NAV Canada freezes summer time off as controller staffing shortage deepens

Canada is heading into a busy aviation summer – a World Cup, major national events, and peak travel demand – and the country's air navigation service provider announced in March 2026 that it’s still roughly 200 air traffic controllers short of a full operational complement. The talent strain, the plan to address it, and the lessons it holds reach well beyond the runway.

NAV Canada's response to its staffing gap is a live case study in what happens when long training pipelines, demographic shifts, and peak operational demand collide in a regulated, safety-critical industry. For HR leaders managing workforces where a wrong hire or an empty seat can carry genuine public and operational risk, the question is not just how to fill today's gap, but how to stop the next one from forming.

A pipeline problem years in the making

NAV Canada currently has 546 students in training, the highest number in the organization's history, according to Kevin Caron, Assistant Vice President, ATS Learning at the Ottawa-based air traffic services organization. Air traffic controller certification takes between 18 and 30 months, and it isn’t a process that can be shortened without compromising the safety standards that define the role, he says.

“This is really a training organization, so we're continually investing in our talent on an ongoing basis,” says Caron, adding that NAV Canada has licensed close to 300 air traffic services professionals since 2023.

But the arithmetic of a long training cycle is unforgiving. Attrition through the certification program runs at approximately 50 per cent – consistent with international benchmarks, Caron says. Combined with the demographic wave triggered by pandemic-era training slowdowns and natural workforce aging, that means progress is steady but gradual.

“We benchmark and talk to other organizations who are always looking at moving that needle, but it’s a highly demanding job with strict standards,” says Caron. “We will never diminish our standards as far as the staffing for 2027 and onwards.”

Outpacing attrition slowly

However, new hires are now outpacing attrition by 26 per cent, according to Yan Tremblay, Director of Major Tower-Terminal Operations at NAV Canada in Montreal. “It’s a slow climb, to use an aviation analogy,” says Tremblay. “But we are winning the fight, slowly.”

That kind of patient, data-driven realism is exactly what workforce leaders in high-stakes industries need to internalize, according to Michelle Branigan, CEO of Electricity Human Resources Canada – an organization that tracks labour supply across a sector where over 60 per cent of roles sit in technical trades, engineering, and technology fields with training timelines of four years.

"From a succession planning perspective, it really is critical …that we don't have a gap in the human capital supply chain,” says Branigan. “So many industries across Canada now are all battling with the same thing that we don't have enough people to meet the needs that we have – and when it comes to the grid, even in aviation, we're not thinking of jobs just for months or years, we're actually thinking about that longer term planning, so it's all about making sure that any organization has a strategy in place to recognize where the critical gaps are.”

A short-term plan to plug the staffing gap

To manage the pressure this summer, NAV Canada has introduced a Critical Staffing Incentive – a financial incentive plan developed collaboratively with its bargaining agent, CATCA, that places monetary value on hard-to-fill shifts and critical operational windows. The plan also includes blackouts on lieu time during peak demand periods, the rehiring of retirees, and the reactivation of former controllers currently working in management or support roles, according to NAV Canada.

Approved by a significant majority of union members, the plan represents what Tremblay describes as a genuinely collaborative process – one grounded in data and shaped by front-line input.

“We couldn't get to that without the actual collaboration with the union,” says Tremblay. “This wouldn't be possible without a mature and productive relationship between the bargaining agent – in this case, CATCA – and NAV Canada.”

The risk of stopgap measures to mask talent shortages

However, Branigan cautions that when organizations are forced into stopgap measures that put extra demands on the workforce, the causes and consequences run deeper than the immediate scheduling problem.

“You can see increased turnover, you can see reduced morale,” she says. “If you don't have enough people to do the work, you're going to have people internally who are getting resentful, having to do more than they should or perceive that they should have to do, because they’re having to carry the load.”

Branigan believes that financial incentives, blackout periods for time off, and managers returning to frontline duties carry a specific risk if left unchecked: “It's very hard to pull back from those types of things quickly and it can very easily become the default, and that’s not how you want to operate your business,” she says.

For HR leaders managing similar pressures, Branigan frames succession planning not as an administrative function but as a business continuity strategy. “Leaders really need to see that succession planning isn’t just an HR function or admin, it's actually business continuity – a core part of your organizational risk management,” she says. “It's not a nice- to-have HR project that's on the table.”

AI, data, and building the workforce of tomorrow

One of the more forward-looking dimensions of NAV Canada's approach is its use of AI-enabled capacity forecasting. The technology currently generates short-to-medium term traffic demand scenarios – modelling volume, complexity, and workload in specific airspace sectors – which then directly inform staffing decisions for the following day or week, says Tremblay.

It’s an early but meaningful application of data-driven workforce management in a real-time operational context – and one that points toward a broader imperative Branigan identifies for any technically complex organization.

"The data tells you the story – you're going to build your plan based on your labour market intelligence,” she says. “You're going to look at the workforce demographics, you're also going to have a look at your competency profiles for those jobs and see – do they need to change at all? And then you map out that entire workforce, supply to demands that are going to drive the business.”

Branigan points to a Canadian electricity utility that discovered through a succession planning exercise that just over 30 per cent of its power line technicians were due to retire within five years. Rather than reacting with stopgap hires, the utility partnered with a local college, funded new programming, and deployed retiring staff as instructors – building a pipeline that ultimately benefited the broader industry, not just one organization.

“Any organization has to be working closely with the education system because you need to understand what jobs you're going to have and what’s the impact of technology – I'm not just talking about AI, but in our industry there's a lot of technological changes, so what does that mean in order to be able to do the things that you need to get done?” says Brangian. “Strong and timely labour market data helps you and your workforce planners guide and work with the education system to make sure that the educators are actually delivering programs for jobs that exist.”

What future-ready workforce planning actually looks like

For HR leaders in industries where training timelines are long and safety standards are non-negotiable, Caron, Tremblay, and Branigan each point to the same underlying discipline: plan farther ahead than feels necessary, measure what matters, and build feedback loops that connect operational reality to workforce strategy.

At NAV Canada, that means a dedicated workforce planning team running both tactical day-of staffing and long-range forecasting, with the two feeding directly into the training pipeline. Caron says the organization has received more than 49,000 applications through its proactive recruitment campaign – a shift from what he describes as a previously low-profile approach to talent attraction.

Crucially, NAV Canada has also committed to reviewing the Critical Staffing Incentive after this summer – assessing whether it changed behaviour, improved service delivery, and reduced customer impact – and feeding those findings directly into next year's planning cycle, according to Tremblay.

“The goal is to reduce impact to stakeholders and customers in terms of our service delivery, says Tremblay. “And whatever lessons we get out, we'll educate whether or not something is proposed again for the following summer or a different version because it may or may not be as effective as we thought it would be – there's a feedback loop at the end and we have that opportunity with our labour relations and our bargaining agent to take those lesson learned and build a plan for next year.”

For Branigan, HR leaders who work in regulated, technically complex sectors should think of their critical, highly-technical occupations as organizational “vulnerability points” – and frame workforce planning accordingly. “If you don't plan, you're going to pay – whether that’s outages, turnover, staff doing things that maybe they shouldn't be doing, safety risks, and then lost productivity,” she says.