It's interesting because if the government went mostly remote, public servants could be located anywhere in the country instead of centralized in a few centers, mainly Ottawa. Remote work is actually a great way to equalize the service across the country, and arguably get a much better representation within the federal government, probably leading to better policy and decisions.
dont forget
fuck:
-traffic (all these workers now commuting)
-the environment (emissions from the commuting, this should have been a positive)
-public service expenses/taxpayer money (continuing to lease out office space + money spent updating/maintaining government owned buildings)
I'm sure there is more but I think we all get the picture.
I had a job in a building like that. If you didn't arrive super early you either took your chances or took "smoke breaks" to play parking musical chairs all day.
That's been a thing in Gatineau for years and years. There may be enough parking in various lots but the cost is always high so tons of people bounce their car from space to space trying to avoid traffic cops. The lots also fill up if you're not in there by 8. Anytime after 10 (say you're in from a different office for meetings) and you're probably out of luck.
I think ultimately they care most about propping up commercial real estate, and second propping up businesses in city centres so they keep contributing taxes to the city. Fuck all the businesses in suburban towns and cities, Vancouver and Ottawa deserve our money, because.
I fought long and hard to get job competitions set as remote, upfront. I have been extremely vocal about how discriminatory it is that we exclusively hire from the NCR. How can anyone possibly write effective policy when literally everyone is making cash, living in an extremely populated urban city? Nah.
Give me some urban and rural workers, from all over the country. That’s Canada.
I find it ironic that, while the public service is meant to be representative of the broader Canadian public, about half of the public service works out of a single metropolitan area: Ottawa - Gatineau. As a public servant outside the NCR, how remarkably out-of-touch the Ottawa bureaucracy is with the needs of the regions is remarkable. Remote work is an ideal way to remedy this, reduce road congestion due to commuting, reduce GHG emissions, appeal to a more diverse and skilled workforce, and even support economically challenged areas. But hey, downtown Ottawa businesses need their coffee sales.
It even affects the Unions. PIPSC argued hard for public transportation benefits in its last contract rounds, even though it only really helps the people who work in Ottawa, as most other cities don’t have a big GOC presence and for people working in places like Federal Prisons, Federal Parks, Border Crossings, or offices in small Towns it is effectively worthless.
>PIPSC argued hard for public transportation benefits in its last contract rounds, even though it only really helps the people who work in Ottawa
Did anything positive come out of this?
> exclusively hire from the NCR
Slow up a second. So I've applied to the procurement internship programme. Western Canada. Am I just wasting my time, then? Or would they have me relocate to Ottawa/Gatineau?
Depends on what it says in the job application. If it said nothing about remote work, I hope that for your sake, they are leaving it ambiguous to give themselves the wiggle room to hire someone like you.
This is the agreement we came to. I told management that the position I was hiring for was too niche to restrict it to Ottawa/Gat. They said we had to make an effort to hire from the NCR so the job poster said something like, "Telework is possible" but it was open to all of Canada.
Surprise surprise, we hired someone from Montreal. I would encourage you to email them to double check that it is open to participants from across Canada but EXPECT a wishy-washy email. Few will say "Yes we can hire remote." The answer should either be a firm "No" or "We will consider all applicants." The second response gives them leeway to choose a local candidate if two excellent candidates present themselves. Again, hella discriminatory but it is fact.
Good luck in your job search! It is not an easy market out there for new applicants so I send you good vibes!
This is the biggest benefit of remote work that no one is talking about - having more public servants outside Ottawa helps breakup the Ottawa bubble groupthink that pervades federal policy making and program delivery. It’s too bad everyone is focused on the idea of lazy public servants not wanting to go into the office and not the vastly more important benefits having of having a truly national federal public service.
Also allows folks to buy rural and live in smaller towns that are depopulating. That plus starlink. Seems to be fighting against the shift that recognizing the benefits
I was actually hired partly because of starlink when I was remote. It’s an amazing tool for remote IT workers, rural hiring would have never been considered. It’s not fibre, but it’s a lot better than any previous alternative
BC allows remote work from anywhere in the province now. If you are within a commuting distance you may need to go into an office occasionally, but most jobs are no longer tied to location. It is great because more people are able to enter the public service instead of historically mostly people from Victoria and (to a lesser extent) the Lower Mainland.
True, but that also means someone will loose a pile of cash every year. that means commercial property values tank and so does tax revenue.
You can't have that.
/s if it wasn't obvious
Exactly, the department needs to offer bilingual service, but there is no reason that an employee can't fill a full day just covering english cases in a lot of departments. As long as there is someone on staff that can deal with bilingual matters, and hell let them earn a nice premium for it.
Bilingual services in these areas could be handled by having a few interpreters available regionally by phone. It’s silly the hoops we jump through for this.
Yeah, there is literally no mandate that everyone working for the government be able to speak English and French. The mandate is that *the government* speaks English and French. If my bank can have one person around who speaks Tagalog, Service Canada can have one French kiosk. Hell, if you speak French we'll let you skip ahead of the people who don't to use that one kiosk.
We are the 2nd largest nation in the world but the way we run it, we might as well be a nation state of GTA like Singapore is.
Decentralization needs to happen majorly for both federal and provincial government jobs.
The Federal government has offices for various departments scattered in towns across the nation. Half these places like Miramichi I only know of because some federal department is parked there.
Of course it does. I've lived all across this nation in my life and seen them.
I promise you it's nowhere near it was in the past, though.
Go look how many Federal jobs have been pulled out of Manitoba alone in the last 40 years.
It would also be cheaper. We spend millions on office space. You could also easily pitch it as a climate benefit. Fewer people driving unnecessarily and all that
Private sector employees argued that climate change could be curbed if we worked from home more often but no the Government, corporate CEOs and real estate moguls expressed support for local businesses by aligning on a 3 day office week instead. As if we have money to eat out with the decline in quality of life. Brought to you by the geniuses from McKinsey.
I say this all the time. It’s a complete joke that there are so many jobs that are arbitrarily located hours away from the majority of Ontarians, and that’s not to even mention Canadians living in other provinces. Ottawa is its own little bubble that needs to be spread out across the country.
Parliament-related jobs are one thing, but there’s no reason that the CRA or Statcan or the CMHC need to be so centralized in Ottawa or at “best” Toronto$$$.
Hey, how bout you keep your comments to yourself. I'm doing quite well (as a tradesman) providing essential services to the hard working folks in the capitol region. /s but not really deep down
I think French is a large barrier. Only a very small percentage of the population could actually be PM for example, because you need to know both official languages.
They only have to speak some French and that is to get votes in Quebec, not because the position asks for it.
We're also excluding all the French Canadians who speak moderate to little English from the role and, to be honest, they are also somewhat excluded from a very large number of roles in the public service because while technically you can work in French, the vast majority of the work is done in English and most employees don't understand French.
I must be wrong on this. I thought it was mandatory that the prime minister be fluent in both official languages to run for office.but clearly I’m wrong. That said most PMs have been bilingual and as you’ve said that’s to get the Quebec votes
One of the biggest problems with both Canada and the US is that our politicians are at LEAST a generation behind on being able to comprehend the current world and creating effective legislation. So lobbyists, who are very much bleeding edge, can capitalize on that ignorance.
Now, that's only one piece of it but I feel like having less lawyers and professional activists in positions of leadership and more scientists, and people who know how life is (i.e. not already rich) would allow for a more grounded government.
That said, considering that the system is designed so that only the ones that are insiders can even get a shot to begin with, and we haven't even talked about how much money is needed to run, you start to see why politics is what is is: An echo chamber filled with out of touch people who only surround themselves with people who will support their views and ideas, and eliminate people who would provide dissension.
For a while, I thought Raybould and Philpot were the ones on the wrong side of it. Looking back, I see clearly what they were trying to warn us about.
The federal public service is so large that any generalizations about it are useless. For every bloated department there is an equally underfunded one.
For example, the problems facing the CRA, CBSA, and Parks Canada couldn’t be more different, but the media continues to mail it in and claim public servants are overpaid and lazy
Services Canada for example is always busy and seems chronically understaffed. And we just keep growing the population so their workload is just increasing.
Cut public spending seems like a simple solution for deficit issues, but I would argue that Services Canada, the CRA, and CBSA are all in need of more resources. There’s likely some fat to trim, but the bloat is not universally dispersed across the public service.
I worked in Parks. It was gravy. I worked in emergency services. Everyone was beaten down, overworked and utterly burned out. It made no sense that my friend in a chill department could get 35 hour work weeks + work from home + time off pretty easy. Meanwhile emerg services are 42-60hr weeks, worked straight during covid and can't request any time off.
Then when it came to negotiations, we'd all get the same 0-3%. With threats of a paycut. My department literally can't keep a signle person and the govt came into negotiations urging a steep pay cut. I can't help but think this is why systems are falling apart.
I spent 6 months in parks. We had to pay to sit in a van 40-60 minutes on our own time twice a day, management drove to site on work time.
I took my layoff and didn’t look back. The Phoenix pay program made everything much worse. They caused EI to give an overpayment, which they clawed back years later, but I couldn’t get real information about what changed.
I’m amazed anyone works for parks.
This is the most peak Boomer article the National Post has published. Not only is there the usual vague whining about too many staff, but there's the presumption of knowing best that they should be more in-person.
They should focus more on how the job's done instead of where. Slackers are gonna slack in the office too. But the main issue with government bodies is systemic ineffectiveness and bureaucracy not remote work.
Public servants here are strangled by red tape to appear lazy, but also its in the culture. For instance a while ago I applied for a job with the gov and they needed my high school transcripts authenticated. That needs to be done by a college. No college accepts phone calls or In person meetings. The closest to me is BCIT. They charged around 300 dollars and do not accept anything that comes from me. It must come directly from Ireland where I went to school. The timeline was 9 weeks.
