Canada Fuel & Aviation Status — Air Canada Route Cuts & Refinery Network

Canada's situation is fundamentally different from the UK or Australia: there is no physical fuel shortage. Per aviation management expert John Gradek (McGill University) cited by CBC News, approximately 85% of the jet fuel used in Canada is produced by domestic refineries. Canada has more than half a dozen kerosene-producing refineries — Irving Saint John (the largest in Canada at 320 kb/d), Suncor's Edmonton and Montréal facilities, Imperial Oil's Sarnia, Strathcona and Nanticoke plants, Co-op Regina, and Parkland's Burnaby refinery in BC. The retail fuel network has not seen the kind of station-level outages affecting Australia or the air-cargo cancellations affecting Europe.

What Canada has instead is a price exposure. Even though Canadian refineries produce most of the jet fuel Canadian carriers consume, the wholesale price at which they sell that fuel tracks the Platts Global Jet Fuel Index, which is up more than 70% since February 28. As Gradek put it, Canada is "still beholden to global price spikes." This is why Air Canada has suspended 10 transborder US routes year-to-date — including the high-volume Toronto–JFK and Montréal–JFK pairs from June 1 through October 25 — citing "the current high cost of jet fuel." Full resumption is deferred to Summer 2027.

The cause profile is different from Spirit Airlines' May 2 wind-down. Spirit was structural: an ultra-low-cost carrier whose margin model could not absorb fuel-cost pass-through, and the company collapsed entirely. Air Canada is a hedged legacy operator using selective route exits to preserve overall network economics. The routes affected are seasonal transborder pairs where load factor is sensitive to fare elasticity — exactly the kind of marginal routes that become unfavourable first when jet fuel costs double.

WestJet has confirmed a stepped capacity reduction in response to the same fuel-cost pressure: approximately −1% in April, −3% in May, and −5.5% in June — the June step is now live, not planned (per CBC and Open Jaw). The reduction is being implemented by consolidating flights on lower-demand routes and shortening the travel period for seasonal services to several destinations. Earlier in the year WestJet had also removed 15 transborder routes from its summer schedule to mitigate a 32% spike in operational costs. Porter and Air Transat have not announced route suspensions or capacity cuts, but together with Air Canada and WestJet all four major Canadian airlines have introduced fare hikes or fuel surcharges between April and May 2026.

Air Canada has confirmed 10 transborder US route suspensions year-to-date, with full resumption deferred to Summer 2027.

The proximate cause of every energy-flow story in 2026 is the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman through which approximately 20% of global oil and a similarly material share of refined-product trade historically transits. The strait has been effectively closed since February 28, 2026. Per the IEA's May 2026 Oil Market Report, cumulative global supply losses since February exceed one billion barrels.

Canada is structurally insulated from the worst of this for one specific reason: domestic refining capacity is large relative to domestic demand. The Irving Oil refinery in Saint John, New Brunswick alone refines roughly 320,000 barrels per day — one of the largest in North America — and exports a meaningful share to the US Northeast. Suncor and Imperial Oil operate large refining clusters in Alberta and Ontario. The aggregate Canadian refining footprint is sufficient to cover the bulk of domestic jet fuel and road fuel demand, and the country is a net exporter of refined products to the US.

The exposure that remains is to price, set on global markets. Canadian crude (notably Western Canadian Select) trades at a discount to Brent and West Texas Intermediate, but Canadian refined-product pricing converges with global benchmarks because Canadian refiners can choose to export to higher-priced markets. When global jet fuel prices double, Canadian airlines pay near-global prices even if the fuel was refined in Sarnia or Saint John. The Platts Global Jet Fuel Index is up more than 70% since February 28; that increase is what drove the Air Canada route economics underwater.

Carbon pricing and provincial fuel-tax regimes mean Canadian retail prices have always been higher than US equivalents. The percentage rise versus pre-conflict baseline has been similar to the US rather than amplified by it — meaning Canadians feel the price increase but not a Canada-specific surcharge.

If you have transborder US summer travel booked with Air Canada, check whether your route is among the 10 suspended through Summer 2027. The Toronto–JFK and Montréal–JFK suspensions for June 1 through October 25 are the most impactful. Affected passengers will be re-routed by Air Canada at no charge under standard cancellation rules — typically onto American Airlines, Delta, or United via codeshare. If you booked through a US-side OTA the re-protection process may take longer to confirm.

If you are flying with WestJet, Porter or Air Transat, expect fare-level rather than schedule-level impact. All three have introduced fuel surcharges or fare hikes between April and May 2026 but no route suspensions yet. Your booked flights are likely to operate as scheduled; the price you paid at booking is what you pay (fuel surcharges apply to new bookings, not existing ones).

If you are flying to Europe, the relevant exposure is at the destination, not at your Canadian origin. EU airports are more exposed than Canadian or US ones; if your destination is the UK, France, Italy, Spain or Greece, monitor European jet fuel inventories — Goldman Sachs has identified the UK as the highest-risk country for summer jet fuel rationing.

If you are flying to Cuba, direct flights remain operational but the on-the-ground experience is materially degraded. Cuba is in the most acute energy crisis in its modern history: 22-hour daily blackouts across most of the country, severe shortages of gasoline and diesel, intermittent water supply, and resort generators under heavy load. Canadian tour operators are not formally advising against travel but the Government of Canada travel advisory reflects the deteriorated conditions. Contact your tour operator for resort-level operational status before departure. If you have flexibility on destination, alternative Caribbean choices (Mexico, Dominican Republic, Jamaica) are not currently experiencing the same supply collapse.

If you are concerned about gasoline prices, the practical advice is: check GasBuddy or your provincial price tracker before filling up; prices vary by 10–20 cents per litre across stations even within the same city. There is no station availability problem in Canada. There is a price problem.