller Bombardier Q400 turboprops, are still running, because Encore’s cabin crew work under a separate agreement. On thin regional routes, that may be your only WestJet option until the mainline fleet comes back.

How long that takes now depends on the bargaining table — and, potentially, on Ottawa. When Air Canada’s flight attendants struck in 2025, the federal government leaned on binding arbitration to get aircraft moving again. Whether WestJet’s grounding ends in a negotiated deal or in government intervention, the underlying question is the same one crews across the industry are now asking out loud: who pays for the work that happens before the door closes?

Sources: The Globe and Mail; FlightGlobal; CP24; Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE); WestJet.