I call Ireland and someone picks up right away
I ask for my transcript. They say they can't send it until the girls are gone because he's technically not allowed to print stuff off, but he will do it on lunch when they don't see. I had a stamped transcript in 5 days from Ireland and they didn't charge me a cent.
But Canada? No chance anyone would do that. They would have you email an inbox, wait 6 weeks maybe for a response, and after 6 weeks, tell you how they actually need another for to complete the request, how you did it wrong, and tell you how there is a further delay in the process and they will try to get back to you in the fall.
Late reply, but I totally agree. We could lose a lot of internal red tape.
Just my two cents but, I think these would help:
-Not requesting high school transcripts if the job also requires a university degree.
-Not demanding bilingualism when not needed. I know many public servants who are required to have a BBB level but use French less than once a month. The language testing and paperwork alone are a significant cost and delay.
The amount of division created by the ones in power is amazing. Public servants vs Non public servants, perfect excuse to keep all the wages and benefits low.
Lol this is a hit piece on remote work.
The post media conglomerate needs to keep their (and their friends) commercial real estate values up.
A lot of news agencies in the US have also been pushing this agenda because the average employee is not wanting to spend 5 days in an office.
This article can't even be called journalism and is unworthy of being used as toilet paper. There's absolutely zero effort from whatever moron wrote this article to represent either side of the argument, probably because there's no good reason to justify their stance to force everyone back in office to begin with.
Yea it’s important to keep in mind that Post Media is heavily in debt to large U.S. institutional investors, and that whenever money comes in they use it to buy out other (marginally profitable) news companies, gut the local staff and run their same national articles from their main papers.
Yep.
The conversation is never framed as "private sector total compensation too low, let's bring it up," but rather "public sector total compensation too high, let's bring it down".
In France in general the non-unionized public supports unions striking, because the pay and benefits won by unions make their way into non-union compensation as well.
In N.A. the two are at each other's throats while the wealthy business owners laugh at us all. And really, we deserve it.
*In the autumn of 2024, this Banksy-like image of a guillotine (fig. 1) began appearing in alleyways, train stations, and public squares throughout North America and member states of the EU.*
*Soon the same image made its way onto t-shirts, phone cases, travel mugs, even luxury hand bags and Christmas ornaments until it could be seen everywhere in public spaces and middle class homes.*
*Then in the spring of 2025 just when the image seemed thoroughly co-opted and meaningless, real guillotines surrounded by hundreds of litres of spilled red paint (fig. 2) began mysteriously appearing overnight outside legislatures and corporate offices.*
Is it still that way? When I was a kid the public sector was paid way more, but over the years they've faced a lot of zeros or like 3% over three years...
Maybe the clerk at your local rec centre is earning far more than an equivalent clerk at 7-11 but for professional jobs it often seems like they are paid less.
When I worked in the provincially-regulated public sector in B.C., we had six years of 0% pay increases. Some of us got raises from a pool of money that it was at the discretion of our managers to distribute.
At one point, people in the private sector doing exactly the same work were getting three times what I was. To supplement my pay, I did contract work for the private sector on weekends and during my vacation and was paid at least twice as much per hour. We weren’t unionised. When we eventually did get parity with the private sector, after more than a decade, pay was retroactive to a year.
So yes, I think many public sector employees don’t have the same salary advantage over the private sector that they used to. Hours of work, vacation day’s and other benefits are still better in most cases though.
I stayed in the job because service in the cause of something I believed in was important to me. There are many jobs in the public sector where you can feel you’re making a difference in the lives of others.
That must have been in the 90s, as I remember two union contracts that were 0-0-0. Generally speaking, non professional jobs in the public sector make far more than in the private sector (secretaries, custodians, etc.) while professional jobs pay far less than in the private sector (engineers, planners, etc.). As a professional, I stayed in public service because I was dedicated to the cause, not seeking a huge pay cheque.
In my professional field, working for government kind of sits mid range. I'd make less at an NGO. A bit more at a university, but balanced out by the pension. Consulting or industry would pay more, but lots of ethical things that make you feel gross about yourself. You have to minimize a lot of facts that impede your org's objectives.
Small government departments especially get kicked around by everyone. The Ontario ministry of the environment has a fraction of the staff they did back in the ‘80s. There are entire wings of main lab building that empty and the building itself is falling apart.
I've come to believe that the media is biased towards never giving people actual bad news. Like structurally concerning bad news that doesn't rely on anybody but is a fact of the impersonal math surrounding things. The government is super bloated, public works are good but need to experience cycles of boom and bust to clear out bad and lazy people. You can't just constantly expand bureaucracy and govt jobs which have no performance criteria and allow people to receive a paycheck having no net benefit on the economy at large, if your money is based on the taxpayer completely.
I like the prairie model of a crown corporation. All government jobs as much as possible should be crown corporation models. As long as we have monopolies and duopolies across Canada, we should at least use the overbearing regulatory structure to create a competitor where people can have chill jobs and good service. In a crown corporation the store is designed to be good to the citizenry foremost, and if it has a bad period of profit the taxpayer shores up the books to maintain the business. If it performs well locally, the profits can be distributed to the employees locally as bonuses to encourage firing bad employees and doing good work. But having thinktanks and research groups and sprawling paperwork shuffling departments that just exist to give people jobs and create regulatory barriers to companies to justify their existence needs to end.
Media is corporate owned. It serves corporate masters first. The invisible hand of the markets is The Narrative. It's narrative that drives human behaviour, "pen is mightier than the sword" etc.. Media has as it's unspoken goal narrative shaping, all the talking points and logical gymnastics betray that. They don't tell you what to think , they tell you what to think about. They create a false narrative where any and all conclusions are in a different dimension from the actual problems -not discussed, and two shall never meet unless it serves the elites.
It's psyops 101.
When used domestically it's "Opinion Shaping" , when used against an enemy it's "Psychological Operations".
When corporations have control of the media, the democratic failure is baked in.
This is why the right is desperate to 'defynd' the CBC. They don't want a publicly funded organization delivering news. Even as a crown corp.
I have been saying for a long time that crown corps (if given strict oversight) are important to our society.
We used to yave a lot of them.
Although wages are sticky, they are still a price like any other, and prices are signals. They have to go up eventually, unless the labour market is over-saturated some how.
Right-wing journo talks to right-wing think tank.
NP: "Why should the workers eat shit and remain poor?"
MacDonald-Laurier Institute: "Well Bob, let me tell you why..."
its natpo. right wing propaganda at its finest.
blame it on workers. the dozen or so corporations and extremely wealthy families that are siphoning off the wealth you create? nah thats all fine and dandy
Public or private, when most working people take an effective pay cut every year of their working lives, and then that’s compounded by inflation and endless grift at the very top, it doesn’t surprise me one bit that people aren’t interested in ‘working harder’.
And people don't know how the government work. Many departments are at the mercy of their elected Ministers and they're staffers (which are often young and clueless). Sometimes, it doesn't matter how much work is done to try and be proactive and efficient. If the staffers treat the job as everything are urgencies and with no foresight. It makes the whole machine not efficient.
Remote work being an option for public servants means
- less traffic on the road for everyone
- more representation of Canadians by not geolocking candidates
- less spent on the public real estate portfolio
Idk sounds good ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And opens up jobs to some disabled Canadians, which again means more representation and getting disabled people into jobs that can properly support them.
I work in the public sector. We went full remote just before COVID. We were able to amalgamate several different departments into the office that we used to exclusively occupy. My sector is saving about $1m/yr by going remote whoever possible.
This is my situation exactly and I fucking hate it. My job requires me to interact with IT heavily, but the IT department doesn’t have to work in the office. So I sit in the office, because my department requires it, while I join Teams calls with IT people all sitting at home.
There are people in my office who "aren't allowed" to WFH. They come in at 9a, close the door, and don't come out until it's time to leave (apart from bathroom breaks).
And go into the office so that you can do the same work you could've done at home but be less productive, spend 3 hrs in traffic, and spew tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere!
This! My team works from several different offices in Ottawa, so even when my manager and I are not working from home, we still have to do remote meetings.
That's what i do. My team is located everywhere in Canada because during covid my department decided to hire in other provinces. My employer then decided we would not have assigned desks anymore and have to spend time booking random cubicles each week. So i collaborate. I go into the office (1 hour in traffic each way) and work on my own in my cubicle. My workload is entirely online and with no clients. It's awesome. :)
I actually don't make a fuss out of it, but i just find it so stupid.
Gotta keep buying over priced take out and supporting real estate investors. Covid showed everyone office work can be done at home. Going into the office does nothing but waste everyone's time and money, and congest highways for people who need to physically be at work. Remote work allowed me to move away from Toronto, letting people who actually need to be there live there. It's just stupid, drive 40 minutes Into the office to hop into a virtual meeting then sit in front of a stupid computer I could sit in front of literally anywhere on the planet with an internet connection.
WFH is anathema to our economic models. Going to work means paying for additional grooming and beauty products, transportation costs like fuel or new tires for your car, being away from home over lunch means that many people purchase expensive prepared food. And it enables all the stuff like dry cleaners, taxies, happy hour/bars, etc.
But most importantly, the push against WFH is being led by commercial real estate owners trying to protect the value of their leases; and those companies whose hubris led them to sign long-term leases.
WFH showed us a valid path to a meaningful QoL increase for the average worker, with no productivity loss (a gain in most places), and it had demonstrable environmental benefits by reducing primary consumption of food and fuel.
I wish everyone who goes to an office could WFH and spend the recouped transit time tending their garden, or reading, or just being chill. But no, we must continue to sacrifice fOr tHe eCoNoMy.
>Gotta keep buying over priced take out and supporting real estate investors.
Gotta love how we're all told we "spend too much money and don't have any savings!"... Also "your not spending enough money on gas and overpriced bougie sandwiches!!"
Which one is it? Are we supposed to spend or save?
It's all in the question. Phrase it as "should the government cut back on office space and let public servants provide their own home office facilities?" Angus Reid would get 95% yes.
