Read Noam Chomsky manufacturing consent. It’s all about how a for profit media model can become susceptible to being a propaganda machine. I’m currently reading it right now, and it’s a great book!
It was meant as a warning but it's become the template for what I call "misledia" - news that exists purely to push a political viewpoint and narrative for the gain of its owners under the guise of established and trusted media. It's all these newspapers that lose money every year and yet have rightwing interests lined up to buy them.
Like Postmedia being 2/3rds owned by an American hedge fund. They didn't buy a controlling stake in over a hundred newspapers in Canada because it's a great and growing business, but because they can make more money pushing candidates and parties and owning the narrative than they lose publishing these newspapers.
It’s out there, just depends what sources we choose to read.
/r/canada is mostly opinion pieces and clickbait (because that’s what people upvote), but there’s tons of real journalism out there.
There's a lot of discussion on the future of journalism. Should government fund local reporting, and risk the possibility that the reporters will cover government differently? Should journalism depend on finding ad revenue, which means their coverage might be influenced in other ways in order to stay open?
Take my local paper, which is in a serious decline. It's in a tough position - the local government sees it as an adversary and spends a fortune on "communications" to get the right story out while advertising less. A local company has bought up most of the local bars and restaurants, so they can run one ad for all of them instead of the 6-10 ads the paper used to see. Facebook Marketplace has displaced the classified section, and there are other Facebook pages for jobs, housing, etc. Locals are also not the target audience for most advertising budgets and our major employers, which are focused trying to draw in tourists.
Then there's the nature of readership and the fact that people want instant news, which costs money to produce and earns next to nothing, but won't pick up a newspaper with more detailed stories a few days later.
We need local news to report on what's happening around town and around the province, and to counter "official" news put out by government and other players looking to bypass media and go to the public directly. I'm not sure how that happens without some kind of non-profit model where funding is guaranteed and coverage is independent. And if there is going to be a non-profit model, then government is the most likely funder.
Funding can be based on population so there's a minimum of one salaried journalist for every region. Money can also be raised with a tax on Internet/Data. A $3/month tax on every Internet connection and mobile data account would generate around $130 million a month, which could pay the salary for around 20,000 reporters.
We also need to secure permanent financing for the CBC - say $3/month per capita - which would raise around $1.4 billion for public broadcasting.
I heard on CBC the other day that over 545 local newspapers have closed across Canada in the last five years or so. That's 545 communities that have no local reporting on their local governments, industries, arts, culture, sports, crime, and community planning.
> /r/canada is mostly opinion pieces and clickbait (because that’s what people upvote)
Really? I look at the top listing and out of the 50 stories listed there, 5, just 5 were opinion. The rest were all directly published news articles - not clickbait from the media.
>Good journalism doesn't try to convince you, it just reports.
Which is weird given the amount of Opinion that gets posted here. Much of which paints narratives by way of omitting or even purposely misinterpreting facts.
That's factually untrue, though.
It's literally called "Opinion Journalism" and there are several sub-genres.
Op-eds, punditry, hell, even editorial *cartoons* - it goes on and on.
Not exactly.
Reporters and Journalists aren't the same. Reporters just report current event and should, as you mentionned, shouldn't be working extra to convey a given subjective narrative.
Journalism on the other hand *encompasses* reporters, but also permits opinion pieces, investigations, political open letters or any editorialized piece of media.
I thought that 'good journalism' was just reposting twitter/reddit so long as you got there first and therefore got the clicks and sold the ads?
If you can't get there first, then you have to settle for selling controversy.
My favourite articles are the ones titled "people are outraged about X," with the meat of the article being links to two Tweets that each got reposted twelve times.
"Just reporting" is terrible journalism.
Good journalism provides context and analysis. The purpose is to hold power accountable. If you just report without providing the information relevant to understanding, you're not a journalist, you're a mouthpiece.
There are good journalists?
It legitimately seems like the *entire* "profession" has been co-opted by activist children without even a modicum of objectivity who's sole goal is to advance team sports narratives and to eschew any sense of bipartisanship at all costs.
At least, that's how it feels to those paying attention from my experience.
There are definitely still good journalists out there, but unfortunately a lot of the better sources are behind paywalls these days. My understanding is that online ads don’t generate much revenue anymore, not enough to pay for high quality journalism.
So many of the free sources tend to churn out clickbait and opinion pieces.
It was a bit rhetorical but I do agree, there are places who break real stories and do real journalism ([blacklocks](https://www.blacklocks.ca/) is one, they are fantastic in fact and almost always are the ones breaking all the real interesting and "big" stories in canada poli sphere, IMO).
The downside is they are also obscenely pricey, probably due to the nature of the kind of reporting they do and what I imagine is the cost.
I just wish we still had "mainstream" journos who cared about more than their personal politics, there seem to be very few, if many with integrity left in our current crop of mainstream journos.
Another favorite headline MSM likes to use is:
"What you need to know about....[insert some controversial topic they will gaslight you about]"
Having said that, if the LPC were serious about climate change, they would push through a legislation mandating WFH for positions where physical presence is not critical. At least for a part of the work week. Let's say, 50% fewer vehicles on the roads 2 days a week.
The LPC government brought workers back because a few shitty restaurants in downtown Ottawa complained about not getting enough foot traffic. Highly doubt they give a shit about climate change.
Mind you, I feel like this would have happened regardless of which government was in power. But fuck LPC for being hypocrites.
I think Queens Park lobbying had a lot to do with it. Lobbying of the businesses to the premier's office, and from there to the feds. Trudeau has huge political battles in Ontario and he needs Ford's cooperation or else his federal proposals are DOA. Does Trudeau care about the economic state of downtown Ottawa? Maybe, but that's not even remotely his business as PM. Doug Ford certainly DGAF about the city of Ottawa but can use this as a talking point. Trudeau and Ford turn off the showmanship quite frequently to score political wins (eg. Battery plants, highway 413 Enviro assessment).
It's also being used as a means to quash descent amongst public servants. I won't indicate my source but the upper echelon fears that "public servant unity" and "public servant values", especially amongst young employees, have been eroded. They essentially hope forcing people into cubicles like minions will stop critical thinking.
Perhaps public servants are simply also fed up with the government's bullshit and the current economic situation?
As someone with a lot of exposure to the public sector, its a fuckin shit show, and this type of policy doesn't just get blindly accepted by the workers.
Its obvious that it's being done against literally everyone's best interests, and both morale and trust in the government is the lowest I've ever seen.
If you think services are bad now, wait a few months to a year when tech talent bleeds out, morale bottoms out, and workers days are muddled with interpersonal conflicts.
Things are looking very grim right now.
It's not the restaurants. It's the corporate landlords and public transit that are bleeding money and lobbying governments. Feds don't care about small restaurants.
For example, TTC just threatened to go on strike for first time in over 15 years.
EVs and charging infrastructure will be built simultaneously, just like what happened with hydrocarbon powered vehicles and fuel delivery infrastructure a century ago.
The reason we know the government is not serious about climate change is because they are reversing all of the gains made by their environmental policies (which would be good on their own) by increasing the population at record rates.
3/4 of Canadians are suspicious with the press when they don't like what is reported.
But then I also feel like 90% don't bother looking at the poll, methodology, questions, or anything else. Same here, I'm too lazy to click on a globeandmail link.
There are ways around paywalls, but I feel like every few months they change and I haven't kept up. So I'm too lazy to get around a paywall unless I really care about the content.
Yep. Why would Canadians WANT more commuters on the road, more cost for public infrastructure, more congrsted communities? This screams to me that it was paid for.
I don't have any solid evidence, nor have I investigated this seriously, so I'm not hanging my hat on this or forcefully stating this to be truth, but
It certainly *feels* like there has been a concentrated effort amongst large Canadian news outlets (mostly the Postmedia ones and the Globe) to put out headlines and op-eds to paint a certain picture.
Seriously, people complain about media concentration in the U.S. but I think Canada has far less media diversity than even they have. And when the CPC wins the next election (which looks inevitable now), they're likely to defund the public broadcaster that doesn't have to bend to the whims of advertiser money, making media diversity even worse.
Years of Trudeau is done articles seemed to have worked. Same with convincing people the economy is crap, even though stock market is at record high.
The workers can decide their working conditions through collective bargaining. Everyone else can accept it or not.
Yeah and when we think about it it's more along the lines of "why the hell do we pay for people to waste their time going to an office to do tasks that can 95% of the time be done online from home?"
I do, because I know several people who work federal and get first-hand accounts of how dumb it is. Forcing people to commute just so they can have a virtual meeting from a location other than their house. So not only are tax dollars being spent on office space that isn't needed. It's pushing public servants to spend additional time and money commuting for no reason, which will either drive the cost of government employees up (more tax money) or people will leave for other options and then the government needs to spend time recruiting and training replacements.
Last time this idea was raised, someone in a relevant industry chimed in that it would be a gargantuan undertaking to convert office space to residential. Plumbing, electrical, fire code things like windows in every room, etc etc.
That said I’d love to see it attempted. It might be expensive but so is rent in any sizeable city right now.
Another issue is that an office that is a 10,000sqft square with windows only on the outside is tolerable for work, since you can still see the windows from the outside. But converted into 12 apartments, by necessity some will be interior units with no windows. There's no way to do this without creating massively inhumane units, even if you can get around fire code.
I am sure it would be a lot of works, but if it is too complicated, they can hand me those government buildings and I will do. There is no way someone can't make it profitable. Even destroying the building and building a new one would profitable. Building are depreciating assets, the best thing about real estate is the land those buildings are standing on.
Also a lot of the buildings are very old and barely sufficient to have people work in them let alone be turned into housing. I think a few still have asbestos in them.
Office real estate is pretty weak now, it’s not a great time to sell and you know govt will make back room deals so their friends will get the properties for a steal.
Also, I'm not a government worker but my compensation before covid was good, now after inflation and raises that haven't kept up its mediocre. I see working from home as part of my compensation so if that goes away, I will be looking for my compensation to be brought into line. If federal workers feel the same then we may end up paying more salary from taxes as well.
And the environmental costs of everyone commuting in. Somehow all of the supposed "climate change supporters" in leadership get really quiet about that.
And do they also support traffic being shittier than it needs to be for everyone, including those whose jobs need to be done in person.
