Dec. 30, 2025 "Tens of thousands of Ontario public servants return to office full-time next week. Here’s what that could mean for Toronto": Today I found this article by Phil Tsekouras on BNN Bloomberg:
Nearly half of all of Ontario’s 60,000 public service workers are set to return to the office full time next week after years of hybrid work arrangements.
They’ll join tens of thousands of other employees from
banks,
tech companies,
and the telecom sector
who have also been called back to the office in recent months, as part of a trend that is shifting away from remote work.
Statistics Canada data shows that for the fourth year in a row, the proportion of employed people mostly working from home is falling and as of May of last year,
76 per cent of all workers in Toronto were commuting.
It’s the end of an era for Ontario Public Service (OPS) workers, who had enjoyed more flexible work arrangements since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Those who were able to had been working remotely for part, or all, of the first two years of the pandemic,
before they were called back to the office a minimum of three days a week in 2022.
Then, in August, the province announced that those who were not currently in office full time (roughly half),
would need to come in four days a week starting in October
and five days a week starting Jan. 5.
In making the announcement, the government said its return to office policy was in line with the current workforce landscape
and Premier Doug Ford claimed workers are “more productive” in person.
“How do you mentor someone over a phone? You can’t. You’ve got to look at them eye-to-eye,”
he said at the time.
So, what could the return of thousands of workers mean for Toronto? We asked the experts to find out.
A ‘local economic depression’: economist
According to the Strategic Regional Research Alliance, office occupancy in Toronto has been improving in recent years but still lags behind what it was before COVID.
The most recent data shows that,
as of Nov. 15, the average weekly office occupancy in the city is 82 per cent,
down from 92 per cent pre-COVID.
“I think that the key thing to note is just that, because these workers have not been in the area, it’s led to basically a local economic depression,” said Colin Mang, an economist at McMaster University.
After the province announced it was calling workers back, Ford pointed out that he’s seen firsthand the indirect negative effects of remote and hybrid work arrangements, specifically in the downtown core.
“I’ll just use downtown Toronto, for example, the PATH. You know there’s hardworking entrepreneurs that basically their businesses just died when they weren’t seeing the flow of traffic,” he said at the time.
In July, data from Environics (commissioned by The Globe and Mail)
showed that downtown foot traffic in Toronto was still 46 per cent lower in May 2025,
compared to January 2020.
The same data showed that foot traffic was even lower in Ottawa (77 per cent of pre-COVID levels).
Some have linked the struggles experienced by businesses in the nation’s capital to a lack of federal office workers, most of whom are currently working from home two days a week.
“Having people come and commute to your downtown core, it generates a lot of economic activity,
and that’s really been missing the past couple of years with back-to-work mandates, both in the private sector and in the public sector,”
Mang explained, noting that the Toronto’s downtown, specifically the PATH, has lost some of the “vibrancy” it had pre-COVID.
“You notice it. It’s just not what it was before the pandemic. So, bringing these workers back, part of that is around generating more economic activity in the downtown core, because that’s really suffered over the last five years.
It’s worth noting that not all of the province’s 60,000 OPS workers are in downtown Toronto but the province said the majority are located in the Greater Toronto Area.
Will Toronto traffic get worse when workers come back?
It’s no secret that Toronto has a traffic problem. In fact, it was once ranked the worst city in North America for congestion by navigation company TomTom.
Some had feared that the return of more BMO, RBC, TD, Scotiabank, and Rogers Communications Inc. employees (to name a few) in the fall would have led to an even more dire situation on the roads.
But according to Karen Chapple, director of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto, the impact didn’t materialize then—and likely won’t materialize on Jan. 5 either —due to a lack of office space.
Like the OPS, Chapple says that U of T will begin requiring its employees to come into the office full time starting in January, and it’s already clear they don’t have enough room.
“We have the same issue which many of the folks had in September, and which the province may have as well, which is we don’t have enough desks,” she said, referring to reports that some of the aforementioned banks ran out of physical space to host its employees in October.
