Lethbridge preparing for future without commercial flights – Lethbridge

Lethbridge Airport was once home to several airlines, but that eventually dwindled to Air Canada and WestJet.

Now, only WestJet remains, but even it will be exiting the city later this month.

With no commercial airlines, the manager of Lethbridge Airport isn’t too concerned about the future of his site.

“It is quite busy outside of scheduled passenger traffic, so we want to continue to support that and those businesses,” said Cameron Prince, airport manager.

According to him, WestJet only made up about two per cent of air traffic at the regional hub.

“On average in 2025, we were seeing roughly 100 movements a day. That’s flight training, medevacs, charter flights, agriculture – like crop dusting, things like that,” said Prince.

The final day of flights for WestJet in Lethbridge will be June 23. The company cited a drop in demand for why they chose to pull out of the city.

Despite the loss of the commercial carrier, Prince says no City of Lethbridge employees at the airport are set to lose their jobs.

“We’re working through attrition at the moment. We actually had a retiree, so we’re not backfilling positions as they go, necessarily, but we’re not looking at removing at this point, anyways.”

He says the city is looking into leasing land on airport property as a way to recoup the roughly $500,000 generated annually by WestJet.

“The city owns the airport lands. How airports generally work is they hold onto that land and lease that out to businesses. That’s how you can use those revenues to offset the costs of maintaining the airport itself.”

While this method could boost revenue in the wake of WestJet’s final departure, Prince says new airlines could soon choose to arrive in southern Alberta.

“We are in talks with airlines pretty consistently right now and I will say we are optimistic there will be something in the future. We’re just not sure what the timeline will be for that because airline network planning does take a lot of time.”

The City of Lethbridge says it will continue to manage operating costs in line with activity levels over time.

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