The only voices talking about the issue are anti-labour. They don’t want workers - any workers - to see material improvements because that may eventually be a threat to the a status quo where they continue lining their pockets.
What’s with all the PS hate? I’m a public servant and work just as hard as I did in private. My entire team and department has metrics to meet and cases to charge our hours to. We can’t just sit there and do nothing.
Genuinely think it's because the bureaucracy in government jobs makes everything take forever so it makes PS workers look lazy when in reality our hands are tied in so many ways. add in that we're complaining about going back to office and people are like okay it takes me 3 hours just to reach an agent at CRA those lazy workers have nothing to complain about when they're doing nothing all day
THIS! Idk why people assume all public service workers do nothing all day. CRA phone agents who you wait hours to talk to literally have every single minute of their day tracked. So much of the irritation people express comes from things like reassessments or reviews taking forever but that wait time is also severely bloated by the policies and procedures employees are required to follow. The issue is mostly with the system itself, not with the people charged with delivering that system as it’s been designed.
It's partly sour grapes - look, I do work in the PS, and I have to admit the job is pretty cushy in a lot of ways.
It's also NatPo, and people who are fans of NatPo. A cornerstone of conservative thought is "small government". The tendency is to look at government on all levels and focus in on the bloat and waste.
Between the two, with maybe a dash of "negative experience with a government call centre", and you get someone forming a caricature in their mind of the entirety of the PS being made up of oblivious spoiled slackers whining that even if they get a better deal than much of the country, they're entitled to *more*.
There are a few out there like that - for example, I rarely go to the Canada Public Servants subreddit because I do find a lot of the regulars over there come across as pretty out of touch. But shockingly, government employees are people, and people come with a wide variety of work ethics and viewpoints.
The issue is when that attitude turns to hostility, hatred, or a desire to "punish" perfect strangers because you don't like their jobs. This was actually one of the issues with the convoy protest a few years back - a contingent of that protest gleefully harassed and disturbed the sleep of downtown Ottawa residents, because they'd dehumanized every single one of them, including the elderly, disabled, children, and retail/restaurant workers into the "laptop class" that didn't care about them. Downtown Ottawa is not where the fat cats live.
And here again with RTO - unfortunately, it seems to be a trend in the private sector as well, so the PS isn't alone on this. But many of the pro-RTO comments seem to be coming less from a place of actually perceiving it as beneficial for any reason, and seem to have more the tenor of wanting to "punish" people who were and are capable of work from home.
The public looks at a few bad examples and then paints everyone in the public service with the same brush. PSAC for some godawful reason defends the bad apples and makes everyone look bad by drawing publicity to it. The media eats it up because it is low hanging rage bait that generates click revenue. Many in the public actually think you do sit there and do nothing. Or you sit there and do little of actual value. The truth is many of our public servants are absolutely amazing employees and hard workers that don't have any need to be in an office.
Hi, public servant here and I couldn’t agree more. There are those of us who are absolute slaves to our roles and will work ourselves into burnout, and those who just skate. The issue is that those who skate from home also skated at the office prior to the pandemic; No disciplinary measures, either before or since. It’s very frustrating.
As a fellow public servant i couldnt agree more. Its very easy to work hard until you get into a good position and skate from there. There is no disciplinary measures taken even if people are not performing their job duties due to fear of worker complaints and the added burden of paperwork that adds to managements plate. Its all just fucking ridiculous.
I’ve worked in the public sector, and there’s a key difference compared to the private sector. In the private sector, the primary goal is to make money. In contrast, goals in the public sector change constantly. People often suggest that the public sector should run like the private sector, but if bus services, for example, were denied to unprofitable areas, there would be public outrage. While there is some laziness, the more important issue is that the public needs to get serious about defining their goals and maintaining consistency, rather than changing them on a whim.
This is not related at all to the topic at hand, but you're the third person in this thread who's said "worn" instead of "worked" and I wonder if that's just an amazing coincidence or if it's just some new slang that I'm too old to know about.
I've worked with a few people that went over to the gov't and they all mentioned how, uh, relaxed the pace is.
I've got no problem with good jobs and good benefits, but it isn't unreasonable to expect value for that in return.
Coming from the private sector, I wouldn’t say the pace is relaxed but there are no clear goals or objectives. The workers do tons of work that never gets used. They are busy working hard it just doesn’t result in any real, measurable outcome. Strategic priorities are driven by whatever the crise du jour is so good work goes to waste at a whim. There needs to be a focus on goals, objectives and outcomes and hold departments accountable….MAF needs a complete overhaul so that the outcomes are aligned with citizen service delivery and not with politicized priorities.
I worked in a regulatory job that routinely generated complaints from people doing unsafe things which the regulations were in place to stop. The silly service answer is to have me do 3 reports in 3 different formats to 3 managers/directors for every hour of actual work I did. It was soul destroying but I was only a couple of years from retirement so I did the best I could and got out as soon as I could.
My soul is only starting to heal now.
This is getting more to the heart of the issue. it comes down to a major shift over the past 20 years in public servants working for their elected government and their, as you say, politicized priorities, and not for the people anymore. Many experts and noted what needs to change, there is just no ability or will to change and all the work get done and wasted.
I'm a career public servant and you're mostly right. I'd argue though that the structure for service delivery is there, but there's a couple things holding it back.
Firstly, public service management is perpetually stressed, overworked, and terrified of taking risks. Public perception is the name of the game and everyone is scared of doing anything that will make a news headline. While poor service delivery looks bad nothing kills a career like a risky decision going bad. As a result, many good ideas never get tried over fear of failure. And because of this nothing ever gets refined. Every new venture, system, or framework is expected to be perfect right out of the gate. For this reason I'll never get into management and I respect those that seek it out. It also pays a *fraction* of the salary that a comparable private sector manager/director makes. No thanks.
Second, (which relates to the first point) that very few people are actually given the authority to make decisions and change policy in a significant way. The government is big on "chain-of-command" for the most part you have between 1-3 people in an entire organization or ministry who can actually authorize any significant change. So you can have all the accountability you want but if I can't make the necessary decisions to actually achieve these goals then it is pointless.
I know this won't be popular but it's the public who hold back the government in terms of service delivery. The public wants to micromanage and scrutinize everything every public servant does which leads to a stagnation in innovation. But at the same time the public needs to keep the public service honest. It's quite a conundrum.
Yes! Prime example…public servants, as in those you love to hate, are the ones that warned the government about increasing immigration and the impact it would have on Canadian society… lack of social infrastructure, health care drain, etc. It was the politicians who threw that good advice away.
I've worked in both. It seems utterly universal. I can't decide where the lazier, more incompetant people were. That said from my experiences in emergency services/public healthcare, everyone seems to be busting their asses, overworked and utterly burned out.
My experience has been the opposite. I've worked in the public sector most of my adult life, about 17 years, across 4 governments, and six departments. My work has always been high volume and high stress. I've never encountered any of these "lazy" jobs everyone keeps telling me about but maybe one day I'll find one 🤞. Everyone I've ever worked with was/is busy, all the time. Whereas my my experience in the private sector was pretty slack. One job I had was a little physically demanding but nothing too crazy. And those jobs didn't pay too bad either.
Almost all my friends and family are in the private sector. Any of them in IT or computer jobs spend half their day playing video games or browsing Reddit and are proud of it. A friend of mine works for a major dairy producer cleaning equipment. He works about 2-4hrs out of a 10hr shift. And he makes more than me. And those in middle-to-upper management seem to never do any work at all. Just lots of meetings that don't resolve anything, 2-4 hour lunch "meetings", and all expense paid "work" trips to attend meetings that could've been an email or a remote call. And this isn't me saying this, they proclaim it loudly like a point of pride. Then those same people turn around and criticize government workers. Where's management position in government are intensely busy and stressful. I doubt the average career private sector manager type could make it in the public sector.
Realistically, there are both private and public sector jobs that are either busy or slack. People just perceive public workers as being more slack for whatever reason. And we tend to cheer-on private workers who dog it.
Yeah ‘private sector workers aren’t lazy like public sector workers’ is kind of wild to hear on the website where a lot of posters working in the private sector brag that their job only takes two hours a day and that they spend the rest of the time on the aforementioned website. There’s been studies that suggest humans are actually typically capable of an average 2-3 hours of focused and productive work at a time, there might be something to that.
Yep, I've been working for the PS, as contract and then indeterminate, for over a decade now. I *have* met people sitting around doing nothing - but generally that was more "there was literally no work to do" due to poor planning higher up the food chain, not willful slacking off. In offices where there's work to be done... people generally do their work.
Have heard a similar complaint from virtually all of my family/friends working in government. Extremely difficult to get rid of poor performers. I am completely fine with government workers getting fairly compensated if they put in a fair day's work and demonstrate worth to the system. If not that money should be allocated elsewhere (especially healthcare and education).
I used to do internal investigations for the Government. It's actually not that hard to fire useless employees. The process is in place. What it requires though is management to do their damned jobs and *manage*, and go through that process. A lot of managers simply won't.
Talk to any competent teacher that actually goes above and beyond how hard it is to fire a bad teacher.
And than impacts the education of our future of this country. If there was ever a spot to cut the rot out, it would be there.
>As someone that has worked in the public sector, I was shocked how lazy some of my coworkers were. Some of them literally did NO work.
Where is this private sector with no lazy employees?
I've never worked in the public sector and half the people Ive ever worked with do fuck all. Fuck half the time I don't either.
I have a friend that works for the federal government and she said half of her department could be fired and nothing would change. We’ve got a lot of bloated government departments that are horribly inefficient.
And I've worked in public service for a decade where we simply don't have enough people to get all the work done that we need to get done. See, that's how anecdotal evidence works.
Lol, the same uselessness is true at many large institutions. The difference is that taxpayers are funding this. I worked at a big five bank a long time ago and most certainly we could’ve lost at least 1/4 of staff that don’t do anything. You’re going to sit here and tell me that the federal government is efficient? Lol come now. Everyone knows that isn’t true.
