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Servicing its pension obligations was completely unmanageable for the company, and so the grumblings started anew that the carrier was once again heading for a brush with insolvency.

Mr. Rovinescu admitted the easiest thing to do would be to rip everything up and start fresh. “Sadly, life doesn’t work like that,” he lamented on the call.

Instead, he said Air Canada would just keep chipping away at the legacy structure of the airline in an effort to return to it to profitability and a more manageable cost structure.

By the end of that year, Mr. Rovinescu had achieved one those goals with Air Canada returning to the black in 2012 for the first time in five years, kicking off a rally that saw the airline become the top performer on the S&P/TSX Composite Index in 2013, gaining 316% over the course of the year.

But one of the final pieces the puzzle was only put in place Wednesday with Air Canada announcing its multi-billion-pension solvency deficit had been eliminated.

While the numbers are still being finalized, management said it expected a “small” surplus in its pension plan at the start of 2014 for the first time since 2001.

At the start of 2013, its pension solvency deficit sat at $3.7-billion.

The reversal of fortunes at Air Canada is in many ways indicative of the state of several previously-distressed pension plans in the country.

The health of Canadian pension plans improved sharply again in the fourth quarter of 2013, according to the Mercer Pension Health Index, which tracks the funded status of a series of hypothetical, defined benefit pension plans. Nearly 40% of the pension plans in the index were fully funded at the start of 2014, compared to 6% the year before. In fact, less than 6% of the plans entered 2014 less than 80% funded, Mercer figures show.