New return-to-office mandate for federal public servants could become issue in Ottawa’s next municipal election | Opinion

By Karl Salgo, Associate and Executive Advisor

Published on March 25, 2026 in the Ottawa Citizen

With Ottawa city councillors and the mayor staking out positions on the issue, it could be debated by candidates next fall.

The next round of municipal elections in Ontario is seven months away, but in Ottawa many incumbents and their potential challengers have already set out their views on at least one issue, and a federal one at that: the return to office mandate for public servants.

This doesn’t mean that the federal government is likely to enter the municipal fray, or that municipal politicians have any illusions about setting federal policy, especially since the Carney government already seems to have made up its mind to end remote work. But it does go to show how much the debate around a distributed workplace is driven by considerations besides the quality of the public service.

Municipal politicians wrestled with the issue of remote work for the city’s own workforce back in September 2025 when considering a motion to rescind a five-day return-to-office (RTO) mandate set by the city manager.

As a quasi-compromise, city councillors passed (by 15 votes to 10) an alternative motion affirming the city manager’s authority to determine RTO practices while encouraging flexibility where appropriate. Still, it became pretty clear where different councillors and the mayor stood on this issue.

Once the federal government announced its own changes to its remote-work policy in February, several city councillors put out statements opposing the new requirements that would force many public servants back into the office for four days a week come July.

The Ottawa Citizen then asked every councillor where they stood on the issue and 17 out of 24 responded.

A central fault line in the debate over RTO has been whether public servants should be forced back into the office to support downtown business and transit versus concerns about transit capacity and traffic, environmental impacts and quality of life issues such as the availability of childcare.

Ottawa Mayor Marc Sutcliffe, though officially neutral on federal policy, has emerged as a de facto champion of bringing people back downtown for the sake of businesses and OC Transpo, which he optimistically claims will be able to handle the uptick in use. Kitchissippi Coun. Jeff Leiper, a potential challenger for the mayor’s job who introduced the anti-RTO motion, has criticized a municipal five-day mandate as “short-sighted” considering both employee flexibility and the environment. There are councillors on both sides of the issue, and interestingly their positions don’t always line up with whether they represent the suburbs or the city’s core.

As a municipal election approaches, to say nothing of any snap election at the national level, the debate about municipal employees may prove to be a proxy and possibly a dry run for a debate on federal policy. After all, in economic terms, Ottawa’s 17,000 city workers (a lot of whom have jobs that can’t be done remotely anyway) have a limited impact compared to the 150,000 federal employees working in the National Capital Region, three quarters of whom are in Ottawa.

Studies, both by independent organizations and the government itself, tend to confirm that remote work has contributed to small business declines in the core, increased office vacancies, and put pressure on public transit, but also that it’s had positive impacts on the environment and suburban growth.

Considerations like this apply to municipalities besides Ottawa, of course, since other cities have public sector workers as well as private sector employees engaged in remote work. But the stakes are high here because a larger share of public versus private sector workers have hybrid arrangements and a very — I would say questionably — large share of federal employees is based in Ottawa.

Ottawa’s municipal politicians usually take care to acknowledge that this isn’t their decision to make, but that hasn’t stopped some of them from expressing their recommendations to the federal government in urgent terms. If these public pronouncements don’t carry much direct weight at the cabinet table or with the Treasury Board, they might carry more with the government caucus. And if nothing else, they might deliver a few additional votes.

None of this is inherently inappropriate. But the economic needs of the capital city, and more specifically its downtown core, shouldn’t be a significant driver of the national government’s strategy for a distributed workplace. Above all, that should be performance and service driven.

It’s not that external considerations don’t play any role in public service employment policies. Historically, the government has used employment to foster such goals as bilingualism, DEI, improved employment standards, and regional economics. In that vein, remote work could support a more inclusive, family friendly, and nationally decentralized public service. But such goals should generally reflect broader societal interests. And the dominant objective should always be better service for Canadians.