Everyone at Air Canada had known for a long time that they were facing increasingly severe competition from a discount airline start-up. But nobody had an idea that the national airline was suffering the ill effects of industrial espionage.
Then one day last spring, a disaffected employee at WestJet Airlines telephoned an Air Canada executive to reveal that WestJet was privy to the secrets of Air Canada's computer system.
Air Canada then hired a team of private detectives who went to the home of Mark Hill, a senior executive at WestJet and one of the young airline's founders.
Outside Mr Hill's home in Oak Bay, a prosperous suburb of Victoria, the detectives found rubbish bins filled with the long paper strips of documents that had been carefully shredded. With Mr Hill photographing and yelling at them, the sleuths loaded the rubbish into their pick-up and drove off. They found the documents appeared to have been taken directly from Air Canada's computers.
When Air Canada received the reconstructed documents back in Canada, it was a few short steps to the court house for a C$220 million ($1.43 billion) civil suit in what may be the biggest case of industrial espionage in Canadian history.
The suit alleges that WestJet hacked into Air Canada computers to get vital information on the airline's passenger loads - invaluable information to competitors.
When Air Canada investigators checked the airline's website, they discovered that from May last year to March this year, the site had been tapped into from the outside almost 250,000 times. On a single day, the site was checked out almost 5,000 times.