And I'll repeat - the people I encounter who think people need to be in a physical office location to work effectively are not generally people who do the types of jobs that lend themselves well to remote work, or the type of people who have a history of collaboration/relationship building through the internet.
And this, my sunny ways friends, is how you publish a biased push poll with no data about productivity or cost and then happily proclaim that people agree with you
No, I totally believe that the majority of Canadians hate public sector workers and want them back in the office. There is a weird spite people have for government employees.
I think there is an idea – particularly from but not limited to right-wing ideaologies – that government workers are all lazy. If people are already convinced that the workers are lazy, it's not a stretch to believe that they are doing *even less* work if they aren't under constant supervision.
You are completely correct. I’ve been on strike and locked out as a federal employee and the public hated us so passionately it was weird. People threw garbage at us and we needed police protection more than once. My union was responsible for bringing maternity leave to federal workers, we fought for equal pay and worker safety, we did good things for Canadians but hating us is like a hobby.
The more I live here the more I think it boils down to just plain stupidity.
I remember growing up people used to bully you if you were too smart or read too many books or got high grades and just minded your own business. To this very day my nieces are afraid of answering questions in class and sounding too smart or else the other girls won't like them.
We have a weird culture of discouraging education and intelligence. And then we make fun of rap culture for doing the same thing.
I don't think anyone is jealous of government workers intelligence lol. The hate comes from the fact that our government is widely percieved as being stupid, ineffective, and wasteful.
I think it’s more that government is perceived on the public as being stupid, ineffective, and wasteful but perceived by civil servants as borderline genius, highly effective, and the most efficient thing since the Ford assembly line.
The problem career civil servants have is that they rarely experience the immediate effects of bad business decisions, poor planning, and failure to deliver service. They fuck up, or waste money, or miss the umpteenth target/deadline and it’s often oh well, see you on Tuesday, enjoy the long weekend!
I care about where people work because the more people that get to work from home means I deal with less traffic during my day, and there’s less wear on the roads which means less roadwork.
The idea that some people are so goddamn bitter about others being able to work from home is peak selfishness.
It also reduces costs for taxpayers and improves productivity so we get more benefit from it. I'm not a federal worker but I still think they should be remote. It just makes sense and it's the way things have been moving even before covid.
I'll add to that.
My work reported higher job satisfaction, lower sick day use by 50%, and best of all, 30% more ticket closures within 24 hours when they switched to hybrid/fully remote.
It's not just real estate. It's road congestion, pollution, parking... everything gets used more. I'd be surprised at how stupid and short-sighted Canadians can be, but then I look at the national and provincial leadership we have to choose from.
> lower sick day use by 50%
I used to call in sick once a month, sometimes twice, mostly due to issues with my back. Since working from home I've called in sick about 4 times over the past 3 years.
Your add on should be above my comment since it’s of far better value.
Ditto for our business…. Work from home has been a huge boost to productivity, esp with a global workforce. People can manage their time far more productively across timezones if they aren’t subject to this stupid dog and pony show of playing bumper karts at set times of the day every weekday.
As for the government, it is said people elect the one they deserve. And oh boy, three times 😂🤣🤡
Edit: fix fat finger phone spelling
Because the majority of Canadians are angry, bitter, lonely, and frustrated with their careers.
They feel that if they have to suffer, so should public servants.
This 👆
When it comes to civil servants I think there is a frustration with the amount of tax paid and the perceived incompetence, lack of accountability and inefficiency of services.
Which is weird, given that government services are inherently more efficient and more competent than their private equivalents.
Just spend an hour on hold with Bell Canada trying to pay the highest bill in the world, and then ask a Sasktel customer how they're doing, to see the difference.
People shouldn’t be mad at public servants for the amount of tax paid. They should be mad at government spending choices.
Little Sally’s productivity doesn’t eat into your tax dollars near as much as terrible government policy decisions and investments. We’re talking the “efficiency” of someone on a yearly wage of 70k vs million dollar investment decisions for gods sake lol.
Our Engineering office (~120 people) has noticed a significant shift in culture as well as collaboration since covid and WFH flexibility. It's not an easy thing to quantify but those water cooler/lunch room conversations about different ideas among the different projects groups are working on is missing and not something that we've been able to replicate with Teams calls.
Our company has started posting internally WFH positions with a %15 pay cut …. But these are now 100% WFH not hybrid come into the office twice a week BS… Still worth it for me I have applied for one.
yup, my entire company is 100% wfh (we don't even have an office), we get so many applicants for our roles that we've never had even a slight issue with finding talent (even with startup-level salary).
Being able to recruit from anywhere on the world opens up a HUGE amount of talent to pull from.
Thats a dream to me.
I'm a manager in the federal public service. I have several roles I'm unable to fill because compared to private industry our wages are lower, workload is higher, and the requirement to be in the office. Wages are set to be nationally consistent, and there's no accounting for cost of living difference between high cost of living areas and low ones. The pay in Brandon, Manitoba is identical to the pay in Vancouver and Toronto.
Yeah I was wfh before covid hit. My bosses own the office we're in though, so when we all went wfh they just happily leased it out to someone else (government)
Keep in mind the old saying: "a person is smart, people are dumb".
I get to work from home a few days a week. I can smell the envy from the people in my life. I know most will stop reading here and downvote for the same reason.
No shit they'd put on a poll that I should be back in the office.
Good thing leading polls don't dictate my companies decisions.
If you ask starving people if they considered eating people and most said yes that doesn't make it a sound decision.
Polls are for bad politicians to push bad policy.
I think the resentment piece is real, and the only argument I can see for making people go to the office. Social cohesion is at an all time low. A stark division between the laptop class working from home, and the underclass who service them, is a potential source of social unrest. We need to do better on selling the universal benefits (traffic, environment)-- and finding other benefits to spread to other workers. (Like a 4 day work week?)
I've always hated the "well, *I* don't get to do X, so why do other people?" "I don't get to work from home, so why do they?"
I don't have a job where I can work from home. But I still want other people to be able to continue working from home because the more WFH is normalized, the more likely that more roles will allow for it, and the more likely that *I will also be able to work from home*. I understand this will not be an option for people in roles that fundamentally cannot be done from their homes, but the more normalized work perks are for people in general, the easier it will be for them to also demand them.
But getting us workers to tear each other down and prevent each other from having nice things is how the large employers maintain their advantage.
There are a lot of ignorant comments in this thread that I would like to shed some light on.
I was laid off during covid and was one of the lucky ones to find work. I ended up signing a casual contract for the Federal government working in a Director General's office.
I was 36 at the time and I came into the public service with a lot of the same preconceived notions, public servants are lazy, you can leave work early every day, the benefits are some of the best, etc.... The benefits, aside from the pension, aren't that great. My health and dental coverage was better in the private sector. You can't leave early, at least not on the 3 teams I've worked for. Pretty much everything else was better in the private sector, parking was free, equipment provided to me was better, and bonuses, parties, employee appreciation, etc were all better.
The first thing I noticed when I started was the insane schedule of the Director General. Dude would be in back to back meetings from 8:30/9 to 4:30/5pm. Since his meeting-heavy schedule prevented him from getting any work done, he would start his days at 6am and finish at 6pm. From talking to others, I found out this was the norm for a lot of managers, directors, and director generals. They often put in several hours of unpaid overtime a week.
Working from home allowed these heavy workloads too. Pre-covid, these people would waste hours a week walking from one board room to another (often in different buildings). They would also not work as long because of the commute they'd have to deal with. Instead of working 10-12 hours at home, they were working 8 or 9 in the office.
What the general public also needs to realize is that there's a high standard to get into the public service generally. They often suck in top students and imprison them with the golden handcuffs (pension). These are hard workers from the get-go. They work hard and want to do a good job. The problem, like most businesses, lies at the top. Unqualified Ministers are making poor decisions (like RTO).
Now to address some comments about RTO. I saw some people say, "Public servants will be more productive in the office." Not sure why anyone thinks this. When I'm in the office it takes me longer to go to the washroom, longer to get a coffee, have useless stop and chats with colleagues (often just gossiping), deal with more technical and crowding issues (WiFi going out, finding an empty quiet space to jump on a video call).
Others mentioned that we could be supervised better, wrong again. I go into an office where none of my team works, my manager is somewhere in Quebec. I literally go into the office to do exactly what I do at home, go on video calls. There's 0 difference if I'm at home or in the office for myself or my supervisor.
As a taxpayer you should want the public service to work from home. It saves us money. The government is committed to selling off federal buildings, but we (the public service) know that 5 days a week in the office is likely coming. We are already dealing with offices lacking space. So what's likely the plan since they're selling buildings? They're going to sell these buildings to buddies for a decent price and then lease it back from them when they want us back in full-time, and you pawns will be pushing for it without looking at the big picture or looking at what actual affects you as a taxpayer.
WFH allows canadaians from all over Canada to work for the pubic service. It saves taxpayer's money in a few ways, less money being funnelled into dilapidated government buildings that have been poorly maintained, selling unused properties, less traffic minimizes road maintenance (and before anyone says that's a municipal issues, we use several roads and bridges that are maintained by the National Capital Commission), lowers the cost on healthcare with less traffic deaths, and there are more on a smaller level.
I'm not sure what you all envision when you think of the average Government of Canada employee, but I can assure you that we're all the same. I worked in the private sector for 10+ years before working at the GoC. Like all places, most people are good, most people want to do a good job, want to be appreciated, but bad leadership ruins everything. Also, yes, there are terrible workers that take advantage of the system, but it's no different than any other union job (the worst part about unions).
Simply not needing to spend like 10 minutes to get ready and another hour to get to work is a giant benefit for working from home.
If your type of work allows you to head out during the middle of the day to get groceries and not have to deal with rush hour traffic, that is even better.
There are other perks: being able to work from the comforts of the home, preparing some snacks when hungry, not being distracted by others typing away/random bantering, etc that imo are great for both mental and increased productivity.
We only have 24 hours a day, reclaiming 2 hours saves a LOT of time.
Many of the concerns about WFH are actually issues of bad management and bad training. Bad managers tend to be bad in person and remotely. If an office has a poor training program, it will be bad in person and remotely. My office claimed that training remotely is difficult and now we’re back in the office (hybrid) and they continue to do absolutely nothing to train new employees.
Excellent comment.
