travel on the edge
As my mother predicted, there were striking personnel marching back and forth outside Pearson airport when we arrived. I do hope they get what they're looking for, because I believe their situation to be untenable and the airline to be a absurdly capricious in their dealings with their staff. Just as an aside to Err Canada management -- if you're flying the oldest airplanes in the world and paying your executives lavishly, maybe withholding pay for hours worked isn't a good look?
Inside the airport wasn't much better. I have honestly never in forty-five years of commercial flying seen the kind of screaming that was going on at the check-in gates. The stores were mostly empty, doubtless because the largest airline at the airport wasn't flying. And possibly because they overcharge so wildly that you can pay $4.50 for a bottle of pop, which is laughable. Everyone was on edge, preoccupied, and unable to really help.
That said, with a great deal of walking back and forth, we found the bag-weighing device I was looking for, and we were able to shuffle around a bunch of stuff. Because we thought we were flying with Err Canada, we'd only brought one check-in bag apiece. But because we were actually flying with Turkish Airways and ANA, we had no such constraint there but rather we had a new constraint of our main carry-on could only be 8kg. We were allowed another personal item, and this because our overflow.
Our two check-in bags, with a limit of 23kg, were 23.045kg and 22.7kg, respectively. Our main carry-on bags were 8.0kg and 7.7kg. I'm not sure how my bags were the heavier ones when it was The Boy who was loaded down with mementos, but such is life. Then our "personal items". Mine was camera bag that became loaded with minor electronics peripherals and other things. I have no idea what it weighed. The Boy's was his basketball, which had a bag. We'd deflated it at the Canadian Tire the day before, so The Boy crammed that full of books and other heavy-and-compact items.
After checking that stuff, we were almost home free. Apparently in Canada you're still required to take your laptop out of your bag, like it's the 2001-2020 era. Also, a candle that I was carrying for The Boy was sold in an old maple syrup tin. The security guy I got was very theatrical about managing this, while The Boy's guy kept saying, "it's a candle, that's just how it's made; no, it's not a problem -- smell it!"