Toronto Pearson (YYZ) handled more than 65,000 scheduled flights in 2025, making it far and away Canada's busiest airport — and its most popular route says a lot about how Canadians travel. The single most frequent destination was Montreal, with 5,885 round trips and roughly 930,000 seats flown during the year. Vancouver came second (4,595 round trips, but nearly 1.1 million seats thanks to bigger aircraft), followed by Ottawa, New York LaGuardia and Calgary.
The rest of the top ten is a mix of big Canadian cities — Halifax, Edmonton, Winnipeg — and a handful of US gateways: Newark and Boston. Notably, Air Canada sits at the top of every one of these routes, holding close to half of all traffic at Pearson. Cross-border flying, traditionally a strength of this corridor, has dipped to historic lows amid political friction, so domestic routes are carrying the airport's schedule.
Pearson's scale is easy to underestimate. The airport covers more than 4,600 acres with five runways over 9,000 feet, served by 50-plus airlines flying to 155 destinations. It handled over 50 million passengers in 2019 and supports about 50,000 local jobs, while its cargo operation moves nearly 400,000 tonnes a year. All told, it accounts for around 6.3% of Ontario's GDP — some $42 billion.
International service keeps growing too. Royal Air Maroc joined the roster in 2025, and Etihad now flies its A380 to Abu Dhabi, giving Pearson 60% of Canada's capacity to the UAE. Air Canada, for its part, is pushing new winter routes to Rio de Janeiro, Lima and Cartagena, plus Mexican and Caribbean leisure spots, with nonstop Shanghai, Budapest and Prague flights launching next summer.
Travellers should also know the airport is in the middle of a serious makeover. The Pearson LIFT programme — a long-term investment in facilities and terminals — will renovate Terminals 1 and 3 (retail, dining, restrooms, jet bridges), expand parking and ground transport, and could eventually add a whole new terminal. The airport is planning for 65 million passengers a year by the mid-2030s, and it was named the best large airport in North America by ACI for its 2023 performance, so the bones are good.
For holiday planners, the takeaway is simple: Pearson is the connective tissue of Canadian air travel. Whether you're hopping to Montreal for a weekend, flying west to Vancouver, or connecting onward to Europe, South America or the Gulf, chances are you'll pass through YYZ — and over the next few years, that experience should get noticeably smoother.