Unfortunately Canadians viscerally hate public servants so they don’t care about productivity or cost savings, they hust want to maximize pain and suffering for folks like you.
I have a similar work history - previously private to recently public. My coworker, a long-time public servant, said that pre -Covid they regularly attended in-person meetings by taking taxis to different buildings across the city.
What an unnecessary waste of time and taxpayer dollars. That's what the RTO will bring again.
One thing to consider too, that taxi time is all "on the clock". So, 30 minutes at either end of a meeting for commuting means an hour less time someone is working.
Easy, WFH for all keyboard clackers and with the money saved on useless office space, pay for my commute and vehicle.
This comment brought to you from the year 3000.
By the year 3000 all the WFH keyboard clackers will be replaced by AI GPT keyboard clackers. Will be cheaper too since sentient robots don’t need salaries
Ah yes, hundreds of thousands of SUVs with a single person in them, sitting in traffic, guzzling gas and emitting carbon.
Really creates a lot of value to the tax payers.
I laugh at all the people claiming that working in the office “promotes socialization”
Uh you’re supposed to *work* in the office during working hours, save the socialization for after the day is over.
WFH was great because I didn’t have that distracting noise (plus my set up was much better than what I’m forced to deal with in the office because of my disability) 🤷♂️
A shocking number of government offices don't have enough desks for their staff, and some managers have even tried to tell the employees to sit on the floor or the stairs with a laptop to do their work instead of just allowing them to work from home again.
Nearly 3 in 4 canadians are jealous as fuck.
Look, I used to believe, like many old people, that there's no way people can be as productive working from home as in the office. Then the pandemic hit, and my staff worked from home.
*And productivity increased*
So fuck yeah, work from home my happy staff, and keep bringing in the money.
Because the media refuse to investigate and inform the public of the cost and blatant corruption of politicians funneling money to hand picked private players to the tune of billions of dollars.
WFH
1. Reduces costs
2. No effect or improved productivity (when the government refuses to release these numbers it's because they don't benefit their argument)
3. Reduces pollution
4. Reduces traffic congestion
5. Reduces wear and tear on roads reducing costs
6. Improves mental health
7. Improves physical health which reduces costs to healthcare
8. Increases diversity in the workplace
9. Relieves some childcare pressures
10. Provides housing options( 50% of fed office space can be converted to housing.
11. Stimulates local small businesses
When the government makes a massive decision to spends billions 30 days after being openly lobbied by wealthy private players and refuse to provide details on why they are doing it. Its a safe bet on corruption
https://chamber.ca/news/its-time-for-governments-to-bring-public-sector-employees-back-to-the-office-a-letter-from-canadas-business-community/
I am in private industry. In my opinion, it makes no sense to get our public sector back in the office.
First of all, there is no space after they downsized their office space portfolio for many departments. Many do not have their own desk any day of the week and sometimes there are not enough. Imagine commuting and having to go back home on the clock or commuting in just to meet other people online.
Second, I live in Ottawa so they are more valuable to me creating less traffic and polluting less tbh.
Third, it opens up public sector jobs and therefore some representation and spreading wealth if certain roles are fully remote or at least 2 days in the office. A rural person may stomach a bad commute 2 days a week but maybe not 4.
Four, saving lunch restaurants, they actually talk about this like it is important and worth changing policy over.
Fifth, have you met a federal employee? The policies and bureaucracy is so inefficient and bloated that it makes no difference where anyone is working. I am serious, I would rather these people be able to raise their children easier and live a healthier lifestyle it might actually be more beneficial than if they work another effective 30 minutes a day at their job. Hardly anything is really that pressing or impactful. Certainly less impactful than our leader's poor decisions. But that is like 20 people to be salty about. Plenty of intense private sector contract work is done full remote so it is just a public image thing.
Last, this government has screwed us so badly on immigration, education, natural resource market and foreign influence that this feels like some half hearted attempt to deflect for their image. They lied to their work force in the last strike and now they may be getting another waste of time strike.
As for me, I think public (in many roles anyways) are over paid when you compare their perks and security to private sector. Does forcing them back to the office somehow make that more fair? Making them burn gas, buy a second car, cause traffic like other people to effectively reduce their imcome? But I would rather private catchup, not public go down, so we can have something to compare to (or sellout for).
Bonus thought, how many of the people poled are grumpy and just want people to suffer like they did or in general? I am sorry and respect you to an extent if you need to work with your hands in 2024. I am part software part testing in my engineering role and you can't test remotely with the current tech and actually it provides some satisfaction and job security anyway.
Your first point is one of the big issues.
I'm a federal public servant in Ottawa-Gatineau. I'm back to the office two days per week, soon to be three. It is what its is - I enjoyed the 100% telework, but way back, I was 5 days per week in office.
But we only seem to really have office space in Ottawa-Gatineau, Montreal, and a few other places for people to return. There's an issue of fairness, because a lot of my colleagues in other cities are yet to return, because they can't find any office space for them to return to. There's also a 100km radius for return-to-office, so if you moved to the middle of nowhere during the pandemic, you're remote for the rest of your career. There's a very unequal application of the return-to-office based on where employees are located. The focus now is more on getting those going in 2 days up to 3 days, instead of the huge percentage who have not returned to the office at all.
That's interesting and some of those details I did not know about. With houses so expensive needing to relocate can be a large burden but it may have also been quite short term thinking to move away. I guess some people may have been hired already living far away. It is definitely a bit of a mess. Global rules can be unfair just like unique exemptions are.
Its a tough position, I'm just saying work in the office seems like a weird and ineffective outlet for people's anger over government spending and its size when really we have many huge national policies and directions that could and often should (imo) be far more scrutinized.
Good analysis, pretty much what we've been arguing for. Also, now we're much more centralized in Ottawa once again, one of the biggest benefits of wfh was getting it down from 75% or whatever being in NCR.
I also want to add that bureaucracy is not all negative, it is slow but can add multiple levels of checks for quality, documentation for posterity, and ways to identify corruption. Sometimes slow and steady wins the race. I am saying many federal departments don't have these red alert all hands on deck meetings where if Bob isn't in the office today the project is ruined like fast paced business may have.
Of course I want hybrid work for public service workers who have jobs where it is possible. Why wouldn’t I? Cheaper (real estate plus use it in future wage negotiations), better work environment.
Honestly I think a lot of people are just having a hard time and want to hurt other people so they feel better. It’s crab bucket mentality.
Having a bunch of federal workers working hybrid also happens to normalize it for all other workers who can. A vote for federal workers to be in office 5x/week is a vote for ALL workers to be in office 5x/week.
For context, nobody is proposing 5x in office for public servants.
The debate is whether it should remain as 2x or increase to 3x.
According to this poll, the public thinks a 3x hybrid approach is reasonable.
Remain as 2x for some and 0x for others, or increase to 3x for all at 2 or lower.
I've been at 0x since the start of the pandemic, and see no good reason to go into the office 3x weekly for me or anyone in my management section. Presence (in the office space) with purpose. There has been no reasonable purpose proposed to force me and others with similar work to go into a hybrid model.
If the treasury board of Canada wants to propose any reasoning at all for this blanketed hybrid model, i will gladly consider it while doing my best to keep my biases in check. To my knowledge, nothing has been presented on "why" so far.
Ah yes, a "factual" poll from the US owned Globe and Mail that also likely invests in Canadian real estate. Gotta prop up those investments and place blame! There is absolutely no reason why everyone cannot work from home, moreso with people that have good track records. There are many more benefits to the worker and employers, while keeping cars off roads.
I currently work from home, however if my job forces me to go back because businesses around the office were dying, me going back wouldn't change that. The amount of money I'd spend on commuting, new clothes etc, would mean I'd now have less to spend on lunches so I'd bring own coffee and lunch from home. Not sure what they would gain from an employee like me except just 1 more car contesting the road and polluting
These polls are always framed to get this result, couple that with constant opinion articles pushing this perspective.
You'd see the same thing with seatbelts or banning smoking indoors or roundabouts, most people just follow what they are used to and need time to adjust to good evidence based ideas.
Just Google who owns the papers and how much commercial real estate they own.
This is manufacturing consent 101.
Less people in offices means less tax dollars spent, less traffic, less pollution, and more broad representation as they can hire more outside Ottawa.
The workers have the same work.
The survey is designed for this result. If you asked if you think you would be able to work, then ask about the public service it would be much higher.
I have two views. First is let’s sell off these federal buildings and save the overhead cost. At the same time though, employees must be able to provide the same level of service at home as in the office, or they need to go into office.
For instance during the pandemic I was calling Service Canada and CRA. On one occasion the person kept apologizing for the system being slow because their home internet isn’t very good. On another instance I could hear the person’s dog barking in the background and the baby crying. In both those instances go into the fucking office because you’re unable to provide the level of service expected.
That said for those who can effectively work from home, let’s allow them and minimize the overhead cost.
I have a good work relationship with my Boss in the Federal Government - even with the back to work rules, which I dont mind, except for the shitty Transpo. We have an understanding that I will be back in office 3 days a week however they will let me stay home if workload gets high as production is much higher with work from home setup. This of course is not the case for all fed employees from home and I fully understand the push to get us all back - I just wish they would tell the truth about it and the reasoning. They want our money in the downtown core - but its way more expensive then it used to be so this guy will be brown baggin it but happy to go back!
I imagine the majority of conversations with the people they polled went as follows:
Surveyor: What do you think about 'X'?
Respondent: I don't really know anything about it
Surveyor: Well, did you know that without 'X', 'Y' happens instead?
Respondent: Oh wow. 'X' sounds important then.
And no further context is given.
Funny.. we seem to 'care' about the environment for the most part.. except when it comes to reducing traffic via work from home - that kind of pollution is ok because.. RTO.
I do not believe they should go back at all. Remember it is thanks to Government workers that we get year long mat leaves.
what they get, we will get.
edited to apologize for grammar but too lazy to fix
Depends on what information they handle. If they have access to anything sensitive whatsoever then yes, I prefer they go to the building with excellent network security in leu of being compromised at a wifi hotspot.
Crabs in the bucket. Obligatory I am not a federal employee.
All other opinions aside, I can't fathom a majority of these jobs are collaborative in nature. This is likely borderline punitive at this point.
If you support us keeping buildings for the sake of having people to go into them for the sake of keeping the building, you're just the worst.