“We can’t have people sitting on each other’s laps…Some people shrunk their space. Other people hired more people. So, you’re not actually going to see people there five days a week,” she said.
Ford was asked about that issue in December, specifically about the ongoing renovations at Macdonald Block which will house thousands of public servants when the project is finished.
“Yeah, we’ll have enough office space. We’ll make sure everyone gets in there,” he said.
Chapple went on to say that she expects there will also have to be some flexibility around the return to the office for workers.
She said employers have become more understanding about work-life balance since COVID-19 and that considerations will need to be made for those caring for the elderly, children, or those with illnesses, or resignations may follow.
“It’s not like it was in 2019. There’s a new kind of tolerance,” she said.
“The rules will need to be relaxed for these practical reasons,
and because of the need to
keep people happy
and have a qualified workforce
and not lose a bunch of people overnight.”
At time of writing, more than 10,000 public servants have reportedly said they want to work from home at least one day a week, according to the Ontario Public Service Employees Union.
When Ford was asked about that development, he said: “You have to come back to work. Simple as that.”
Big picture, Chapple said she anticipates there will be a “little bit of a bump” in traffic to start the New Year as employees head back, but not “much more than normal.”
“And we always have more traffic in the winter because fewer people want to take the transit anyway, so we probably see that kind of normal, slight bump up and congestion, which will relax a little bit as the weather gets better.”
Jan. 5, 2026 "Ontario government workers set to return to office full time as of today": Today I found this article by Liam Casey on BNN Bloomberg:
TORONTO — Ontario government employees are expected to return to the office five days per week starting Monday, despite objections from public sector unions.
In August, Premier Doug Ford announced thousands of Ontario civil servants would return to the office full time by January, ending work-from-home and hybrid models that have persisted more than five years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ford said it was time to bring people back to work so they can be mentored and collaborate.
Public servants have complained about the lack of office space to accommodate the workforce returning en masse.
Ford said Monday the province is "working on that" issue, but believes it will be sorted out.
"It's great to get everyone back to work, like every other normal citizen, you go out there and you show up five days a week, and there's arrangements if they can't make it in, they're going to have to work within the bureaucracy," Ford said.
The Ontario Public Service Employees Union has said that the order was made "without consideration for the realities front-line public service workers face."
Union president J.P. Hornick said the mandate is "ridiculous and insulting."
"This seems to be a problem of the premier's own imagination rather than something that is actively an issue on the ground," said Hornick, whose union represents some 30,000 public sector workers and another 9,000 at the Liquor Control Board of Ontario.
There has been no deterioration in service due to remote work, Hornick said Monday in an interview.
"We have not seen any evidence and the premier has not provided any that would justify the return-to-office mandate," Hornick said.
The union said about 10,000 of its 30,000 public servants have applied for alternative work arrangements that include requests made for medical reasons and caregiver concerns, given it's difficult to find daycare spots even with several months' notice.
"Not a single one of those has been addressed yet," Hornick said.
Canadian Union of Public Employees members at Ontario Health atHome organized a provincewide day of action Monday to protest the return-to-office mandate, saying workers would take their lunch breaks on the street to demand a return to the hybrid model.
"Available office spaces have shrunk since 2019,
which has resulted in an uneven application of the return to office mandate in the various regions across the province,"
a news release from CUPE said.
"This not only impacts the staff who must provide these essential health services, but also the sick and injured Ontarians who rely on these services."
Alberta’s public service is also returning to full-time in-office work in February to
"strengthen collaboration, accountability and service delivery for Albertans,"
a spokesperson for the Alberta government said.
It's still not clear when federal public servants will have to increase their office presence, or by how much. Prime Minister Mark Carney promised last month that a plan would soon come into "sharper view."
The current rule, in place since September 2024,
requires federal public servants to work a minimum of three days a week in-office,
with executives in the office four days per week.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 5, 2026.
Liam Casey, The Canadian Press
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