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The federal public service has been turned on its ear. The latest jolt is Prime Minister Carney’s signal that a full return to the office is on the way. Already public servants are staring down the largest downsizing in more than a decade and are under pressure to deliver faster. A five-day RTO is something they have flat-out resisted since the pandemic.

The plan was leaked on Reddit with a screenshot of a Treasury Board Secretariat memo showing a phased return: executives back five days by January, everyone else moving to four days next July, then five by January 2027. (Now, most spend at least three days in the office and executives go for four days).

Some senior officials say that’s the plan they expect to be announced in the new year.

Just take that in. Remember “hybrid is here to stay”? Seems not. 

But all Carney told Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe during an armchair chat this week about getting back to the office is that “different levels of return” will depend on seniority, roles, and departmental capacity. 

That raises questions, says political scientist Lori Turnbull. Does he actually want everyone back five days? Or is it code for: senior people in strategic roles must be in the office?

“Maybe he’s saying, ‘if you’re senior and part of the strategic decisions, I need you here. You come every day.’ The rest? Maybe not. But that would take significant curation and management at a time when they’re whacking people,” said Turnbull (pictured below). Turnbull is a professor at Dalhousie University’s faculty of management and a senior advisor at the Institute on Governance. 

So, let’s dig into an issue that has shaken the federal employer-employee relationship, labour relations, and trust in government more than anything in decades. It shows no sign of letting up.

Today:

“Five days? That’s enough”: There will be people who won’t come back.

Check your jacket, check your shoes: Carney’s a guy who likes the office.

Why five days?: Will it help execution? Carney should say.  

But where’s my desk?: Office basics still in short supply.

LABOUR
A century-level disruption
The shift to remote and then hybrid work is the biggest disruption in the federal employer-employee relationship in more than a century. Some say it was as seismic as the move from patronage hiring to merit-based hiring and promotions. For the first time, employees had real flexibility, controlling their time and space, how and where they do their work.

Government efforts to take that back sparked the biggest fracture between Treasury Board and employees in decades.

It became the next frontier for labour rights, with a fight over the rights of management vs. the rights of employees.

It escalated to a national strike in 2023, it strained services, hollowed out downtown Ottawa businesses and divided Canadians, many of whom already feel public servants enjoy better working conditions than most. In May 2024, the public-service unions promised a “summer of discontent,” hoping to position their fight for remote work as a fight for all Canadian workers.

From April 26, 2023: Public Service Alliance of Canada striking government workers protest on Parliament Hill, in Ottawa, THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

A couple of half-hearted attempts have been made to get people back to the office. But this time the government is serious, some insiders say. What it actually looks like is still a mystery.

“The downsizing made it a logical time.” Carney hasn’t said much about the public service beyond wanting it smaller and to move faster. But he has promised that unions will be consulted about the “modalities” and “appropriate levels” of returning to the office over the coming weeks. It’s not going to be negotiated, however.

“I’m a huge fan of the public service,” Carney told Sutcliffe. “We need the public service at this critical time, and we need public servants to have all the tools, including offices and workspaces, that make their jobs as interesting, as impactful, as possible.”

A full-time return has been in the works for a while, senior bureaucrats say. “The government has been watching major employers, public and private, bring staff back to the office, and the downsizing made it a logical time for a federal return,” said one.

THE SOFT STRATEGY
“It wasn’t intended as a motivator, but …”
There’s still no sign of a real plan to back any of this up. No roadmap for talks with unions, no HR or office-accommodation strategies to manage space.

Treasury Board president Shafqat Ali – the employer – said he knew nothing about the proposal before it leaked. Days later, his boss was telling Ottawa’s mayor a plan is on its way. And then Liberal MPs from the national capital region were in the wings saying they hope managers will be flexible because not all jobs need to be done in the office.

All this is landing right in the middle of a major downsizing – and that timing is impossible to ignore. The Carney government is also entering its first round of bargaining, and remote work is sitting alongside pay and pensions as a top union priority, says PIPSC president Sean O’Reilly.

Job security is the only issue that could rival it, with unions pushing for stronger protections under the Workforce Adjustment Directive. (WFA explainer here.) Cuts of 40,000 jobs, uncertainty, and a five-day return make for a volatile mix.

And it’s widely acknowledged the combination could push people to leave. Some will simply decide they’re done. It could also make recruitment and retention even harder in AI and tech – specialized fields where the public service already struggles to compete.

“We all know there will be people who won’t come back to the office and will take a package and go,” one official said. “It wasn’t intended as a motivator, but there’s a sense some are thinking: ‘Five days? That’s enough.’”

And there’s precedent. RTO mandates – especially in finance and tech – are sometimes used as downsizing tools. Its the “soft layoff strategy”: call people back knowing some will quit rather than comply. Amazon, Dell, Goldman Sachs have all done it.

They tried: Amazon corporate workers in Seattle staged a walkout in May 2023 to protest the company's return-to-office policies (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

The unions have fought to rescind every RTO mandate. They have used grievances, complaints and legal challenges – and they will again.