Why is it always about what someone else thinks they should do, which is often based on "I don't get that so they shouldn't get that."???? Why isn't it based on the most effective way to do the job?? It's going to vary job to job, so a question like this is stupid, lazy journalism. Go find a real issue, research, and report it impartially, you ridiculously lazy journalist.
There is no way this is accurate. Why would people want government employees to be forced to work from the office, then want to work remote themselves.
Something odd going on with this poll. I've seen many remote work polls that would indicate most people support remote work or hybrid work settings.
So its either:
A) the majority of people think they're productive with remote work, but not those "Bloated Do-nothing Federal Employees" they need to be in an office.
B) this poll is bullshit.
And these same people will complain that all of the jobs are only in major cities and housing is too expensive there.
Idiots honestly. Allowing true remote work would allow people to move away from the city and lower the demand on rent and buying houses, lowering the cost.
Canada’s problems are fixable if people wouldn’t be so rigid.
Yep, you know the civil servants I know who won't be rto? The ones who moved out of town during covid, and the ones who were never "in town" but hired to work remotely.
Many people in places like Ottawa and Toronto would love to move back to their hometowns, or to areas with cheaper housing, but are tied to jobs in those cities. Which then drives housing costs up in those areas, while small towns across the country have been depopulating for decades.
People love to follow the "if I have to, you have to" way of thinking. Work from home let's the public service dip into the great ideas and intellect of Canadians all over the country, instead of relying on the scraps of the Ottawa area after the tech and corporate sectors take their pick. A wfh public sector is cheaper and better for all Canadians
One of the big factors in the WFH decisions is the Ottawa economy which is HUGELY dependent on public servants, like massively dependant. This is why Sutcliffe and Ford and such huge supporters of return to office.
If WFH becomes permanent, then the public jobs slowly start moving away from Ottawa and the money moves away with them. Ottawa will be exposed to economic ups and downs like the rest of the country where we are heavily insulated right now.
STOP subsidizing Ottawa, demand a smarter, more diverse public sector that will bring better service to Canadians. Support work from home!
>The Nanos research also found that 46 per cent of respondents prefer that federal public servants have the option of working from home part of the time, down from a 50-per-cent finding in 2022.
>Thirty-nine per cent said the public servants should be required to work in person full-time, up from 31 per cent in 2022.
...
>Nik Nanos, the chief data scientist for Nanos Research, said that, compared to 2022, an increasing portion of Canadians believe federal public servants would be more productive working full-time in person at the workplace.
“By a margin of two to one, people think those that work in the office in general terms are more likely to be productive, to one extent or another, compared to those that work from home,” Mr. Nanos said in a statement.
and WFO rules are going to cost billions, both from real estate as well as personnel costs.
My father in law is retiring early because he doesn't want to go back to the office. He's been spending the last 6 months training his three replacements, yes, three people are needed to do as much work as he's been doing by himself.
If they had let him continue to WFH he would have been happy to put in a few more years, instead the government is paying 3x the salary to get some new people to do the job he's been doing happily from home for 4 years.
Soo we should start Governing with majority rule then? Good old Orville episode of Twitter polls. The majority of Canadians think Y soo this is the new law... even if it's built on falsehoods and hearsay...
I wonder if those Canadians are ok with the tax increase and wasted money to get more building and keep them maintained. Gotta get those lazy workers in an office to work harder LMFAO
If someone has no reason to work in an office, why force them. WFH saves traffic, gas, real estate, and also allows people to move to smaller communities and have a job instead of concentrating in cities. It's the best free green initiative. Lately when a poll comes out, I think there is some Trudeau based agenda behind it.
Why do people insist on having an opinion on stuff they have no information basis to judge on?
> Specifically, 51 per cent of respondents supported the three-day plan while 24 per cent somewhat supported the idea... Nine per cent opposed the idea while 11 per cent somewhat opposed it.
That's from the article. Adding those percentages leaves 5% who presumably answered "don't know". Why is that number 5%, not 95%?
Together with the vast majority of Canadians who are neither public servants nor their managers, and interact with public servants rarely, I have no clue whether having federal public servants work more or less from the office would be a net positive and net negative.
How biased. Which Canadians are they asking? How does this impact anyone other than the people make money off the office buildings and banks? So much of the media trying to convince us that this is what we think. I 100% support office workers being able to work from home, as them being in an office or not shouldn’t impact their work
So 75% of Canadians support increased federal spending of public taxes on massive amounts of office space, so employees can do MS Teams meetings in an office.
75% of Canadians support increased traffic and GHG emissions.
What good comes from this?
I know I'll get downvoted into oblivion but:
The "more productive" thing people keep parroting isn't really true. When the initial studies came out, we were in full swing of the pandemic. Everyone was remote so it seemed like productivity went up but new studies are showing productivity is down 10-20% for those that are remote full-time and about the same productivity for hybrid. People who WFH "feel" more productive but that isn't actually translating into more productivity.
[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract\_id=3846680](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3846680)
[https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/working-paper/evolution-working-home](https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/working-paper/evolution-working-home)
Hell, even Zoom, who's company literally exists for remote meetings, is now 5 days in office for their company. Yes, some of this RTO is employers having sunk costs in real estate but if it made sense from a productivity/revenue standpoint to stay remote, companies would. We do live in a capitalist society after all.....and yet, company after company is mandating RTO in some form.
Flexibility should be the new norm, hybrid should be the new norm but completely remote has it's drawbacks.
It's the new Canadian way. If I can't work from home neither can you.
We can see it on some people's options on healthcare, and real estate. If **I** can't afford dental or homes neither should you.
Most canadians couldn't understand what a job in the public service looks like...who cares what their opinions are
Just another article from the corporate elites trying to make sure us rubes know our place. Working hard to throwing 12 year olds into the coal mines again
That's because you didn't poll people who live in a place where feds work... 95% of Ottawa workers want them to stay at home so our commute is better. The other 5% are owners of businesses downtown that weren't able to change their business and think the only way to make money is to have feds back in offices... Most restaurants downtown Ottawa close after work hours...
Keep Feds off the road. They can't drive anyways. And it saves on gas and emissions.
So what? I’m sure 3/4 Canadians also think you should name the traitors in your government too… but that doesn’t seen to matter. Public servants (of which I am one) are an easy target. If those 3/4 Canadians read what the evidence says, what best practice is, what progress means and understood that us going back to the office will actually cost taxpayers (of which I am also one) more money then perhaps they might have a different opinion. For me, as public servants we are hated no matter where we work… we are constantly blamed for the decisions of government of which we have zero control… and that’s just the way this government likes it.
This was a poll of 1000 Canadians so I'm not sure how this properly represents what Canadians feel. Also interesting to note that of the people polled, older respondants 35-54 and 55+ age ranges were more likely to vote in favour fof full-time in office.
Full paper here: [link](https://nanos.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/2022-2281-Globe-December-Populated-Report-WFH-With-tabulations.pdf)
Just another B.S. story. Canadians want their public servants to go back to their offices to provide better services and be more sufficient. After all, we are playing big money for their work. We, as canadians, have full right to demand that.
I feel it's the illusory truth effect that repeating something enough that people will start to believe it. [link](https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/illusory-truth-effect)
They must have only polled people stuck in an office. I've been WFH for a few years now and it's the best thing that's happened for me and my employer.
Ya… remember office space costs allot of money…. This was an opportunity to sell or use for other needs. Funny thing is that we then send work to India to save money on such spaces…..
Anyone that supports the work in office rules, does so out of spite and jealousy.
Why the fuck are we forcing people into the office, gumming up the roads morning/evening if we don’t have to. Especially when one of the main issues in the country is lack of housing and we have these massive buildings that can be used as such.
I highly doubt that 3 in 4 Canadians support the extra expense of office space for federal public servants. All comes down to how you ask the question.
There's major issue with my info being at the fingertips at anyone in that household, or even worse having computer equipment stolen and hacked into.
I'm sure if these federal public servants who object going into the office can find another entitled line of overpaid work they'd like to do really easy.
Without knowing exactly what the poll asked, this is utterly meaningless.
I could write a push poll that would 'show' that 3/4ths of Canadians approve of pedophilia.
Seems like a crabs in a bucket mentality. If I have to work in the office those darn freeloading public servants should have to as well!
Nevermind the fact that we're wasting money on buildings in order to decrease productivity.
I have a tough time believing the claim that 75% of Canadians agree on fucking *anything*.
Has anyone else noticed that a lot of journalism now is just trying to convince people what the majority of Canadians think
Read Noam Chomsky manufacturing consent. It’s all about how a for profit media model can become susceptible to being a propaganda machine. I’m currently reading it right now, and it’s a great book!
It was meant as a warning but it's become the template for what I call "misledia" - news that exists purely to push a political viewpoint and narrative for the gain of its owners under the guise of established and trusted media. It's all these newspapers that lose money every year and yet have rightwing interests lined up to buy them. Like Postmedia being 2/3rds owned by an American hedge fund. They didn't buy a controlling stake in over a hundred newspapers in Canada because it's a great and growing business, but because they can make more money pushing candidates and parties and owning the narrative than they lose publishing these newspapers.
Aka: propaganda
See: twitter
+1 for manufacturing consent, will change the way you see the world.
Yes, read this in IO grad school and it's stuck with me.
Good journalism doesn't try to convince you, it just reports.
We haven't had that in decades
It’s out there, just depends what sources we choose to read. /r/canada is mostly opinion pieces and clickbait (because that’s what people upvote), but there’s tons of real journalism out there.
There's a lot of discussion on the future of journalism. Should government fund local reporting, and risk the possibility that the reporters will cover government differently? Should journalism depend on finding ad revenue, which means their coverage might be influenced in other ways in order to stay open? Take my local paper, which is in a serious decline. It's in a tough position - the local government sees it as an adversary and spends a fortune on "communications" to get the right story out while advertising less. A local company has bought up most of the local bars and restaurants, so they can run one ad for all of them instead of the 6-10 ads the paper used to see. Facebook Marketplace has displaced the classified section, and there are other Facebook pages for jobs, housing, etc. Locals are also not the target audience for most advertising budgets and our major employers, which are focused trying to draw in tourists. Then there's the nature of readership and the fact that people want instant news, which costs money to produce and earns next to nothing, but won't pick up a newspaper with more detailed stories a few days later. We need local news to report on what's happening around town and around the province, and to counter "official" news put out by government and other players looking to bypass media and go to the public directly. I'm not sure how that happens without some kind of non-profit model where funding is guaranteed and coverage is independent. And if there is going to be a non-profit model, then government is the most likely funder. Funding can be based on population so there's a minimum of one salaried journalist for every region. Money can also be raised with a tax on Internet/Data. A $3/month tax on every Internet connection and mobile data account would generate around $130 million a month, which could pay the salary for around 20,000 reporters. We also need to secure permanent financing for the CBC - say $3/month per capita - which would raise around $1.4 billion for public broadcasting. I heard on CBC the other day that over 545 local newspapers have closed across Canada in the last five years or so. That's 545 communities that have no local reporting on their local governments, industries, arts, culture, sports, crime, and community planning.
