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Institute on Governance

Conservatives’ sympathy for public servants wanting to work from home will likely be low

If the polls are to believed, the Conservatives are poised to form government following the next election. They have already indicated their dismay about the size of the public service, and questioned its competence as an institution to deliver services to Canadians.

Jennifer Carr, president of PIPSC, pictured Sept. 9, 2024, at a rally for public servants’ remote work rights outside 365 Laurier Avenue West in Ottawa, Immigration and Citizenship Canada. The Hill Times photograph by Sam Garcia

Opinion by Lori Turnbull, Senior Advisor at the Institute on Governance

OTTAWA—Federal public service employees have been mandated by the Treasury Board to return to the office for at least three days a week. This decision is being met with resistance from unions, one of which has won a judicial review of the decision in Federal Court. The tone of Reddit discussions on this topic is charged with anger and frustration. Some public servants decry being forced back to the office for an extra day as a regressive act by an employer that has not come to terms with the realities of a digital age.

The Treasury Board must shoulder blame for the mixed and muddled messages sent to staff as workplaces reopened after the COVID pandemic period, during which most of the public service worked from home. The employer can be excused for not having a standard playbook on how to manage this transition. The federal public service is a huge organization that is not monolithic; a one-size-fits-all approach would not have worked. But even with that being said, the response seemed particularly bungled. After too much silence from the centre of government, the first initial messages were to let individual departmental deputies decide on how best to manage their workplaces. This created an asymmetrical application which sowed confusion and a degree of jealousy as some had to go work and others didn’t (not to mention frustration among many frontline workers who never had the option to stay at home in the first place). Senior officials and local politicians further muddied the waters by suggesting that return to work wasn’t simply about productivity and service delivery, but rather that public servants had a broader societal responsibility to support the rebuilding of local economies by shopping and eating at downtown restaurants.

The federal public service is complex entity and, within it, there are many different realities, jobs, and workplace cultures. There are jobs that lend themselves to remote work which is why, prior to COVID, the public service had experience with tele-work agreements. It used to be clear, however, that the onus was on the employee to make the case for remote work. Intuitively, this makes sense. The employer needs to have the authority to set the terms and conditions of employment in ways that serve the purposes of the organization. If you don’t like the workplace requirements, then perhaps the job is not for you. But the COVID experience seems to have obscured this fact – or reversed it entirely. There appears to be a growing belief among significant pockets of the public service that it is the employer that needs to justify their desire to enforce in-person work arrangements – even if those were the terms and conditions of employment to which everyone had previously agreed.

One of the key problems with this issue is that both sides are pointing to largely unproven “evidence” to support their positions. The unions suggest that everything is fine, that workers are getting the job done and that the COVID experience has proven that video conferencing works. The employer counters with arguments about productivity and collaboration. Those in favour of more in-person office work argue that skills are best learned through osmosis by working in close proximity to colleagues and that this helps to build a positive work culture.

While there may be merit to both sides of the argument, many Canadians – in both the private sector and the provincial and municipal public sectors – are simply mystified that this conversation is taking place at all. For the vast majority of working Canadians, getting up, getting dressed and going to work is an indispensable part of having a job. In Don Draper’s famous line from AMC’s Mad Men: “That’s what the money is for”. Public servants do themselves no favours when complaining that going back to the office will mean paying for parking or daycare – things which Canadian workers across the employment spectrum must accept. In some respects, one cannot help but get the impression that many public servants exist in a professional reality far removed from those that they are serving.

The Clerk of the Privy Council recently launched a public service-wide conversation on what it means to be a public servant and the values and ethics that underpin the institution and its work. This is a timely and important exercise. This discussion is also taking place in a period of potential political change. If the polls are to believed, the Conservatives are poised to form government following the next election. They have already indicated their dismay about the size of the public service and questioned its competence as an institution to deliver services to Canadians. One can imagine the levels of sympathy for public servants wanting to work from home will be low.

Lori Turnbull is a senior advisor at the Institute on Governance.