PSAC has warned Treasury Board it can’t alter the mandate mid-bargaining, arguing that doing so violates the statutory freeze on working conditions that kicks in when bargaining begins. Treasury Board has always maintained that it’s management’s right to decide where employees work.

The union is still waiting on a grievance it filed in 2023 over the three-day RTO mandate and its violation of the freeze. It is still before the courts.

THE CARNEY WAY

Punctuality, British spelling and black shoes
Carney has never explicitly pushed for a return to the office. But bureaucrats say his buttoned-down, traditional style leans toward in-person work. He’s demanding. He values discipline, order, and punctuality over the more casual and relaxed rhythm of hybrid schedules.

Carney “cares deeply about professionalism,” according to the National Post. He has insisted that internal documents use British spelling. Formal business attire is expected. Men in the PMO are told to wear black shoes. (A London “rule” that still holds sway.)

That’s a guy who clearly likes the office.

Also, he and PCO clerk Michael Sabia have been steering the public service toward a new ethos around speed, accountability and risk-taking.

Some say Carney has been lining up his ducks – putting his priorities in place – and now he’s turning to the public service, the workforce he needs to execute and deliver them.

For Carney, where public servants work isn’t about culture, morale, or union battles – it’s about driving delivery.

“He is all about delivery and execution,” said one senior bureaucrat. “This isn’t about employer-employee relationships. It’s about how the government best delivers on what he thinks it should be doing. Where your employees work is a functional lever to pull.”

Which brings us back to Turnbull – who has given a lot of thought to how Carney wants the public service to work.

THE RTO DEBATE
“We’ve lost sight of the bigger question”
Carney and Sabia are like-minded, she argues, and they haven’t given a lot of thought to the cultural shift in the public service since remote work. They also haven’t given the public service a plan for how it’s supposed to deliver the government’s priorities – or how they expect it to move faster.

The public service went through a major cultural shift since the pandemic sent thousands of office workers home, Turnbull said. At first, people assumed they’d be back. But as time went on, they realized they could do their jobs from home. The burden shifted to the government, as employer, to explain why they needed to be in the office at all. This issue is at the centre of a court case against RTO.

That shift was cemented by the Trudeau-era hiring surge of younger workers, who care far more about the value of their work than office presence.

Former clerk John Hannford worried about this. How do you maintain the vocation of public service — and the transfer of an institution’s values, ethics, and knowledge – when no one is in the office?

Sabia, meanwhile, is acting much more like a prime minister’s clerk than the public service’s clerk. He’s not talking about vocation. He wants a faster, more risk-tolerant, more accountable, more streamlined public service.

“I think the very existence of the public service was always going to be a challenge for Mark Carney and Michael Sabia,” said Turnbull. “They aren’t process people or operations people. They’re idea and visionary people. It would be helpful if they had a reform plan that spelled out what they want – and took some responsibility for getting it done.”

She worries that the public service’s role and its needed reforms are being overshadowed by the fight over the number of days in the office.

“We’ve lost sight of the bigger question: what do we want the public service to do? Debates over flexibility – who gets it, how work-from-home is staggered — should come after that. Instead, RTO has become a story about worker rights, which is fair, but it has to fit into a broader conversation about the organization and how it serves the government’s goals.”

Turnbull argues there’s still no explanation for why five days matters. If it’s about execution, the obvious question is: how does five days in the office help the public service execute any better?

“I don’t know what the strategic connection is between a back-to-the-office plan and the overall direction of the government – what it wants the public service to do,” she said.

“If (Carney’s) saying return-to-office is strategically linked to execution – that bringing people in five days a week is how we’re going to get things done – then fine,” Turnbull said. “But if he’s not saying that, I’m not sure how this makes any difference.”

In fact, it could make things worse.

Still not enough desks. Nearly 47 per cent of Canada’s public servants are based in the National Capital Region. But many of the office buildings in the region aren’t ready for a full influx of government workers, says Shawn Hamilton, a long‑time Ottawa real-estate executive.

Hamilton (pictured below) works with Proveras Commercial Realty and has spent years tracking the ups-and-downs of the federal office market. He says many of the buildings in the region lack space and have too few desks for a workforce of this size. 

Some buildings “are frankly awful,” he says. “Of course, people push back if the workplace is a grind.”

Buildings are coming back on the market and leases are being undone, he says. “They need a real strategy before bringing people back.”

But former clerk Michael Wernick warns the government can’t afford to alienate its workforce. It has too big an agenda – from defence procurement to housing. “They can’t be fighting their public servants while trying to deliver all they’ve set out to do.”

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A bit about me. I write The Functionary as part of my work covering and analyzing the federal public service for Policy Options, where I am the Accenture Fellow on the Future of the Public Service. I've been reporting on the public service for more than two decades, covering parliamentary affairs and politics for the Ottawa Citizen and iPolitics. My work has been recognized with a National Newspaper Award and a Canadian Online Publishing Award. 

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