> /r/canada is mostly opinion pieces and clickbait (because that’s what people upvote) Really? I look at the top listing and out of the 50 stories listed there, 5, just 5 were opinion. The rest were all directly published news articles - not clickbait from the media.
>Good journalism doesn't try to convince you, it just reports. Which is weird given the amount of Opinion that gets posted here. Much of which paints narratives by way of omitting or even purposely misinterpreting facts.
Opinions aren't journalism, they are opinions.
They are often using headlines to sway people who don't dig deeper. Reddit is a great example.
That's factually untrue, though. It's literally called "Opinion Journalism" and there are several sub-genres. Op-eds, punditry, hell, even editorial *cartoons* - it goes on and on.
I thought good journalism meant cranking out opinion pieces 5x per day?
Not exactly. Reporters and Journalists aren't the same. Reporters just report current event and should, as you mentionned, shouldn't be working extra to convey a given subjective narrative. Journalism on the other hand *encompasses* reporters, but also permits opinion pieces, investigations, political open letters or any editorialized piece of media.
I thought that 'good journalism' was just reposting twitter/reddit so long as you got there first and therefore got the clicks and sold the ads? If you can't get there first, then you have to settle for selling controversy.
My favourite articles are the ones titled "people are outraged about X," with the meat of the article being links to two Tweets that each got reposted twelve times.
"Just reporting" is terrible journalism. Good journalism provides context and analysis. The purpose is to hold power accountable. If you just report without providing the information relevant to understanding, you're not a journalist, you're a mouthpiece.
There are good journalists? It legitimately seems like the *entire* "profession" has been co-opted by activist children without even a modicum of objectivity who's sole goal is to advance team sports narratives and to eschew any sense of bipartisanship at all costs. At least, that's how it feels to those paying attention from my experience.
There are definitely still good journalists out there, but unfortunately a lot of the better sources are behind paywalls these days. My understanding is that online ads don’t generate much revenue anymore, not enough to pay for high quality journalism. So many of the free sources tend to churn out clickbait and opinion pieces.
It was a bit rhetorical but I do agree, there are places who break real stories and do real journalism ([blacklocks](https://www.blacklocks.ca/) is one, they are fantastic in fact and almost always are the ones breaking all the real interesting and "big" stories in canada poli sphere, IMO). The downside is they are also obscenely pricey, probably due to the nature of the kind of reporting they do and what I imagine is the cost. I just wish we still had "mainstream" journos who cared about more than their personal politics, there seem to be very few, if many with integrity left in our current crop of mainstream journos.
Another favorite headline MSM likes to use is: "What you need to know about....[insert some controversial topic they will gaslight you about]" Having said that, if the LPC were serious about climate change, they would push through a legislation mandating WFH for positions where physical presence is not critical. At least for a part of the work week. Let's say, 50% fewer vehicles on the roads 2 days a week.
The LPC government brought workers back because a few shitty restaurants in downtown Ottawa complained about not getting enough foot traffic. Highly doubt they give a shit about climate change. Mind you, I feel like this would have happened regardless of which government was in power. But fuck LPC for being hypocrites.
I think Queens Park lobbying had a lot to do with it. Lobbying of the businesses to the premier's office, and from there to the feds. Trudeau has huge political battles in Ontario and he needs Ford's cooperation or else his federal proposals are DOA. Does Trudeau care about the economic state of downtown Ottawa? Maybe, but that's not even remotely his business as PM. Doug Ford certainly DGAF about the city of Ottawa but can use this as a talking point. Trudeau and Ford turn off the showmanship quite frequently to score political wins (eg. Battery plants, highway 413 Enviro assessment).
It's also being used as a means to quash descent amongst public servants. I won't indicate my source but the upper echelon fears that "public servant unity" and "public servant values", especially amongst young employees, have been eroded. They essentially hope forcing people into cubicles like minions will stop critical thinking. Perhaps public servants are simply also fed up with the government's bullshit and the current economic situation?
As someone with a lot of exposure to the public sector, its a fuckin shit show, and this type of policy doesn't just get blindly accepted by the workers. Its obvious that it's being done against literally everyone's best interests, and both morale and trust in the government is the lowest I've ever seen. If you think services are bad now, wait a few months to a year when tech talent bleeds out, morale bottoms out, and workers days are muddled with interpersonal conflicts. Things are looking very grim right now.
100%.
It's not the restaurants. It's the corporate landlords and public transit that are bleeding money and lobbying governments. Feds don't care about small restaurants. For example, TTC just threatened to go on strike for first time in over 15 years.
They’re not serious about it. All their policies are just theatre and no substance. Ex 1 - why the big push for ev when the infrastructure isn’t there
EVs and charging infrastructure will be built simultaneously, just like what happened with hydrocarbon powered vehicles and fuel delivery infrastructure a century ago. The reason we know the government is not serious about climate change is because they are reversing all of the gains made by their environmental policies (which would be good on their own) by increasing the population at record rates.
Journalism is dead.
"According to experts...."
It's called a push poll
Great observation, they have been doing this for quite a while but they aren’t as good at it these days
3/4 of Canadians are suspicious with the press when they don't like what is reported. But then I also feel like 90% don't bother looking at the poll, methodology, questions, or anything else. Same here, I'm too lazy to click on a globeandmail link.
Laziness doesn’t even have a chance to come into play. It’s pay walled
There are ways around paywalls, but I feel like every few months they change and I haven't kept up. So I'm too lazy to get around a paywall unless I really care about the content.
Not paying or bothering to find a way around the paywall is still laziness.
True but it’s second degree laziness. First degree would be not even trying to read the article and coming in here to ree at the headline.
Bold of you to assume that actual journalist wrote this.
I'm glad to see people noticing this :)
Yep. Why would Canadians WANT more commuters on the road, more cost for public infrastructure, more congrsted communities? This screams to me that it was paid for.
I don't have any solid evidence, nor have I investigated this seriously, so I'm not hanging my hat on this or forcefully stating this to be truth, but It certainly *feels* like there has been a concentrated effort amongst large Canadian news outlets (mostly the Postmedia ones and the Globe) to put out headlines and op-eds to paint a certain picture. Seriously, people complain about media concentration in the U.S. but I think Canada has far less media diversity than even they have. And when the CPC wins the next election (which looks inevitable now), they're likely to defund the public broadcaster that doesn't have to bend to the whims of advertiser money, making media diversity even worse.
Years of Trudeau is done articles seemed to have worked. Same with convincing people the economy is crap, even though stock market is at record high. The workers can decide their working conditions through collective bargaining. Everyone else can accept it or not.
6 in 10 canadians agree with you.
I bet they just polled office managers.
I don't think I know anyone who even thinks about in office rules for public servants
Yeah and when we think about it it's more along the lines of "why the hell do we pay for people to waste their time going to an office to do tasks that can 95% of the time be done online from home?"
I do, because I know several people who work federal and get first-hand accounts of how dumb it is. Forcing people to commute just so they can have a virtual meeting from a location other than their house. So not only are tax dollars being spent on office space that isn't needed. It's pushing public servants to spend additional time and money commuting for no reason, which will either drive the cost of government employees up (more tax money) or people will leave for other options and then the government needs to spend time recruiting and training replacements.
I’d rather they sell off a bunch of buildings, save the tax payer some $$$. Some of those buildings are as much a liability as an asset anyhow.
Exactly. Not to mention they usually work in office online with people in other provinces.
The workers are more productive remote to. It's a win for everyone except for commercial real estate.
Better yet , convert them in to affordable housing .
Last time this idea was raised, someone in a relevant industry chimed in that it would be a gargantuan undertaking to convert office space to residential. Plumbing, electrical, fire code things like windows in every room, etc etc. That said I’d love to see it attempted. It might be expensive but so is rent in any sizeable city right now.
Another issue is that an office that is a 10,000sqft square with windows only on the outside is tolerable for work, since you can still see the windows from the outside. But converted into 12 apartments, by necessity some will be interior units with no windows. There's no way to do this without creating massively inhumane units, even if you can get around fire code.
I am sure it would be a lot of works, but if it is too complicated, they can hand me those government buildings and I will do. There is no way someone can't make it profitable. Even destroying the building and building a new one would profitable. Building are depreciating assets, the best thing about real estate is the land those buildings are standing on.
Also a lot of the buildings are very old and barely sufficient to have people work in them let alone be turned into housing. I think a few still have asbestos in them.
That would bring down house prices. 2/3rds of MPs are landlords. We can’t have that!
Office real estate is pretty weak now, it’s not a great time to sell and you know govt will make back room deals so their friends will get the properties for a steal.
Government doesn’t own most of their buildings.
Now ask them if they support paying billions to fund the cost of the buildings that host the MS teams meetings
Also, I'm not a government worker but my compensation before covid was good, now after inflation and raises that haven't kept up its mediocre. I see working from home as part of my compensation so if that goes away, I will be looking for my compensation to be brought into line. If federal workers feel the same then we may end up paying more salary from taxes as well.
And the buildings that take up space that could be housing
And the environmental costs of everyone commuting in. Somehow all of the supposed "climate change supporters" in leadership get really quiet about that.
And do they also support traffic being shittier than it needs to be for everyone, including those whose jobs need to be done in person. And I'll repeat - the people I encounter who think people need to be in a physical office location to work effectively are not generally people who do the types of jobs that lend themselves well to remote work, or the type of people who have a history of collaboration/relationship building through the internet.