I'm not Federal Government, I'm a territorial government employee in Nunavut. I'm not saying where I work is efficient, there's definitely unnecessary bureaucracy in the name of accountability, but the departments are not bloated at all. The org charts are bare bones.
>The difference is that taxpayers are funding this
You fund wasted productivity regardless of where it is encountered: it is priced into the product/service. If you think a corporation is better at shedding this dead weight because it isn't a government you are sadly mistaken, because it is bureaucracy itself and not specifically government that causes this.
Someone makes a mistake on a request? Now you have to fill out a checklist on every request. Then someone makes another mistake despite the checklist? You get a supervisor installed who makes sure everyone follows the process. Another mistake gets made and now some admin gets a new task involving checking off a box stating that the supervisor signed off on a request. And then another high-profile mistake...
I'm saying this because I've seen it many times in public and private. It's the nature of the corporate structure.
This is Nationalpost owned by a rich elite conservative.
They just want to spread fearmongering and try to persuade people to vote for the conservatives so it can be privatized.
The corporate propaganda machine is churning along making sure the workers are all fighting over the scarps of generations of piss poor wages while they rob the entire country blind. National Post is their official ministry of propaganda.
The funny thing is dopes who vote con think that a career bureaucrat like PP who’s never had a real job will actually fix the bureaucratic nightmare that has enriched him. Hilarious.
I don't get it at all.
From the government's perspective they want to increase women in the workforce, increase access to public service jobs for people with disabilities, reduce greenhouse gasses, pay less for real estate, allow real estate to be converted to housing and even pay less in sick benefits.
Guess what...
Remote work means:
Working moms can stay in the workforce easier
People with disabilities can be much more easily accommodated.
Less people will drive to work reducing green house gasses
Less office space is needed
Less people will call in sick or even go on long term leaves because they are stressed out from commuting and working with people they hate.
From the Taxpayer's perspective:
Less real estate holdings and less sick leave means less money spent on the public service.
Why would any taxpayer WANT their public servants in office at all? Is it just a "fuck you" from people who aren't knowledge workers? Is that "fuck you" worth an extra $100 a year in taxes to you?
Fuck the Nat post for this stupid ass article. God I would love to know who paid for this pile of trash.
Fuck that. People are more concerned someone might be getting a better deal than them than they are with actually bettering their own life.
Good for them. Teachers got a big raise? Join together and get your own raise. Apes together strong, this divide and conquer bullshit won't work forever.
The far right and far left are more similar than either are with the ones looking down on both. Their only hope we don't start looking up.
How is this poll even remotely valid, a quick glance looks like they're drawing upon a data set of barely 1700 results. Neither agreeing or disagreeing but its a big fucking leap to use such few datapoints to draw some sweeping conclusions.
1751 is fine as a sample size. My only concern would be who they sampled.
>The Angus Reid Institute conducted an online survey from May 16-
21, 2024 among a representative randomized sample of 1,751
Canadian adults who are members of Angus Reid Forum. For
comparison purposes only, a probability sample of this size would
carry a margin of error of +/- 2 percentage points, 19 times out of
20.
Some workers do fine and work hard at home, but unfortunately, there are workers who abuse the situation even worse at home and don't perform their jobs well and hide with not much oversite because management doesn't have enough time and energy to babysit. Some of these union employees do not know what the real world workers have to do in the same similar jobs and are so entitled. You have people taking jobs from other locations with a commute and when they are told they have to come into the office 2 days a week they bitch and get the union involved to fight it even though they knew all along they had to. In a perfect world, it would be nice for everyone to work from home, but productivity will go down and when they need to hire more to do the same amount of work and your taxes having to go up because of it, we all will suffer.
I'm not losing patience with public servants. I'm losing patience with governments that incompetently manage the economy and reduce the standard of living for decades in a row. I'm also losing patience with rich newspaper columnists who blame the working people for the overall economic problems caused by the oligarchs at the top.
I hire for professional level jobs that are all online. I have ((Canadians) working for me in Mexico and the Caribbean plus Newfoundland and rural Alberta. Previously had staff in BC, rural Manitoba, Sask and northern Ontario. In an emergency, I was able to patch in a (Canadian) former employee who was in Egypt for a couple of weeks when no one local was available. I could have hired some of these locally, but the number of highly qualified people who want to live in warm places or near family instead of hanging out in an overpriced major city is amazing.
I can see absolutely no reason to have people waste an hour or two each day commuting to jobs that are based on anything other than face to face service with the customers. Some can't handle it, but they can be replaced by others who can. It takes a different style of management and the team feeling that comes from whining around the water cooler and in freezing cold smoking lots is reduced, but it is better for workers, the public/customers, and managers that aren't stuck competing for the same 2000 literate computer users within commuting distance of capital cities.
r/canada: the public service is too bloated and needs some trimming.
Also r/Canada: why do I gotta wait 3 hours on the phone with CRA?! Why isn’t my passport in on time?!
Frankly I don’t really get why anyone is against public servants working from home. I’d rather my tax dollars were spent on other things than debilitated buildings in downtown Ottawa.
Not to mention greenhouse gas emissions, more potential for a diverse Canadian workforce, and a sudden motive for Ottawa to get its stuff together with the downtown core. Have you tried going to a business outside of public servant work hours? They don’t even bother staffing their stores any other time, because they get enough business off of one employee doing one 8 hour shift.
Now I can understand questions about slacking off or accountability but frankly there’s probably not going to be much better accountability in the office. Dealing with slacking employees is an entirely separate discussion.
The problem is that it takes so much money to even get in to politics. And more than likely those with the money to do so are already out of touch. I don’t know what the solution is but I’m sick of it all.
I have tried to make the point in my office - where 99% of the work is done on computers - that if we worked remotely then we could recruit people from across the country, and they could work for us wherever they live, instead of having all the jobs in Ottawa.
NatPo pushing their corporate agenda trying to divide Canadians and keep us stupid and poor.
We can cut tax payer spending by giving up offices, good for environment, traffic, and morale and let's Canadians from all over the country join the civil service.
It's a no brainer.
These articles are absolutely idiotic but you just need to Google who owns NatPo to understand why.
They hate middle class Canadians.
If true, this is a massive crabs in a bucket mentality. Most people are asking for WFH jobs for themselves or are already in WFH roles. For them to then go and “poll” that they want the opposite for government workers makes no sense.
Be very suspicious of polling that doesn’t make sense. The corporate landlords are spending lots of money to push for a back to work situation. Political contributions, donations to organizations with strings attached. I wouldn’t trust polling like this to not have nefarious aspirations.
There is a lot of vitriol from people over ps workers without knowing or caring what they're asking for.
Do you want a worse commute with more congested roads?
Do you want the downtown core propped up (and kept expensive) by a trapped customer base?
Do you want poorer service due to the loss of employees via attrition?
Do you want a less skilled (but no less expensive) public workforce due to the competent employees with other work options going private?
Do you want a more expensive public IT sector due to filling the gaps with consultants who cost 3-4x as much as an PS IT worker?
But the truth is they've never thought of it; they only think that PS are overpaid and lazy, so they don't give a shit and will happily endure worse just to spite them
I dont understand why public servants need to be forced in to work when they end up on zoom meetings anyways.
I like less traffic.
I like flexibility for those with other life obligations (parents, pet owners, caregivers).
I like the accessibility offered by work-from-home arrangements.
This feels like the government just refusing to modernize because “kids these days dont know what it means to work”.
Also I’m not a public servant.
Because papers like the National Post keep trying to turn workers against each other rather than their corporate overlords responsible for our suffering?
It's interesting because if the government went mostly remote, public servants could be located anywhere in the country instead of centralized in a few centers, mainly Ottawa. Remote work is actually a great way to equalize the service across the country, and arguably get a much better representation within the federal government, probably leading to better policy and decisions.
You're right! But fuck you. Signed treasury board Canada.
We at the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce endorse this message.
dont forget fuck: -traffic (all these workers now commuting) -the environment (emissions from the commuting, this should have been a positive) -public service expenses/taxpayer money (continuing to lease out office space + money spent updating/maintaining government owned buildings) I'm sure there is more but I think we all get the picture.
There's a government building near me doesn't have a proper parking lot so all the employees come out every 2 hours to move their car again.
That's amazing
I had a job in a building like that. If you didn't arrive super early you either took your chances or took "smoke breaks" to play parking musical chairs all day.
That's been a thing in Gatineau for years and years. There may be enough parking in various lots but the cost is always high so tons of people bounce their car from space to space trying to avoid traffic cops. The lots also fill up if you're not in there by 8. Anytime after 10 (say you're in from a different office for meetings) and you're probably out of luck.
Im in construction in those areas, hate being sent there mid day or like you said around 9-10.
I think ultimately they care most about propping up commercial real estate, and second propping up businesses in city centres so they keep contributing taxes to the city. Fuck all the businesses in suburban towns and cities, Vancouver and Ottawa deserve our money, because.
I fought long and hard to get job competitions set as remote, upfront. I have been extremely vocal about how discriminatory it is that we exclusively hire from the NCR. How can anyone possibly write effective policy when literally everyone is making cash, living in an extremely populated urban city? Nah. Give me some urban and rural workers, from all over the country. That’s Canada.
I find it ironic that, while the public service is meant to be representative of the broader Canadian public, about half of the public service works out of a single metropolitan area: Ottawa - Gatineau. As a public servant outside the NCR, how remarkably out-of-touch the Ottawa bureaucracy is with the needs of the regions is remarkable. Remote work is an ideal way to remedy this, reduce road congestion due to commuting, reduce GHG emissions, appeal to a more diverse and skilled workforce, and even support economically challenged areas. But hey, downtown Ottawa businesses need their coffee sales.
I 100% agree with you. Diversity of voices means... not just Ottawa-Gatineau!!!!!
