After years of sticking mainly to domestic flights, with a focus on Western Canada, WestJet is slowly moving into the trans-Atlantic business. The financial muscle of Onex may allow it to accelerate that overseas expansion, which had been limited by the airline’s comparative lack of planes that can fly across oceans.

The Transat deal could help Air Canada if the mess surrounding Boeing’s 737 Max jet continues.

Along with WestJet and other airlines around the world, Air Canada has been fiddling with schedules to deal with the grounding of its two dozen Boeing 737 Max planes after two deadly crashes. And this week my colleagues Natalie Kitroeff and Tiffany Hsu reported that yet another problem has been uncovered in the software connected to the two crashes, which killed 346 people.

[Read: Boeing’s 737 Max Suffers Setback in Flight Simulator Test]

The troubled airplane is supposed to be Air Canada’s future workhorse; the airline is waiting for another 60 deliveries.

But Air Transat long ago agreed to lease 15 of Airbus’s equivalent to the 737 Max, a particularly fuel-efficient plane. Airbus can’t make enough of its planes, so anyone now looking at them as a Boeing alternative gets put at the bottom of a very long waiting list. The Air Transat purchase will allow Air Canada to jump that queue, if necessary.