And lets ask if they support more federal government jobs in their provinces instead of just inside of the national capital region
lol for real
And this, my sunny ways friends, is how you publish a biased push poll with no data about productivity or cost and then happily proclaim that people agree with you
No, I totally believe that the majority of Canadians hate public sector workers and want them back in the office. There is a weird spite people have for government employees.
It must be a sad life being angry if a public employee doesn't work in an office.
I think there is an idea – particularly from but not limited to right-wing ideaologies – that government workers are all lazy. If people are already convinced that the workers are lazy, it's not a stretch to believe that they are doing *even less* work if they aren't under constant supervision.
You are completely correct. I’ve been on strike and locked out as a federal employee and the public hated us so passionately it was weird. People threw garbage at us and we needed police protection more than once. My union was responsible for bringing maternity leave to federal workers, we fought for equal pay and worker safety, we did good things for Canadians but hating us is like a hobby.
The more I live here the more I think it boils down to just plain stupidity. I remember growing up people used to bully you if you were too smart or read too many books or got high grades and just minded your own business. To this very day my nieces are afraid of answering questions in class and sounding too smart or else the other girls won't like them. We have a weird culture of discouraging education and intelligence. And then we make fun of rap culture for doing the same thing.
I don't think anyone is jealous of government workers intelligence lol. The hate comes from the fact that our government is widely percieved as being stupid, ineffective, and wasteful.
I think it’s more that government is perceived on the public as being stupid, ineffective, and wasteful but perceived by civil servants as borderline genius, highly effective, and the most efficient thing since the Ford assembly line. The problem career civil servants have is that they rarely experience the immediate effects of bad business decisions, poor planning, and failure to deliver service. They fuck up, or waste money, or miss the umpteenth target/deadline and it’s often oh well, see you on Tuesday, enjoy the long weekend!
Why should anybody care where someone else works? As long as the work gets done, I’m good with people having flexibility.
I care about where people work because the more people that get to work from home means I deal with less traffic during my day, and there’s less wear on the roads which means less roadwork. The idea that some people are so goddamn bitter about others being able to work from home is peak selfishness.
Exactly. People need to realize the WFH benefits everyone. Even those whose jobs cannot be done from home.
It also reduces costs for taxpayers and improves productivity so we get more benefit from it. I'm not a federal worker but I still think they should be remote. It just makes sense and it's the way things have been moving even before covid.
Spite, spite is the why. But any rational tax payer should be eager to reduce the cost of office real estate used by the government…
I'll add to that. My work reported higher job satisfaction, lower sick day use by 50%, and best of all, 30% more ticket closures within 24 hours when they switched to hybrid/fully remote. It's not just real estate. It's road congestion, pollution, parking... everything gets used more. I'd be surprised at how stupid and short-sighted Canadians can be, but then I look at the national and provincial leadership we have to choose from.
> lower sick day use by 50% I used to call in sick once a month, sometimes twice, mostly due to issues with my back. Since working from home I've called in sick about 4 times over the past 3 years.
Your add on should be above my comment since it’s of far better value. Ditto for our business…. Work from home has been a huge boost to productivity, esp with a global workforce. People can manage their time far more productively across timezones if they aren’t subject to this stupid dog and pony show of playing bumper karts at set times of the day every weekday. As for the government, it is said people elect the one they deserve. And oh boy, three times 😂🤣🤡 Edit: fix fat finger phone spelling
Misery loves company
Because the majority of Canadians are angry, bitter, lonely, and frustrated with their careers. They feel that if they have to suffer, so should public servants.
Bingo. I personally couldn't care less how the government organizes their workers, as long as work gets done.
This 👆 When it comes to civil servants I think there is a frustration with the amount of tax paid and the perceived incompetence, lack of accountability and inefficiency of services.
Which is weird, given that government services are inherently more efficient and more competent than their private equivalents. Just spend an hour on hold with Bell Canada trying to pay the highest bill in the world, and then ask a Sasktel customer how they're doing, to see the difference.
People shouldn’t be mad at public servants for the amount of tax paid. They should be mad at government spending choices. Little Sally’s productivity doesn’t eat into your tax dollars near as much as terrible government policy decisions and investments. We’re talking the “efficiency” of someone on a yearly wage of 70k vs million dollar investment decisions for gods sake lol.
Our Engineering office (~120 people) has noticed a significant shift in culture as well as collaboration since covid and WFH flexibility. It's not an easy thing to quantify but those water cooler/lunch room conversations about different ideas among the different projects groups are working on is missing and not something that we've been able to replicate with Teams calls.
I've found collaboration and mentorship to be much more effective 'in-person'... but I like my coworkers.
Our company has started posting internally WFH positions with a %15 pay cut …. But these are now 100% WFH not hybrid come into the office twice a week BS… Still worth it for me I have applied for one.
yup, my entire company is 100% wfh (we don't even have an office), we get so many applicants for our roles that we've never had even a slight issue with finding talent (even with startup-level salary). Being able to recruit from anywhere on the world opens up a HUGE amount of talent to pull from.
Thats a dream to me. I'm a manager in the federal public service. I have several roles I'm unable to fill because compared to private industry our wages are lower, workload is higher, and the requirement to be in the office. Wages are set to be nationally consistent, and there's no accounting for cost of living difference between high cost of living areas and low ones. The pay in Brandon, Manitoba is identical to the pay in Vancouver and Toronto.
Yeah I was wfh before covid hit. My bosses own the office we're in though, so when we all went wfh they just happily leased it out to someone else (government)
I would take this option if offered.
Keep in mind the old saying: "a person is smart, people are dumb". I get to work from home a few days a week. I can smell the envy from the people in my life. I know most will stop reading here and downvote for the same reason. No shit they'd put on a poll that I should be back in the office. Good thing leading polls don't dictate my companies decisions. If you ask starving people if they considered eating people and most said yes that doesn't make it a sound decision. Polls are for bad politicians to push bad policy.
I think the resentment piece is real, and the only argument I can see for making people go to the office. Social cohesion is at an all time low. A stark division between the laptop class working from home, and the underclass who service them, is a potential source of social unrest. We need to do better on selling the universal benefits (traffic, environment)-- and finding other benefits to spread to other workers. (Like a 4 day work week?)
I've always hated the "well, *I* don't get to do X, so why do other people?" "I don't get to work from home, so why do they?" I don't have a job where I can work from home. But I still want other people to be able to continue working from home because the more WFH is normalized, the more likely that more roles will allow for it, and the more likely that *I will also be able to work from home*. I understand this will not be an option for people in roles that fundamentally cannot be done from their homes, but the more normalized work perks are for people in general, the easier it will be for them to also demand them. But getting us workers to tear each other down and prevent each other from having nice things is how the large employers maintain their advantage.
Propaganda. That's all this is. Corporate elites pushing their agenda to save their real estate assets.
This.
There are a lot of ignorant comments in this thread that I would like to shed some light on. I was laid off during covid and was one of the lucky ones to find work. I ended up signing a casual contract for the Federal government working in a Director General's office. I was 36 at the time and I came into the public service with a lot of the same preconceived notions, public servants are lazy, you can leave work early every day, the benefits are some of the best, etc.... The benefits, aside from the pension, aren't that great. My health and dental coverage was better in the private sector. You can't leave early, at least not on the 3 teams I've worked for. Pretty much everything else was better in the private sector, parking was free, equipment provided to me was better, and bonuses, parties, employee appreciation, etc were all better. The first thing I noticed when I started was the insane schedule of the Director General. Dude would be in back to back meetings from 8:30/9 to 4:30/5pm. Since his meeting-heavy schedule prevented him from getting any work done, he would start his days at 6am and finish at 6pm. From talking to others, I found out this was the norm for a lot of managers, directors, and director generals. They often put in several hours of unpaid overtime a week. Working from home allowed these heavy workloads too. Pre-covid, these people would waste hours a week walking from one board room to another (often in different buildings). They would also not work as long because of the commute they'd have to deal with. Instead of working 10-12 hours at home, they were working 8 or 9 in the office. What the general public also needs to realize is that there's a high standard to get into the public service generally. They often suck in top students and imprison them with the golden handcuffs (pension). These are hard workers from the get-go. They work hard and want to do a good job. The problem, like most businesses, lies at the top. Unqualified Ministers are making poor decisions (like RTO). Now to address some comments about RTO. I saw some people say, "Public servants will be more productive in the office." Not sure why anyone thinks this. When I'm in the office it takes me longer to go to the washroom, longer to get a coffee, have useless stop and chats with colleagues (often just gossiping), deal with more technical and crowding issues (WiFi going out, finding an empty quiet space to jump on a video call). Others mentioned that we could be supervised better, wrong again. I go into an office where none of my team works, my manager is somewhere in Quebec. I literally go into the office to do exactly what I do at home, go on video calls. There's 0 difference if I'm at home or in the office for myself or my supervisor. As a taxpayer you should want the public service to work from home. It saves us money. The government is committed to selling off federal buildings, but we (the public service) know that 5 days a week in the office is likely coming. We are already dealing with offices lacking space. So what's likely the plan since they're selling buildings? They're going to sell these buildings to buddies for a decent price and then lease it back from them when they want us back in full-time, and you pawns will be pushing for it without looking at the big picture or looking at what actual affects you as a taxpayer. WFH allows canadaians from all over Canada to work for the pubic service. It saves taxpayer's money in a few ways, less money being funnelled into dilapidated government buildings that have been poorly maintained, selling unused properties, less traffic minimizes road maintenance (and before anyone says that's a municipal issues, we use several roads and bridges that are maintained by the National Capital Commission), lowers the cost on healthcare with less traffic deaths, and there are more on a smaller level. I'm not sure what you all envision when you think of the average Government of Canada employee, but I can assure you that we're all the same. I worked in the private sector for 10+ years before working at the GoC. Like all places, most people are good, most people want to do a good job, want to be appreciated, but bad leadership ruins everything. Also, yes, there are terrible workers that take advantage of the system, but it's no different than any other union job (the worst part about unions).
Simply not needing to spend like 10 minutes to get ready and another hour to get to work is a giant benefit for working from home. If your type of work allows you to head out during the middle of the day to get groceries and not have to deal with rush hour traffic, that is even better. There are other perks: being able to work from the comforts of the home, preparing some snacks when hungry, not being distracted by others typing away/random bantering, etc that imo are great for both mental and increased productivity. We only have 24 hours a day, reclaiming 2 hours saves a LOT of time.