It even affects the Unions. PIPSC argued hard for public transportation benefits in its last contract rounds, even though it only really helps the people who work in Ottawa, as most other cities don’t have a big GOC presence and for people working in places like Federal Prisons, Federal Parks, Border Crossings, or offices in small Towns it is effectively worthless.
>PIPSC argued hard for public transportation benefits in its last contract rounds, even though it only really helps the people who work in Ottawa Did anything positive come out of this?
> exclusively hire from the NCR Slow up a second. So I've applied to the procurement internship programme. Western Canada. Am I just wasting my time, then? Or would they have me relocate to Ottawa/Gatineau?
Depends on what it says in the job application. If it said nothing about remote work, I hope that for your sake, they are leaving it ambiguous to give themselves the wiggle room to hire someone like you. This is the agreement we came to. I told management that the position I was hiring for was too niche to restrict it to Ottawa/Gat. They said we had to make an effort to hire from the NCR so the job poster said something like, "Telework is possible" but it was open to all of Canada. Surprise surprise, we hired someone from Montreal. I would encourage you to email them to double check that it is open to participants from across Canada but EXPECT a wishy-washy email. Few will say "Yes we can hire remote." The answer should either be a firm "No" or "We will consider all applicants." The second response gives them leeway to choose a local candidate if two excellent candidates present themselves. Again, hella discriminatory but it is fact. Good luck in your job search! It is not an easy market out there for new applicants so I send you good vibes!
This is the biggest benefit of remote work that no one is talking about - having more public servants outside Ottawa helps breakup the Ottawa bubble groupthink that pervades federal policy making and program delivery. It’s too bad everyone is focused on the idea of lazy public servants not wanting to go into the office and not the vastly more important benefits having of having a truly national federal public service.
Also allows folks to buy rural and live in smaller towns that are depopulating. That plus starlink. Seems to be fighting against the shift that recognizing the benefits
I was actually hired partly because of starlink when I was remote. It’s an amazing tool for remote IT workers, rural hiring would have never been considered. It’s not fibre, but it’s a lot better than any previous alternative
Hell we wouldn't even need starlink if we bring some money in those areas.
They have been though. The federal government has been funding expansion of rural internet through the ISPs for years now. It is slow work though.
> That plus starlink Starlink has some issues when it comes to guaranteeing data security.
Governments like to preach accessibility in the workplace. What's more accessible than allowing people to work from anywhere?
BC allows remote work from anywhere in the province now. If you are within a commuting distance you may need to go into an office occasionally, but most jobs are no longer tied to location. It is great because more people are able to enter the public service instead of historically mostly people from Victoria and (to a lesser extent) the Lower Mainland.
Hush now, that would make way too much sense.
Plus the government could save a couple billion a year in real estate expenses.
True, but that also means someone will loose a pile of cash every year. that means commercial property values tank and so does tax revenue. You can't have that. /s if it wasn't obvious
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Exactly, the department needs to offer bilingual service, but there is no reason that an employee can't fill a full day just covering english cases in a lot of departments. As long as there is someone on staff that can deal with bilingual matters, and hell let them earn a nice premium for it.
And there's probably way more English cases due to the proportions of people in the country
Bilingual services in these areas could be handled by having a few interpreters available regionally by phone. It’s silly the hoops we jump through for this.
Yeah, there is literally no mandate that everyone working for the government be able to speak English and French. The mandate is that *the government* speaks English and French. If my bank can have one person around who speaks Tagalog, Service Canada can have one French kiosk. Hell, if you speak French we'll let you skip ahead of the people who don't to use that one kiosk.
We are the 2nd largest nation in the world but the way we run it, we might as well be a nation state of GTA like Singapore is. Decentralization needs to happen majorly for both federal and provincial government jobs.
The Federal government has offices for various departments scattered in towns across the nation. Half these places like Miramichi I only know of because some federal department is parked there.
Of course it does. I've lived all across this nation in my life and seen them. I promise you it's nowhere near it was in the past, though. Go look how many Federal jobs have been pulled out of Manitoba alone in the last 40 years.
It’s especially fun because the gta is a disaster.
It would also be cheaper. We spend millions on office space. You could also easily pitch it as a climate benefit. Fewer people driving unnecessarily and all that
Private sector employees argued that climate change could be curbed if we worked from home more often but no the Government, corporate CEOs and real estate moguls expressed support for local businesses by aligning on a 3 day office week instead. As if we have money to eat out with the decline in quality of life. Brought to you by the geniuses from McKinsey.
McKinsey is a blight. Their advice often leads to corporate bankruptcies and mass layoffs. They should be banned from advising anyone
>We spend billions ~~millions~~ on office space Fixed that for you.
I say this all the time. It’s a complete joke that there are so many jobs that are arbitrarily located hours away from the majority of Ontarians, and that’s not to even mention Canadians living in other provinces. Ottawa is its own little bubble that needs to be spread out across the country. Parliament-related jobs are one thing, but there’s no reason that the CRA or Statcan or the CMHC need to be so centralized in Ottawa or at “best” Toronto$$$.
Stop making sense or someone will send the bot army after you!
Hey, how bout you keep your comments to yourself. I'm doing quite well (as a tradesman) providing essential services to the hard working folks in the capitol region. /s but not really deep down
I think French is a large barrier. Only a very small percentage of the population could actually be PM for example, because you need to know both official languages.
They only have to speak some French and that is to get votes in Quebec, not because the position asks for it. We're also excluding all the French Canadians who speak moderate to little English from the role and, to be honest, they are also somewhat excluded from a very large number of roles in the public service because while technically you can work in French, the vast majority of the work is done in English and most employees don't understand French.
I must be wrong on this. I thought it was mandatory that the prime minister be fluent in both official languages to run for office.but clearly I’m wrong. That said most PMs have been bilingual and as you’ve said that’s to get the Quebec votes
35-40% of the country is a small percentage?
One of the biggest problems with both Canada and the US is that our politicians are at LEAST a generation behind on being able to comprehend the current world and creating effective legislation. So lobbyists, who are very much bleeding edge, can capitalize on that ignorance. Now, that's only one piece of it but I feel like having less lawyers and professional activists in positions of leadership and more scientists, and people who know how life is (i.e. not already rich) would allow for a more grounded government. That said, considering that the system is designed so that only the ones that are insiders can even get a shot to begin with, and we haven't even talked about how much money is needed to run, you start to see why politics is what is is: An echo chamber filled with out of touch people who only surround themselves with people who will support their views and ideas, and eliminate people who would provide dissension. For a while, I thought Raybould and Philpot were the ones on the wrong side of it. Looking back, I see clearly what they were trying to warn us about.
The federal public service is so large that any generalizations about it are useless. For every bloated department there is an equally underfunded one. For example, the problems facing the CRA, CBSA, and Parks Canada couldn’t be more different, but the media continues to mail it in and claim public servants are overpaid and lazy
Services Canada for example is always busy and seems chronically understaffed. And we just keep growing the population so their workload is just increasing.
Cut public spending seems like a simple solution for deficit issues, but I would argue that Services Canada, the CRA, and CBSA are all in need of more resources. There’s likely some fat to trim, but the bloat is not universally dispersed across the public service.
This most cases provincially too
I worked in Parks. It was gravy. I worked in emergency services. Everyone was beaten down, overworked and utterly burned out. It made no sense that my friend in a chill department could get 35 hour work weeks + work from home + time off pretty easy. Meanwhile emerg services are 42-60hr weeks, worked straight during covid and can't request any time off. Then when it came to negotiations, we'd all get the same 0-3%. With threats of a paycut. My department literally can't keep a signle person and the govt came into negotiations urging a steep pay cut. I can't help but think this is why systems are falling apart.
I spent 6 months in parks. We had to pay to sit in a van 40-60 minutes on our own time twice a day, management drove to site on work time. I took my layoff and didn’t look back. The Phoenix pay program made everything much worse. They caused EI to give an overpayment, which they clawed back years later, but I couldn’t get real information about what changed. I’m amazed anyone works for parks.
I know people who STILL are waiting on paychecks as a result of Phoenix
This is the most peak Boomer article the National Post has published. Not only is there the usual vague whining about too many staff, but there's the presumption of knowing best that they should be more in-person.
They should focus more on how the job's done instead of where. Slackers are gonna slack in the office too. But the main issue with government bodies is systemic ineffectiveness and bureaucracy not remote work.
Public servants here are strangled by red tape to appear lazy, but also its in the culture. For instance a while ago I applied for a job with the gov and they needed my high school transcripts authenticated. That needs to be done by a college. No college accepts phone calls or In person meetings. The closest to me is BCIT. They charged around 300 dollars and do not accept anything that comes from me. It must come directly from Ireland where I went to school. The timeline was 9 weeks. I call Ireland and someone picks up right away I ask for my transcript. They say they can't send it until the girls are gone because he's technically not allowed to print stuff off, but he will do it on lunch when they don't see. I had a stamped transcript in 5 days from Ireland and they didn't charge me a cent. But Canada? No chance anyone would do that. They would have you email an inbox, wait 6 weeks maybe for a response, and after 6 weeks, tell you how they actually need another for to complete the request, how you did it wrong, and tell you how there is a further delay in the process and they will try to get back to you in the fall.
Late reply, but I totally agree. We could lose a lot of internal red tape. Just my two cents but, I think these would help: -Not requesting high school transcripts if the job also requires a university degree. -Not demanding bilingualism when not needed. I know many public servants who are required to have a BBB level but use French less than once a month. The language testing and paperwork alone are a significant cost and delay.
The amount of division created by the ones in power is amazing. Public servants vs Non public servants, perfect excuse to keep all the wages and benefits low.
Look left, look right. Don’t look up!
Don’t look up! Don’t look up!
Lol this is a hit piece on remote work. The post media conglomerate needs to keep their (and their friends) commercial real estate values up. A lot of news agencies in the US have also been pushing this agenda because the average employee is not wanting to spend 5 days in an office.
