If public servants are going to be sent back to the office full time, it needs to be for the right reasons | Opinion

By Karl Salgo, Associate and Executive Advisor

Published on December 12, 2025 in the Ottawa Citizen

Optics have been a major driver in the government’s past changes to remote work policy.

Public servants may be sent back to the office full time as early as 2027, according to reports. Photo by JEAN LEVAC /POSTMEDIA

During a recent “breakfast chat” with Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe, Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke briefly about the government’s plans for the federal public service. His remarks included expectations that tech and artificial intelligence would result in more interesting and impactful work, some modest reassurance that needed job cuts would be managed substantially through attrition and departure incentives, and a clear indication that a full-time return to office (RTO) is likely in the works for most public servants.

While the prime minister’s words were few, a lot could be gleaned from what he said, including the drivers for the decision to end the hybrid arrangement for public servants that has been in place in various forms since 2023. Actual workplace performance doesn’t appear to have loomed large among them.

That isn’t new. When the current three-day hybrid mandate was announced by the Treasury Board Secretariat in 2024, it was essentially a one-size-fits all model that wasn’t defended on the basis of operational analysis beyond a stated belief in the importance of “consistent in-person interactions.”

While it was undoubtedly legitimate for the government to consider its workplace culture as well as the practices of other sectors where remote work was being curtailed, it wasn’t hard to conclude that optics were a major driver. In the National Capital Region, there was also a push to bring bureaucrats back to the city core, where business and public transit revenues were hurting.

I strongly suspect that old-style, hierarchical public sector management also played a role, given its emphasis on maintaining a line of vision and personal control. But frankly, there are many jobs, in the public service and elsewhere, where if you don’t know whether your employees are productive remotely you don’t know if they’re productive in the office either.

Governments also tend to favour one-size-fits-all approaches in most matters, from program design to service delivery to their own operations. This continues to be largely true even though digital technology increasingly enables customization. Accordingly, they’re reluctant to distinguish between jobs that can be done well remotely and those that can’t.

All of these considerations are certainly still in play. It’s notable that the prime minister was being interviewed by Sutcliffe, who offered encouraging if not wholly credible words about the readiness of the city’s deeply troubled transit system to get bureaucrats to work.

What is new is that this latest push for full RTO arises in a context where public servants are being incentivized to leave, nearly 70,000 of them having received information about departure incentives. Remote work is extremely popular with employees — all the more so as commuting has gotten tougher in Ottawa — which is why unions have been fighting hard to keep it. For many eligible employees, RTO could be a big consideration in weighing whether to take a voluntary departure. In other words, the departure packages now include both a carrot and a stick.

Let me be clear: public servants have no inherent right to work remotely. If remote work compromises service quality, either to ministers or the public, it can’t be justified simply because employees like it. It’s also true that the government has lots of rules that are intended less to improve performance than to reassure citizens that the public service is being managed with probity. Still, some reasonably robust assessment of how the mandate lines up against actual outcomes would be in order, especially since remote work might support a less expensive, more inclusive, and more geographically diversified workforce for the government.

The truth is that the government doesn’t really know much about the productivity of the public service, which probably varies considerably across organizations and functions and doesn’t always lend itself to quantification. For those reasons, a senior-level multi-sector committee was struck under former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s government to study productivity in the public service (including comparative measurement methodologies) and was due to report last March. Though the deadline was overtaken by events, the committee is evidently still at work and could report in the new year. Experience tells me not to hope for too much from such studies but it would be interesting to have some kind of relevant analysis.

In the meantime, there were a few encouraging signs from Carney’s recent comments. He indicated that the government would discuss “the modalities” of any new RTO policy with public sector unions. His choice of words suggests that there could be some flexibility about how, although probably not whether, full RTO happens.

Further, Carney indicated that there could be different “levels” of return, depending on the public servant’s role and seniority, as well as the employer’s capacity to provide workspace and offices, which is far from certain.

Aside from signalling an openness to customized arrangements, the prime minister’s words suggest that there might be at least some link between the government’s workplace mandate and its operational needs.

If so, it would be a welcome step in the direction of an evidence-based policy.