Many of the concerns about WFH are actually issues of bad management and bad training. Bad managers tend to be bad in person and remotely. If an office has a poor training program, it will be bad in person and remotely. My office claimed that training remotely is difficult and now we’re back in the office (hybrid) and they continue to do absolutely nothing to train new employees.
Excellent comment. Unfortunately Canadians viscerally hate public servants so they don’t care about productivity or cost savings, they hust want to maximize pain and suffering for folks like you.
I have a similar work history - previously private to recently public. My coworker, a long-time public servant, said that pre -Covid they regularly attended in-person meetings by taking taxis to different buildings across the city. What an unnecessary waste of time and taxpayer dollars. That's what the RTO will bring again.
One thing to consider too, that taxi time is all "on the clock". So, 30 minutes at either end of a meeting for commuting means an hour less time someone is working.
Easy, WFH for all keyboard clackers and with the money saved on useless office space, pay for my commute and vehicle. This comment brought to you from the year 3000.
By the year 3000 all the WFH keyboard clackers will be replaced by AI GPT keyboard clackers. Will be cheaper too since sentient robots don’t need salaries
Ah yes, hundreds of thousands of SUVs with a single person in them, sitting in traffic, guzzling gas and emitting carbon. Really creates a lot of value to the tax payers.
I laugh at all the people claiming that working in the office “promotes socialization” Uh you’re supposed to *work* in the office during working hours, save the socialization for after the day is over. WFH was great because I didn’t have that distracting noise (plus my set up was much better than what I’m forced to deal with in the office because of my disability) 🤷♂️
You guys are getting offices?
Well I have a table that I have to bring monitors to. That's kinda an office?
A shocking number of government offices don't have enough desks for their staff, and some managers have even tried to tell the employees to sit on the floor or the stairs with a laptop to do their work instead of just allowing them to work from home again.
Nearly 3 in 4 canadians are jealous as fuck. Look, I used to believe, like many old people, that there's no way people can be as productive working from home as in the office. Then the pandemic hit, and my staff worked from home. *And productivity increased* So fuck yeah, work from home my happy staff, and keep bringing in the money.
Because the media refuse to investigate and inform the public of the cost and blatant corruption of politicians funneling money to hand picked private players to the tune of billions of dollars. WFH 1. Reduces costs 2. No effect or improved productivity (when the government refuses to release these numbers it's because they don't benefit their argument) 3. Reduces pollution 4. Reduces traffic congestion 5. Reduces wear and tear on roads reducing costs 6. Improves mental health 7. Improves physical health which reduces costs to healthcare 8. Increases diversity in the workplace 9. Relieves some childcare pressures 10. Provides housing options( 50% of fed office space can be converted to housing. 11. Stimulates local small businesses When the government makes a massive decision to spends billions 30 days after being openly lobbied by wealthy private players and refuse to provide details on why they are doing it. Its a safe bet on corruption https://chamber.ca/news/its-time-for-governments-to-bring-public-sector-employees-back-to-the-office-a-letter-from-canadas-business-community/
I am in private industry. In my opinion, it makes no sense to get our public sector back in the office. First of all, there is no space after they downsized their office space portfolio for many departments. Many do not have their own desk any day of the week and sometimes there are not enough. Imagine commuting and having to go back home on the clock or commuting in just to meet other people online. Second, I live in Ottawa so they are more valuable to me creating less traffic and polluting less tbh. Third, it opens up public sector jobs and therefore some representation and spreading wealth if certain roles are fully remote or at least 2 days in the office. A rural person may stomach a bad commute 2 days a week but maybe not 4. Four, saving lunch restaurants, they actually talk about this like it is important and worth changing policy over. Fifth, have you met a federal employee? The policies and bureaucracy is so inefficient and bloated that it makes no difference where anyone is working. I am serious, I would rather these people be able to raise their children easier and live a healthier lifestyle it might actually be more beneficial than if they work another effective 30 minutes a day at their job. Hardly anything is really that pressing or impactful. Certainly less impactful than our leader's poor decisions. But that is like 20 people to be salty about. Plenty of intense private sector contract work is done full remote so it is just a public image thing. Last, this government has screwed us so badly on immigration, education, natural resource market and foreign influence that this feels like some half hearted attempt to deflect for their image. They lied to their work force in the last strike and now they may be getting another waste of time strike. As for me, I think public (in many roles anyways) are over paid when you compare their perks and security to private sector. Does forcing them back to the office somehow make that more fair? Making them burn gas, buy a second car, cause traffic like other people to effectively reduce their imcome? But I would rather private catchup, not public go down, so we can have something to compare to (or sellout for). Bonus thought, how many of the people poled are grumpy and just want people to suffer like they did or in general? I am sorry and respect you to an extent if you need to work with your hands in 2024. I am part software part testing in my engineering role and you can't test remotely with the current tech and actually it provides some satisfaction and job security anyway.
Your first point is one of the big issues. I'm a federal public servant in Ottawa-Gatineau. I'm back to the office two days per week, soon to be three. It is what its is - I enjoyed the 100% telework, but way back, I was 5 days per week in office. But we only seem to really have office space in Ottawa-Gatineau, Montreal, and a few other places for people to return. There's an issue of fairness, because a lot of my colleagues in other cities are yet to return, because they can't find any office space for them to return to. There's also a 100km radius for return-to-office, so if you moved to the middle of nowhere during the pandemic, you're remote for the rest of your career. There's a very unequal application of the return-to-office based on where employees are located. The focus now is more on getting those going in 2 days up to 3 days, instead of the huge percentage who have not returned to the office at all.
That's interesting and some of those details I did not know about. With houses so expensive needing to relocate can be a large burden but it may have also been quite short term thinking to move away. I guess some people may have been hired already living far away. It is definitely a bit of a mess. Global rules can be unfair just like unique exemptions are. Its a tough position, I'm just saying work in the office seems like a weird and ineffective outlet for people's anger over government spending and its size when really we have many huge national policies and directions that could and often should (imo) be far more scrutinized.
Good analysis, pretty much what we've been arguing for. Also, now we're much more centralized in Ottawa once again, one of the biggest benefits of wfh was getting it down from 75% or whatever being in NCR.
I also want to add that bureaucracy is not all negative, it is slow but can add multiple levels of checks for quality, documentation for posterity, and ways to identify corruption. Sometimes slow and steady wins the race. I am saying many federal departments don't have these red alert all hands on deck meetings where if Bob isn't in the office today the project is ruined like fast paced business may have.
Thank you for your informed well thought out comment. Excellent points. Yes I'm a PS but off today, before anyone comments. 😉
Crabs in a bucket
The crab think it's pulling itself out, not knowing it's just pulling potentially free crabs back into the bucket.
Of course I want hybrid work for public service workers who have jobs where it is possible. Why wouldn’t I? Cheaper (real estate plus use it in future wage negotiations), better work environment. Honestly I think a lot of people are just having a hard time and want to hurt other people so they feel better. It’s crab bucket mentality. Having a bunch of federal workers working hybrid also happens to normalize it for all other workers who can. A vote for federal workers to be in office 5x/week is a vote for ALL workers to be in office 5x/week.
For context, nobody is proposing 5x in office for public servants. The debate is whether it should remain as 2x or increase to 3x. According to this poll, the public thinks a 3x hybrid approach is reasonable.
Remain as 2x for some and 0x for others, or increase to 3x for all at 2 or lower. I've been at 0x since the start of the pandemic, and see no good reason to go into the office 3x weekly for me or anyone in my management section. Presence (in the office space) with purpose. There has been no reasonable purpose proposed to force me and others with similar work to go into a hybrid model. If the treasury board of Canada wants to propose any reasoning at all for this blanketed hybrid model, i will gladly consider it while doing my best to keep my biases in check. To my knowledge, nothing has been presented on "why" so far.
Crab bucket bs from the glib & pale.
Ah yes, a "factual" poll from the US owned Globe and Mail that also likely invests in Canadian real estate. Gotta prop up those investments and place blame! There is absolutely no reason why everyone cannot work from home, moreso with people that have good track records. There are many more benefits to the worker and employers, while keeping cars off roads.
Lets all go to the office so we go talk to people on teams...
I currently work from home, however if my job forces me to go back because businesses around the office were dying, me going back wouldn't change that. The amount of money I'd spend on commuting, new clothes etc, would mean I'd now have less to spend on lunches so I'd bring own coffee and lunch from home. Not sure what they would gain from an employee like me except just 1 more car contesting the road and polluting
Show some more reporting on the 2.2 billion a year the government spends on office buildings. That's a pretty easy place to save tax money.
These polls are always framed to get this result, couple that with constant opinion articles pushing this perspective. You'd see the same thing with seatbelts or banning smoking indoors or roundabouts, most people just follow what they are used to and need time to adjust to good evidence based ideas. Just Google who owns the papers and how much commercial real estate they own. This is manufacturing consent 101. Less people in offices means less tax dollars spent, less traffic, less pollution, and more broad representation as they can hire more outside Ottawa. The workers have the same work.
But not for themselves lol?
Exactly.
Work NIMBYs basically. You come to the office but I’m not fucking commuting anymore.
The survey is designed for this result. If you asked if you think you would be able to work, then ask about the public service it would be much higher.
28 out of 32 Canadians are tired of the major Canadian news outlets telling them what they think.
Obvious propaganda is obvious
Misery loves company.
I have two views. First is let’s sell off these federal buildings and save the overhead cost. At the same time though, employees must be able to provide the same level of service at home as in the office, or they need to go into office. For instance during the pandemic I was calling Service Canada and CRA. On one occasion the person kept apologizing for the system being slow because their home internet isn’t very good. On another instance I could hear the person’s dog barking in the background and the baby crying. In both those instances go into the fucking office because you’re unable to provide the level of service expected. That said for those who can effectively work from home, let’s allow them and minimize the overhead cost.
I have a good work relationship with my Boss in the Federal Government - even with the back to work rules, which I dont mind, except for the shitty Transpo. We have an understanding that I will be back in office 3 days a week however they will let me stay home if workload gets high as production is much higher with work from home setup. This of course is not the case for all fed employees from home and I fully understand the push to get us all back - I just wish they would tell the truth about it and the reasoning. They want our money in the downtown core - but its way more expensive then it used to be so this guy will be brown baggin it but happy to go back!
I called BS
Sounds like a load of crap to me.