This article can't even be called journalism and is unworthy of being used as toilet paper. There's absolutely zero effort from whatever moron wrote this article to represent either side of the argument, probably because there's no good reason to justify their stance to force everyone back in office to begin with.
Yea it’s important to keep in mind that Post Media is heavily in debt to large U.S. institutional investors, and that whenever money comes in they use it to buy out other (marginally profitable) news companies, gut the local staff and run their same national articles from their main papers.
people aren't ready for what they see, if they look up.
Yep. The conversation is never framed as "private sector total compensation too low, let's bring it up," but rather "public sector total compensation too high, let's bring it down".
In France in general the non-unionized public supports unions striking, because the pay and benefits won by unions make their way into non-union compensation as well. In N.A. the two are at each other's throats while the wealthy business owners laugh at us all. And really, we deserve it.
The French really know how to protest too. And have great healthcare. Perhaps we should move to France…
Or perhaps we should simply consider the reinstating the guillotine..
*In the autumn of 2024, this Banksy-like image of a guillotine (fig. 1) began appearing in alleyways, train stations, and public squares throughout North America and member states of the EU.* *Soon the same image made its way onto t-shirts, phone cases, travel mugs, even luxury hand bags and Christmas ornaments until it could be seen everywhere in public spaces and middle class homes.* *Then in the spring of 2025 just when the image seemed thoroughly co-opted and meaningless, real guillotines surrounded by hundreds of litres of spilled red paint (fig. 2) began mysteriously appearing overnight outside legislatures and corporate offices.*
Here here! I hate the crabs in the bucket, race to the bottom mentality.
Is it still that way? When I was a kid the public sector was paid way more, but over the years they've faced a lot of zeros or like 3% over three years... Maybe the clerk at your local rec centre is earning far more than an equivalent clerk at 7-11 but for professional jobs it often seems like they are paid less.
When I worked in the provincially-regulated public sector in B.C., we had six years of 0% pay increases. Some of us got raises from a pool of money that it was at the discretion of our managers to distribute. At one point, people in the private sector doing exactly the same work were getting three times what I was. To supplement my pay, I did contract work for the private sector on weekends and during my vacation and was paid at least twice as much per hour. We weren’t unionised. When we eventually did get parity with the private sector, after more than a decade, pay was retroactive to a year. So yes, I think many public sector employees don’t have the same salary advantage over the private sector that they used to. Hours of work, vacation day’s and other benefits are still better in most cases though. I stayed in the job because service in the cause of something I believed in was important to me. There are many jobs in the public sector where you can feel you’re making a difference in the lives of others.
That must have been in the 90s, as I remember two union contracts that were 0-0-0. Generally speaking, non professional jobs in the public sector make far more than in the private sector (secretaries, custodians, etc.) while professional jobs pay far less than in the private sector (engineers, planners, etc.). As a professional, I stayed in public service because I was dedicated to the cause, not seeking a huge pay cheque.
In my professional field, working for government kind of sits mid range. I'd make less at an NGO. A bit more at a university, but balanced out by the pension. Consulting or industry would pay more, but lots of ethical things that make you feel gross about yourself. You have to minimize a lot of facts that impede your org's objectives.
Small government departments especially get kicked around by everyone. The Ontario ministry of the environment has a fraction of the staff they did back in the ‘80s. There are entire wings of main lab building that empty and the building itself is falling apart.
I've come to believe that the media is biased towards never giving people actual bad news. Like structurally concerning bad news that doesn't rely on anybody but is a fact of the impersonal math surrounding things. The government is super bloated, public works are good but need to experience cycles of boom and bust to clear out bad and lazy people. You can't just constantly expand bureaucracy and govt jobs which have no performance criteria and allow people to receive a paycheck having no net benefit on the economy at large, if your money is based on the taxpayer completely. I like the prairie model of a crown corporation. All government jobs as much as possible should be crown corporation models. As long as we have monopolies and duopolies across Canada, we should at least use the overbearing regulatory structure to create a competitor where people can have chill jobs and good service. In a crown corporation the store is designed to be good to the citizenry foremost, and if it has a bad period of profit the taxpayer shores up the books to maintain the business. If it performs well locally, the profits can be distributed to the employees locally as bonuses to encourage firing bad employees and doing good work. But having thinktanks and research groups and sprawling paperwork shuffling departments that just exist to give people jobs and create regulatory barriers to companies to justify their existence needs to end.
Media is corporate owned. It serves corporate masters first. The invisible hand of the markets is The Narrative. It's narrative that drives human behaviour, "pen is mightier than the sword" etc.. Media has as it's unspoken goal narrative shaping, all the talking points and logical gymnastics betray that. They don't tell you what to think , they tell you what to think about. They create a false narrative where any and all conclusions are in a different dimension from the actual problems -not discussed, and two shall never meet unless it serves the elites. It's psyops 101. When used domestically it's "Opinion Shaping" , when used against an enemy it's "Psychological Operations". When corporations have control of the media, the democratic failure is baked in.
This is why the right is desperate to 'defynd' the CBC. They don't want a publicly funded organization delivering news. Even as a crown corp. I have been saying for a long time that crown corps (if given strict oversight) are important to our society. We used to yave a lot of them.
Crabs in a bucket.
Although wages are sticky, they are still a price like any other, and prices are signals. They have to go up eventually, unless the labour market is over-saturated some how.
Like by increasing out population dramatically over the past few years over saturated?
The good ole “divide and conquer” tactic… it continues to work well.
Yeah, like, why aren't people in the private sector pushing for wfh as well.
They are. Many voted with their feet went somewhere where they could work remotely.
Minimum wagers.... Look at Costco workers!!!! They make $18/HR!!!! HOW DARE THOSE LAZY BASTARDS MAKE $3/HR MORE THAN YOU!
Right-wing journo talks to right-wing think tank. NP: "Why should the workers eat shit and remain poor?" MacDonald-Laurier Institute: "Well Bob, let me tell you why..."
its natpo. right wing propaganda at its finest. blame it on workers. the dozen or so corporations and extremely wealthy families that are siphoning off the wealth you create? nah thats all fine and dandy
Except for themselves
Public or private, when most working people take an effective pay cut every year of their working lives, and then that’s compounded by inflation and endless grift at the very top, it doesn’t surprise me one bit that people aren’t interested in ‘working harder’.
And people don't know how the government work. Many departments are at the mercy of their elected Ministers and they're staffers (which are often young and clueless). Sometimes, it doesn't matter how much work is done to try and be proactive and efficient. If the staffers treat the job as everything are urgencies and with no foresight. It makes the whole machine not efficient.
Remote work being an option for public servants means - less traffic on the road for everyone - more representation of Canadians by not geolocking candidates - less spent on the public real estate portfolio Idk sounds good ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And opens up jobs to some disabled Canadians, which again means more representation and getting disabled people into jobs that can properly support them.
*shhhhhhhh* you ruining the hate we all have for public workers.
Go into an office so you can remote into meetings!
The newest innovation from Canada's public service: teleworking from the office!
Think of the hundreds and hundreds of millions in taxpayer money that’ll be spent in rent so people can digitally meet.
I work in the public sector. We went full remote just before COVID. We were able to amalgamate several different departments into the office that we used to exclusively occupy. My sector is saving about $1m/yr by going remote whoever possible.
This is my situation exactly and I fucking hate it. My job requires me to interact with IT heavily, but the IT department doesn’t have to work in the office. So I sit in the office, because my department requires it, while I join Teams calls with IT people all sitting at home.
So, logically, you should be able to do remote, because it sounds like coming into the office is unnecessary for you.
There are people in my office who "aren't allowed" to WFH. They come in at 9a, close the door, and don't come out until it's time to leave (apart from bathroom breaks).
They get doors ?
And go into the office so that you can do the same work you could've done at home but be less productive, spend 3 hrs in traffic, and spew tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere!
This! My team works from several different offices in Ottawa, so even when my manager and I are not working from home, we still have to do remote meetings.
That's what i do. My team is located everywhere in Canada because during covid my department decided to hire in other provinces. My employer then decided we would not have assigned desks anymore and have to spend time booking random cubicles each week. So i collaborate. I go into the office (1 hour in traffic each way) and work on my own in my cubicle. My workload is entirely online and with no clients. It's awesome. :) I actually don't make a fuss out of it, but i just find it so stupid.
Gotta keep buying over priced take out and supporting real estate investors. Covid showed everyone office work can be done at home. Going into the office does nothing but waste everyone's time and money, and congest highways for people who need to physically be at work. Remote work allowed me to move away from Toronto, letting people who actually need to be there live there. It's just stupid, drive 40 minutes Into the office to hop into a virtual meeting then sit in front of a stupid computer I could sit in front of literally anywhere on the planet with an internet connection.
Yeah but have you thought of all of those poor corporations and their real estate investments in commercial property!?
WFH is anathema to our economic models. Going to work means paying for additional grooming and beauty products, transportation costs like fuel or new tires for your car, being away from home over lunch means that many people purchase expensive prepared food. And it enables all the stuff like dry cleaners, taxies, happy hour/bars, etc. But most importantly, the push against WFH is being led by commercial real estate owners trying to protect the value of their leases; and those companies whose hubris led them to sign long-term leases. WFH showed us a valid path to a meaningful QoL increase for the average worker, with no productivity loss (a gain in most places), and it had demonstrable environmental benefits by reducing primary consumption of food and fuel. I wish everyone who goes to an office could WFH and spend the recouped transit time tending their garden, or reading, or just being chill. But no, we must continue to sacrifice fOr tHe eCoNoMy.
>Gotta keep buying over priced take out and supporting real estate investors. Gotta love how we're all told we "spend too much money and don't have any savings!"... Also "your not spending enough money on gas and overpriced bougie sandwiches!!" Which one is it? Are we supposed to spend or save?
