Air Canada was, is and always will nothing more than an employment agency for Canadian citizens. Its employees are a direct reflection of this policy. Air Canada's staff are, for the most part, lazy, intolerant, scruffy, rude and aware of the fact that their employer cannot fire them.
Any company which was or is state owned runs into the same problem that Air Canada is facing. The airline needs to let go some of the overburdening staff and enforce work rules that will allow the carrier to become competitive or else they will continue on like a business from a Dickens novel.
I care less whether or not Air Canada continues to stay as it is, whether or not it allows Emirates, Qatar or Biman Bangladesh into its airports. Air Canada is a lousy airline and they would have been out of business many, many years ago were it not for the million and millions of dollars the Canadian government has pumped into supporting it. I assume that the reason the Canadian government continues to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into Air Canada is because it has to be less than it would cost to have 50% of its overpaid, rude, scruffy staff on welfare.
First of all you grossly misunderstand what Air Canada means to the Canadian government and the Canadian people. While 40,000 direct employees is a lot, it pales in comparison to the subsidiary jobs the airline industry in Canada provides most of which rely on Air Canada as the resident national carrier. Having many of those jobs relocated somewhere else along with the revenue stream the airline industry in Canada provides does not serve the Canadian people at all. Claiming cheap airline tickets to Dubai on a spiffy new A380 as the only benefit to Canadians is ignoring reality.
Air Canada also serves geo-political Canadian interests both within Canada and without that go far beyond the purely economic. Although Air Canada is no longer a crown corporation, it is still very much an implement of government policy unlike Westjet or any other Canadian aviation company. This too serves the Canadian people in ways the average Canadian Joe doesn't understand much less anybody from the sandbox.
If anyone thinks the UAE government doesn't value Emirates Airlines for exactly the same reasons they are sadly mistaken. Witness their juvenile and diplomatically unsophisticated actions to protect their prodigal airline over a relatively few landing slots in Canada. Despite its many faults, you can be sure the Canadian government would not, and does not react in such a petty and unbecoming manner when Air Canada is denied increased access somewhere.
Lastly your characterization of Air Canada employees as lazy, intolerant, scruffy, rude and smugly resting in a job they cannot be fired from says more about you than it does them. There is much wrong with Air Canada that I could fill a book about, but the employees I have had the pleasure of working with have for the most part been as professional and pleasant as anywhere else. In many cases more so.