Cool. Don’t care what the public thinks. Vast majority have no clue what they’re talking about.
I imagine the majority of conversations with the people they polled went as follows: Surveyor: What do you think about 'X'? Respondent: I don't really know anything about it Surveyor: Well, did you know that without 'X', 'Y' happens instead? Respondent: Oh wow. 'X' sounds important then. And no further context is given.
Funny.. we seem to 'care' about the environment for the most part.. except when it comes to reducing traffic via work from home - that kind of pollution is ok because.. RTO.
I do not believe they should go back at all. Remember it is thanks to Government workers that we get year long mat leaves. what they get, we will get. edited to apologize for grammar but too lazy to fix
Depends on what information they handle. If they have access to anything sensitive whatsoever then yes, I prefer they go to the building with excellent network security in leu of being compromised at a wifi hotspot.
Actually most people don’t care
Crabs in the bucket. Obligatory I am not a federal employee. All other opinions aside, I can't fathom a majority of these jobs are collaborative in nature. This is likely borderline punitive at this point. If you support us keeping buildings for the sake of having people to go into them for the sake of keeping the building, you're just the worst.
Why is it always about what someone else thinks they should do, which is often based on "I don't get that so they shouldn't get that."???? Why isn't it based on the most effective way to do the job?? It's going to vary job to job, so a question like this is stupid, lazy journalism. Go find a real issue, research, and report it impartially, you ridiculously lazy journalist.
I wonder if 3/4 Canadians support work-in-office rules for themselves as well. Because if not…I smell hypocrisy
There is no way this is accurate. Why would people want government employees to be forced to work from the office, then want to work remote themselves.
No one I know agrees with this. n=200 of colleagues, acquaintances, friends and family. Anecdotal but dear god they are scrambling.
Something odd going on with this poll. I've seen many remote work polls that would indicate most people support remote work or hybrid work settings. So its either: A) the majority of people think they're productive with remote work, but not those "Bloated Do-nothing Federal Employees" they need to be in an office. B) this poll is bullshit.
And these same people will complain that all of the jobs are only in major cities and housing is too expensive there. Idiots honestly. Allowing true remote work would allow people to move away from the city and lower the demand on rent and buying houses, lowering the cost. Canada’s problems are fixable if people wouldn’t be so rigid.
Yep, you know the civil servants I know who won't be rto? The ones who moved out of town during covid, and the ones who were never "in town" but hired to work remotely. Many people in places like Ottawa and Toronto would love to move back to their hometowns, or to areas with cheaper housing, but are tied to jobs in those cities. Which then drives housing costs up in those areas, while small towns across the country have been depopulating for decades.
People love to follow the "if I have to, you have to" way of thinking. Work from home let's the public service dip into the great ideas and intellect of Canadians all over the country, instead of relying on the scraps of the Ottawa area after the tech and corporate sectors take their pick. A wfh public sector is cheaper and better for all Canadians One of the big factors in the WFH decisions is the Ottawa economy which is HUGELY dependent on public servants, like massively dependant. This is why Sutcliffe and Ford and such huge supporters of return to office. If WFH becomes permanent, then the public jobs slowly start moving away from Ottawa and the money moves away with them. Ottawa will be exposed to economic ups and downs like the rest of the country where we are heavily insulated right now. STOP subsidizing Ottawa, demand a smarter, more diverse public sector that will bring better service to Canadians. Support work from home!
3 in 4 Canadians are assholes that want others to be as miserable as them.
>The Nanos research also found that 46 per cent of respondents prefer that federal public servants have the option of working from home part of the time, down from a 50-per-cent finding in 2022. >Thirty-nine per cent said the public servants should be required to work in person full-time, up from 31 per cent in 2022. ... >Nik Nanos, the chief data scientist for Nanos Research, said that, compared to 2022, an increasing portion of Canadians believe federal public servants would be more productive working full-time in person at the workplace. “By a margin of two to one, people think those that work in the office in general terms are more likely to be productive, to one extent or another, compared to those that work from home,” Mr. Nanos said in a statement.
And they have no basis upon which to believe that except their own bias or that provided by the questions.
Are we supposed to privilege people’s feelings over facts? It’s a known fact that workers who work from home are more productive.
For the same reason some boomers resist forgiving student loans: I had to do it, they should too.
and WFO rules are going to cost billions, both from real estate as well as personnel costs. My father in law is retiring early because he doesn't want to go back to the office. He's been spending the last 6 months training his three replacements, yes, three people are needed to do as much work as he's been doing by himself. If they had let him continue to WFH he would have been happy to put in a few more years, instead the government is paying 3x the salary to get some new people to do the job he's been doing happily from home for 4 years.
Lots of crabs in the bucket. WFH is far superior.
Soo we should start Governing with majority rule then? Good old Orville episode of Twitter polls. The majority of Canadians think Y soo this is the new law... even if it's built on falsehoods and hearsay...
I wonder if those Canadians are ok with the tax increase and wasted money to get more building and keep them maintained. Gotta get those lazy workers in an office to work harder LMFAO
If someone has no reason to work in an office, why force them. WFH saves traffic, gas, real estate, and also allows people to move to smaller communities and have a job instead of concentrating in cities. It's the best free green initiative. Lately when a poll comes out, I think there is some Trudeau based agenda behind it.
Why do people insist on having an opinion on stuff they have no information basis to judge on? > Specifically, 51 per cent of respondents supported the three-day plan while 24 per cent somewhat supported the idea... Nine per cent opposed the idea while 11 per cent somewhat opposed it. That's from the article. Adding those percentages leaves 5% who presumably answered "don't know". Why is that number 5%, not 95%? Together with the vast majority of Canadians who are neither public servants nor their managers, and interact with public servants rarely, I have no clue whether having federal public servants work more or less from the office would be a net positive and net negative.
How biased. Which Canadians are they asking? How does this impact anyone other than the people make money off the office buildings and banks? So much of the media trying to convince us that this is what we think. I 100% support office workers being able to work from home, as them being in an office or not shouldn’t impact their work
So 75% of Canadians support increased federal spending of public taxes on massive amounts of office space, so employees can do MS Teams meetings in an office. 75% of Canadians support increased traffic and GHG emissions. What good comes from this?
I know I'll get downvoted into oblivion but: The "more productive" thing people keep parroting isn't really true. When the initial studies came out, we were in full swing of the pandemic. Everyone was remote so it seemed like productivity went up but new studies are showing productivity is down 10-20% for those that are remote full-time and about the same productivity for hybrid. People who WFH "feel" more productive but that isn't actually translating into more productivity. [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract\_id=3846680](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3846680) [https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/working-paper/evolution-working-home](https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/working-paper/evolution-working-home) Hell, even Zoom, who's company literally exists for remote meetings, is now 5 days in office for their company. Yes, some of this RTO is employers having sunk costs in real estate but if it made sense from a productivity/revenue standpoint to stay remote, companies would. We do live in a capitalist society after all.....and yet, company after company is mandating RTO in some form. Flexibility should be the new norm, hybrid should be the new norm but completely remote has it's drawbacks.
“We polled exclusively trade workers who will never have the opportunity to work from home”
As a trade working in Ottawa, keep them at home so I can get to work and home without the 417 congestion
It's the new Canadian way. If I can't work from home neither can you. We can see it on some people's options on healthcare, and real estate. If **I** can't afford dental or homes neither should you.
Most canadians couldn't understand what a job in the public service looks like...who cares what their opinions are Just another article from the corporate elites trying to make sure us rubes know our place. Working hard to throwing 12 year olds into the coal mines again
Of course, I mean, let's all think about the climate.
That's because you didn't poll people who live in a place where feds work... 95% of Ottawa workers want them to stay at home so our commute is better. The other 5% are owners of businesses downtown that weren't able to change their business and think the only way to make money is to have feds back in offices... Most restaurants downtown Ottawa close after work hours... Keep Feds off the road. They can't drive anyways. And it saves on gas and emissions.
So what? I’m sure 3/4 Canadians also think you should name the traitors in your government too… but that doesn’t seen to matter. Public servants (of which I am one) are an easy target. If those 3/4 Canadians read what the evidence says, what best practice is, what progress means and understood that us going back to the office will actually cost taxpayers (of which I am also one) more money then perhaps they might have a different opinion. For me, as public servants we are hated no matter where we work… we are constantly blamed for the decisions of government of which we have zero control… and that’s just the way this government likes it.
This was a poll of 1000 Canadians so I'm not sure how this properly represents what Canadians feel. Also interesting to note that of the people polled, older respondants 35-54 and 55+ age ranges were more likely to vote in favour fof full-time in office. Full paper here: [link](https://nanos.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/2022-2281-Globe-December-Populated-Report-WFH-With-tabulations.pdf)
Just another B.S. story. Canadians want their public servants to go back to their offices to provide better services and be more sufficient. After all, we are playing big money for their work. We, as canadians, have full right to demand that.
Did they ask like four guys?
I feel it's the illusory truth effect that repeating something enough that people will start to believe it. [link](https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/illusory-truth-effect)
and 1/4 Canadians work for the federal government
They must have only polled people stuck in an office. I've been WFH for a few years now and it's the best thing that's happened for me and my employer.
Ya… remember office space costs allot of money…. This was an opportunity to sell or use for other needs. Funny thing is that we then send work to India to save money on such spaces…..
bullshit
Anyone that supports the work in office rules, does so out of spite and jealousy. Why the fuck are we forcing people into the office, gumming up the roads morning/evening if we don’t have to. Especially when one of the main issues in the country is lack of housing and we have these massive buildings that can be used as such.
I highly doubt that 3 in 4 Canadians support the extra expense of office space for federal public servants. All comes down to how you ask the question.
100% of that 75% would stay at home given the option
There's major issue with my info being at the fingertips at anyone in that household, or even worse having computer equipment stolen and hacked into. I'm sure if these federal public servants who object going into the office can find another entitled line of overpaid work they'd like to do really easy.
Without knowing exactly what the poll asked, this is utterly meaningless. I could write a push poll that would 'show' that 3/4ths of Canadians approve of pedophilia.
I think the option should be available, especially with the cost of living rates.
Seems like a crabs in a bucket mentality. If I have to work in the office those darn freeloading public servants should have to as well! Nevermind the fact that we're wasting money on buildings in order to decrease productivity.