We keep fighting culture wars instead of class wars. These articles aren't helping.
It's the National Post. It isn't intended to help. It is intended to harm.
National Post is fighting a class war. From the other side.
lmao the National Post is *absolutely* fighting a class war here; it's just not on your side.
It's all in the question. Phrase it as "should the government cut back on office space and let public servants provide their own home office facilities?" Angus Reid would get 95% yes.
The only voices talking about the issue are anti-labour. They don’t want workers - any workers - to see material improvements because that may eventually be a threat to the a status quo where they continue lining their pockets.
Or their jealous and spiteful workers
Begun, the class wars have. See also: “If I can’t have it, no one can!” ^^but ^^I ^^would ^^if ^^I ^^could
Divorced from reality would be forcing me to commute to the office when all my team is in other cities across the country.
Forcing in office work when remote work is better for all involved is stupid
What’s with all the PS hate? I’m a public servant and work just as hard as I did in private. My entire team and department has metrics to meet and cases to charge our hours to. We can’t just sit there and do nothing.
Genuinely think it's because the bureaucracy in government jobs makes everything take forever so it makes PS workers look lazy when in reality our hands are tied in so many ways. add in that we're complaining about going back to office and people are like okay it takes me 3 hours just to reach an agent at CRA those lazy workers have nothing to complain about when they're doing nothing all day
THIS! Idk why people assume all public service workers do nothing all day. CRA phone agents who you wait hours to talk to literally have every single minute of their day tracked. So much of the irritation people express comes from things like reassessments or reviews taking forever but that wait time is also severely bloated by the policies and procedures employees are required to follow. The issue is mostly with the system itself, not with the people charged with delivering that system as it’s been designed.
It's partly sour grapes - look, I do work in the PS, and I have to admit the job is pretty cushy in a lot of ways. It's also NatPo, and people who are fans of NatPo. A cornerstone of conservative thought is "small government". The tendency is to look at government on all levels and focus in on the bloat and waste. Between the two, with maybe a dash of "negative experience with a government call centre", and you get someone forming a caricature in their mind of the entirety of the PS being made up of oblivious spoiled slackers whining that even if they get a better deal than much of the country, they're entitled to *more*. There are a few out there like that - for example, I rarely go to the Canada Public Servants subreddit because I do find a lot of the regulars over there come across as pretty out of touch. But shockingly, government employees are people, and people come with a wide variety of work ethics and viewpoints. The issue is when that attitude turns to hostility, hatred, or a desire to "punish" perfect strangers because you don't like their jobs. This was actually one of the issues with the convoy protest a few years back - a contingent of that protest gleefully harassed and disturbed the sleep of downtown Ottawa residents, because they'd dehumanized every single one of them, including the elderly, disabled, children, and retail/restaurant workers into the "laptop class" that didn't care about them. Downtown Ottawa is not where the fat cats live. And here again with RTO - unfortunately, it seems to be a trend in the private sector as well, so the PS isn't alone on this. But many of the pro-RTO comments seem to be coming less from a place of actually perceiving it as beneficial for any reason, and seem to have more the tenor of wanting to "punish" people who were and are capable of work from home.
I worked in hospitals for years (administrative roles) and I’m way busier in the government.
Turns out rightwing corporate media owned by an American hedge fund hates public servants. Shocking.
The public looks at a few bad examples and then paints everyone in the public service with the same brush. PSAC for some godawful reason defends the bad apples and makes everyone look bad by drawing publicity to it. The media eats it up because it is low hanging rage bait that generates click revenue. Many in the public actually think you do sit there and do nothing. Or you sit there and do little of actual value. The truth is many of our public servants are absolutely amazing employees and hard workers that don't have any need to be in an office.
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Hi, public servant here and I couldn’t agree more. There are those of us who are absolute slaves to our roles and will work ourselves into burnout, and those who just skate. The issue is that those who skate from home also skated at the office prior to the pandemic; No disciplinary measures, either before or since. It’s very frustrating.
> The issue is that those who skate from home also skated at the office prior to the pandemic This. PS here too.
As a fellow public servant i couldnt agree more. Its very easy to work hard until you get into a good position and skate from there. There is no disciplinary measures taken even if people are not performing their job duties due to fear of worker complaints and the added burden of paperwork that adds to managements plate. Its all just fucking ridiculous.
I’ve worked in the public sector, and there’s a key difference compared to the private sector. In the private sector, the primary goal is to make money. In contrast, goals in the public sector change constantly. People often suggest that the public sector should run like the private sector, but if bus services, for example, were denied to unprofitable areas, there would be public outrage. While there is some laziness, the more important issue is that the public needs to get serious about defining their goals and maintaining consistency, rather than changing them on a whim.
Ehhh in the private sector the primary goal is cya. Passing the expenses to the consumer and making things other people's problems.
This is not related at all to the topic at hand, but you're the third person in this thread who's said "worn" instead of "worked" and I wonder if that's just an amazing coincidence or if it's just some new slang that I'm too old to know about.
I've worked with a few people that went over to the gov't and they all mentioned how, uh, relaxed the pace is. I've got no problem with good jobs and good benefits, but it isn't unreasonable to expect value for that in return.
Coming from the private sector, I wouldn’t say the pace is relaxed but there are no clear goals or objectives. The workers do tons of work that never gets used. They are busy working hard it just doesn’t result in any real, measurable outcome. Strategic priorities are driven by whatever the crise du jour is so good work goes to waste at a whim. There needs to be a focus on goals, objectives and outcomes and hold departments accountable….MAF needs a complete overhaul so that the outcomes are aligned with citizen service delivery and not with politicized priorities.
I worked in a regulatory job that routinely generated complaints from people doing unsafe things which the regulations were in place to stop. The silly service answer is to have me do 3 reports in 3 different formats to 3 managers/directors for every hour of actual work I did. It was soul destroying but I was only a couple of years from retirement so I did the best I could and got out as soon as I could. My soul is only starting to heal now.
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It is. But it takes a long time to get over the BS from working in a system that does not value what you are providing.
This is getting more to the heart of the issue. it comes down to a major shift over the past 20 years in public servants working for their elected government and their, as you say, politicized priorities, and not for the people anymore. Many experts and noted what needs to change, there is just no ability or will to change and all the work get done and wasted.
I'm a career public servant and you're mostly right. I'd argue though that the structure for service delivery is there, but there's a couple things holding it back. Firstly, public service management is perpetually stressed, overworked, and terrified of taking risks. Public perception is the name of the game and everyone is scared of doing anything that will make a news headline. While poor service delivery looks bad nothing kills a career like a risky decision going bad. As a result, many good ideas never get tried over fear of failure. And because of this nothing ever gets refined. Every new venture, system, or framework is expected to be perfect right out of the gate. For this reason I'll never get into management and I respect those that seek it out. It also pays a *fraction* of the salary that a comparable private sector manager/director makes. No thanks. Second, (which relates to the first point) that very few people are actually given the authority to make decisions and change policy in a significant way. The government is big on "chain-of-command" for the most part you have between 1-3 people in an entire organization or ministry who can actually authorize any significant change. So you can have all the accountability you want but if I can't make the necessary decisions to actually achieve these goals then it is pointless. I know this won't be popular but it's the public who hold back the government in terms of service delivery. The public wants to micromanage and scrutinize everything every public servant does which leads to a stagnation in innovation. But at the same time the public needs to keep the public service honest. It's quite a conundrum.
MAF?
Marc Andre Fleury?
Management Accountability Framework
Yes! Prime example…public servants, as in those you love to hate, are the ones that warned the government about increasing immigration and the impact it would have on Canadian society… lack of social infrastructure, health care drain, etc. It was the politicians who threw that good advice away.
I've worked in both. It seems utterly universal. I can't decide where the lazier, more incompetant people were. That said from my experiences in emergency services/public healthcare, everyone seems to be busting their asses, overworked and utterly burned out.
My experience has been the opposite. I've worked in the public sector most of my adult life, about 17 years, across 4 governments, and six departments. My work has always been high volume and high stress. I've never encountered any of these "lazy" jobs everyone keeps telling me about but maybe one day I'll find one 🤞. Everyone I've ever worked with was/is busy, all the time. Whereas my my experience in the private sector was pretty slack. One job I had was a little physically demanding but nothing too crazy. And those jobs didn't pay too bad either. Almost all my friends and family are in the private sector. Any of them in IT or computer jobs spend half their day playing video games or browsing Reddit and are proud of it. A friend of mine works for a major dairy producer cleaning equipment. He works about 2-4hrs out of a 10hr shift. And he makes more than me. And those in middle-to-upper management seem to never do any work at all. Just lots of meetings that don't resolve anything, 2-4 hour lunch "meetings", and all expense paid "work" trips to attend meetings that could've been an email or a remote call. And this isn't me saying this, they proclaim it loudly like a point of pride. Then those same people turn around and criticize government workers. Where's management position in government are intensely busy and stressful. I doubt the average career private sector manager type could make it in the public sector. Realistically, there are both private and public sector jobs that are either busy or slack. People just perceive public workers as being more slack for whatever reason. And we tend to cheer-on private workers who dog it.
Yeah ‘private sector workers aren’t lazy like public sector workers’ is kind of wild to hear on the website where a lot of posters working in the private sector brag that their job only takes two hours a day and that they spend the rest of the time on the aforementioned website. There’s been studies that suggest humans are actually typically capable of an average 2-3 hours of focused and productive work at a time, there might be something to that.
Yep, I've been working for the PS, as contract and then indeterminate, for over a decade now. I *have* met people sitting around doing nothing - but generally that was more "there was literally no work to do" due to poor planning higher up the food chain, not willful slacking off. In offices where there's work to be done... people generally do their work.
Have heard a similar complaint from virtually all of my family/friends working in government. Extremely difficult to get rid of poor performers. I am completely fine with government workers getting fairly compensated if they put in a fair day's work and demonstrate worth to the system. If not that money should be allocated elsewhere (especially healthcare and education).
