Work-from-home over for thousands as employers pull the plug in 2026
OTTAWA: For many workers nationwide, including tens of thousands of provincial government employees in Ontario and Alberta who will soon need to return to the office full-time, the new year will bring significant changes to the regulations governing in-office employment.
Employees of the Ontario provincial government will be required to work five days a week starting on January 5. In order to “strengthen collaboration, accountability, and service delivery for Albertans,”
Alberta’s public service will resume full-time, in-office employment in February, according to a government spokesman. Some governments are revising their policy, while others, including Manitoba, British Columbia, and New Brunswick, continue to have more lenient hybrid employment regulations.
According to a Newfoundland and Labrador government spokesperson, the province is reviewing its policy regarding remote labor.
Although a spokeswoman stated that there are no plans to mandate that workers return to the workplace five days a week, the Northwest Territories government is also examining its policy regarding remote work.
It is still unclear how much or when government employees will need to enhance their office attendance. Last month, Prime Minister Mark Carney pledged that a plan will soon into “sharper view.”
According to Carney, his government will “engage with the public sector unions on the modalities” of the back-to-office policy, and specifics will be released “over the course of the next several weeks.”
Carney gave few hints about how he thought about the matter. He did state that seniority and specific roles will determine how long public employees are expected to stay in their positions.
The present regulation, which has been in effect since September 2024, mandates that government employees work in the office at least three days a week, with executives working four days a week.
The Canadian Press was informed in December by Treasury Board President Shafqat Ali that the federal government has not yet finalized the specifics of its promised return-to-office plan. He claimed that although discussions have been occurring within the government, “nothing has been finalized.”
A number of institutions, such as BMO, Scotiabank, and RBC, have already instructed their employees to work four days a week. Other businesses in the private sector are also altering their policy.
For instance, starting on January 2, Amazon will mandate that its corporate employees work five days a week. Return-to-office mandates have been resisted by federal and provincial public sector unions.
In an August news statement, the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, which represents over 40,000 public employees, stated that the provincial government has chosen to mandate that all of its employees return to work full-time “without respect for the realities front line public service workers face.”
The largest federal union in Canada, the Public Service Alliance of Canada, said in a statement that Ottawa’s efforts to encourage federal employees to spend more time in their offices are “severely out of touch with what is best for workers and taxpayers.”
“We will reject this government if it attempts to implement significant changes to remote work during negotiations. We will contest them in court and at work, therefore nothing is off the table,” the statement said.
More union resistance is anticipated in the upcoming months, according to Catherine Connelly, a professor and chair of business research at McMaster University’s department of human resources and management.
According to Connelly, “many of their members truly enjoy working from home and they want to preserve the remote work possibilities.” According to Connelly, some workers find that working remotely increases their productivity and helps them save money.
Others, she added, could discover that working remotely interferes with their ability to maintain a healthy work-life balance or that they are unable to form as many relationships as they would in an office.
Connelly stated that as businesses recognize that their best skilled workers demand flexibility, she is unsure if the private sector push to boost office staff presence would continue.
According to her, companies may also begin to refine their policies for remote work by adding additional guidelines for workers who work from home, such as needing childcare for children under a specific age or requiring employees to be reachable for a specific amount of time.
The topic of remote employment has caused division among municipalities, which has affected their economies in a number of ways. When government employees worked from home during the COVID-19 epidemic, many downtown companies in the National Capital Region, which is home to a high number of public personnel, suffered, while many locations outside the Ottawa core saw development.
Mark Sutcliffe, the mayor of Ottawa, stated that he believes it is possible to add an additional “day or two” to the office. According to him, the city is planning to open the next stage of its light rail system and increase transit options. In December, Sutcliffe stated,
“I am looking forward to watching how (return-to-office) plans carry out.” “We want our downtown to be prosperous and thriving.
Since COVID, the past few years have been difficult. Bruce Fanjoy, a Liberal MP who represents a seat in eastern Ontario with over 10,000 public employees, expressed his expectation that there will be “flexibility” when workers return to their jobs.
According to him, that would enable the federal government to manage its office space, attract and retain workers, and lower greenhouse gas emissions. Fanjoy stated last month that “a lot of our trickiest difficulties in cities are because we require everyone to be in a very tight place.”
“All of our local areas’ economies benefit from having governmental employees spread out a little.”
