This has been a very interesting discussion and one that has taken almost my enitre rainy Independence Day Sunday here in India to read. I'm the business class SLF based in Montreal and flying to DEL about once every 2 months, meaning I'm the guy some of you have been tangentially referring to. Air Canada is okay overall, meets my needs, but boy is the company afraid of competition and boy could things be done better for my money. I would be delighted to see some more international competition make AC bring up their game.
Why am I looking to switch airlines to come to India? Standard of service and routes. Have you taken one of those 'lovely jaunty stopover codeshare routes' with the six hour stopover in Europe and then had to wait two extra hours for the baggage handlers in Delhi? Have you ever flown business class with Jet Airlines, Swiss or even Lufthansa? Have you dreamed of a non-stop long-haul flight? Do you realise a very cheap return Z-class ticket YUL to DEL is $5000 if bought well in advance? Do you really think that my expectations are low when an airline is charging that much?
There are better options and better airlines out there and AC if it was truly opened to competition from foreign carriers, major changes would have to take place. Senior management at AC knows it and are hunkering down to protect their routes and bonuses (trust me, they don't care about your jobs that much). The comment about owning a very small market vs having a slice of a much bigger market pie was ne'er truer in this case: by keeping ticket prices higher than they would be, restricting routings and entrance of competitors, and keeping quality of service lower than it could be, AC and regulators cost me and hundreds of like businesses thousands of dollars per flight in higher prices and lost time. OTOH were AC to provide a higher quality product and especially a direct YUL - YYZ - DEL flight, I would be happy to lobby my company to pay the same or even more. A decent comparison could be my routing to NRT, which is a roughly similar distance I think and a roughly similar price on Air Canada's site, but with a 12 hour flight I arrive having slept, gotten tons of work done, etc etc.
I think that the UK, Australia et al allowing lots of EK flights says a lot in the face of the Air Canada 'argument'.
Finally, I wouldn't fly EK because of the human rights / regimes issues (just as I won't fly Chinese state airlines), but that has nothing to do with the competition argument I'm putting forward here. If EK's cost is lower because of slavery or unfair wage issues, that's important but it's a fair trade, not a free trade issue.
All to say if you're going to start throwing figures around to do with economic impact of adding a foreign carrier, please use all the figures, not just the number of flying-industry jobs or figures of convenience.