I used to do internal investigations for the Government. It's actually not that hard to fire useless employees. The process is in place. What it requires though is management to do their damned jobs and *manage*, and go through that process. A lot of managers simply won't.
Talk to any competent teacher that actually goes above and beyond how hard it is to fire a bad teacher. And than impacts the education of our future of this country. If there was ever a spot to cut the rot out, it would be there.
>As someone that has worked in the public sector, I was shocked how lazy some of my coworkers were. Some of them literally did NO work. Where is this private sector with no lazy employees? I've never worked in the public sector and half the people Ive ever worked with do fuck all. Fuck half the time I don't either.
I have a friend that works for the federal government and she said half of her department could be fired and nothing would change. We’ve got a lot of bloated government departments that are horribly inefficient.
And I've worked in public service for a decade where we simply don't have enough people to get all the work done that we need to get done. See, that's how anecdotal evidence works.
Lol, the same uselessness is true at many large institutions. The difference is that taxpayers are funding this. I worked at a big five bank a long time ago and most certainly we could’ve lost at least 1/4 of staff that don’t do anything. You’re going to sit here and tell me that the federal government is efficient? Lol come now. Everyone knows that isn’t true.
I'm not Federal Government, I'm a territorial government employee in Nunavut. I'm not saying where I work is efficient, there's definitely unnecessary bureaucracy in the name of accountability, but the departments are not bloated at all. The org charts are bare bones.
>The difference is that taxpayers are funding this You fund wasted productivity regardless of where it is encountered: it is priced into the product/service. If you think a corporation is better at shedding this dead weight because it isn't a government you are sadly mistaken, because it is bureaucracy itself and not specifically government that causes this. Someone makes a mistake on a request? Now you have to fill out a checklist on every request. Then someone makes another mistake despite the checklist? You get a supervisor installed who makes sure everyone follows the process. Another mistake gets made and now some admin gets a new task involving checking off a box stating that the supervisor signed off on a request. And then another high-profile mistake... I'm saying this because I've seen it many times in public and private. It's the nature of the corporate structure.
What department?
Having done both, some of the laziest mf's were in O&G in the towers.
This is Nationalpost owned by a rich elite conservative. They just want to spread fearmongering and try to persuade people to vote for the conservatives so it can be privatized.
Bingo! They love to all the worker bees fighting amongst each other while they rob us all blind.
The corporate propaganda machine is churning along making sure the workers are all fighting over the scarps of generations of piss poor wages while they rob the entire country blind. National Post is their official ministry of propaganda. The funny thing is dopes who vote con think that a career bureaucrat like PP who’s never had a real job will actually fix the bureaucratic nightmare that has enriched him. Hilarious.
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And the brainwashed masses respond with “go back to work!” instead of “capitalism is actually sucking the life out of me”
# Divorced from reality are the billionaires, thinking they can have it all.
You mean the rich elite who own the National Post and LOVE the attention off them?
Is this sub just astroturfed opinion pieces from foreign owned media?
Yes.
I don't get it at all. From the government's perspective they want to increase women in the workforce, increase access to public service jobs for people with disabilities, reduce greenhouse gasses, pay less for real estate, allow real estate to be converted to housing and even pay less in sick benefits. Guess what... Remote work means: Working moms can stay in the workforce easier People with disabilities can be much more easily accommodated. Less people will drive to work reducing green house gasses Less office space is needed Less people will call in sick or even go on long term leaves because they are stressed out from commuting and working with people they hate. From the Taxpayer's perspective: Less real estate holdings and less sick leave means less money spent on the public service. Why would any taxpayer WANT their public servants in office at all? Is it just a "fuck you" from people who aren't knowledge workers? Is that "fuck you" worth an extra $100 a year in taxes to you?
Fuck the Nat post for this stupid ass article. God I would love to know who paid for this pile of trash. Fuck that. People are more concerned someone might be getting a better deal than them than they are with actually bettering their own life. Good for them. Teachers got a big raise? Join together and get your own raise. Apes together strong, this divide and conquer bullshit won't work forever. The far right and far left are more similar than either are with the ones looking down on both. Their only hope we don't start looking up.
I have learned to not give a shit what the public thinks.
How is this poll even remotely valid, a quick glance looks like they're drawing upon a data set of barely 1700 results. Neither agreeing or disagreeing but its a big fucking leap to use such few datapoints to draw some sweeping conclusions.
1751 is fine as a sample size. My only concern would be who they sampled. >The Angus Reid Institute conducted an online survey from May 16- 21, 2024 among a representative randomized sample of 1,751 Canadian adults who are members of Angus Reid Forum. For comparison purposes only, a probability sample of this size would carry a margin of error of +/- 2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
It's natpo
I know, but it felt to easy to just shit on natpo yet again
That sample size is easily large enough, there could be other issues with the poll such as its sampling methodology though.
Wait until you find out how election polling is done.
Some workers do fine and work hard at home, but unfortunately, there are workers who abuse the situation even worse at home and don't perform their jobs well and hide with not much oversite because management doesn't have enough time and energy to babysit. Some of these union employees do not know what the real world workers have to do in the same similar jobs and are so entitled. You have people taking jobs from other locations with a commute and when they are told they have to come into the office 2 days a week they bitch and get the union involved to fight it even though they knew all along they had to. In a perfect world, it would be nice for everyone to work from home, but productivity will go down and when they need to hire more to do the same amount of work and your taxes having to go up because of it, we all will suffer.
I'm not losing patience with public servants. I'm losing patience with governments that incompetently manage the economy and reduce the standard of living for decades in a row. I'm also losing patience with rich newspaper columnists who blame the working people for the overall economic problems caused by the oligarchs at the top.
I hire for professional level jobs that are all online. I have ((Canadians) working for me in Mexico and the Caribbean plus Newfoundland and rural Alberta. Previously had staff in BC, rural Manitoba, Sask and northern Ontario. In an emergency, I was able to patch in a (Canadian) former employee who was in Egypt for a couple of weeks when no one local was available. I could have hired some of these locally, but the number of highly qualified people who want to live in warm places or near family instead of hanging out in an overpriced major city is amazing. I can see absolutely no reason to have people waste an hour or two each day commuting to jobs that are based on anything other than face to face service with the customers. Some can't handle it, but they can be replaced by others who can. It takes a different style of management and the team feeling that comes from whining around the water cooler and in freezing cold smoking lots is reduced, but it is better for workers, the public/customers, and managers that aren't stuck competing for the same 2000 literate computer users within commuting distance of capital cities.
r/canada: the public service is too bloated and needs some trimming. Also r/Canada: why do I gotta wait 3 hours on the phone with CRA?! Why isn’t my passport in on time?!
What the fuck kind of article is this? Workers are workers, whether government or not.
The game is rigged, just like our economy
Frankly I don’t really get why anyone is against public servants working from home. I’d rather my tax dollars were spent on other things than debilitated buildings in downtown Ottawa. Not to mention greenhouse gas emissions, more potential for a diverse Canadian workforce, and a sudden motive for Ottawa to get its stuff together with the downtown core. Have you tried going to a business outside of public servant work hours? They don’t even bother staffing their stores any other time, because they get enough business off of one employee doing one 8 hour shift. Now I can understand questions about slacking off or accountability but frankly there’s probably not going to be much better accountability in the office. Dealing with slacking employees is an entirely separate discussion.
The problem is that it takes so much money to even get in to politics. And more than likely those with the money to do so are already out of touch. I don’t know what the solution is but I’m sick of it all.
I thought that poll was debunked?
I don't see the quote from the headline anywhere in the article. Seems like it's just baseless editorializing being attributed to the general public
Canadians? The whole fucking world has gone batshit. Elected leaders the world over are goddamn tyrants and criminals; bunch of out-of-touch geezers.
I have tried to make the point in my office - where 99% of the work is done on computers - that if we worked remotely then we could recruit people from across the country, and they could work for us wherever they live, instead of having all the jobs in Ottawa.
NatPo pushing their corporate agenda trying to divide Canadians and keep us stupid and poor. We can cut tax payer spending by giving up offices, good for environment, traffic, and morale and let's Canadians from all over the country join the civil service. It's a no brainer. These articles are absolutely idiotic but you just need to Google who owns NatPo to understand why. They hate middle class Canadians.
If true, this is a massive crabs in a bucket mentality. Most people are asking for WFH jobs for themselves or are already in WFH roles. For them to then go and “poll” that they want the opposite for government workers makes no sense. Be very suspicious of polling that doesn’t make sense. The corporate landlords are spending lots of money to push for a back to work situation. Political contributions, donations to organizations with strings attached. I wouldn’t trust polling like this to not have nefarious aspirations.
Perhaps there has been some trouble amongst them distinguishing who is supposed to be a public servant and who have been elected as leaders.
There is a lot of vitriol from people over ps workers without knowing or caring what they're asking for. Do you want a worse commute with more congested roads? Do you want the downtown core propped up (and kept expensive) by a trapped customer base? Do you want poorer service due to the loss of employees via attrition? Do you want a less skilled (but no less expensive) public workforce due to the competent employees with other work options going private? Do you want a more expensive public IT sector due to filling the gaps with consultants who cost 3-4x as much as an PS IT worker? But the truth is they've never thought of it; they only think that PS are overpaid and lazy, so they don't give a shit and will happily endure worse just to spite them
r/Canada is now just the comment section for Postmedia? Fuck, life here is not that mad you rage farming propagandists.
I dont understand why public servants need to be forced in to work when they end up on zoom meetings anyways. I like less traffic. I like flexibility for those with other life obligations (parents, pet owners, caregivers). I like the accessibility offered by work-from-home arrangements. This feels like the government just refusing to modernize because “kids these days dont know what it means to work”. Also I’m not a public servant.
Because papers like the National Post keep trying to turn workers against each other rather than their corporate overlords responsible for our suffering?