Aug. 27, 2026    |  Sign up + past editions    |    Unsubscribe  

Hi all, 

The real showdown over the return-to-office mandate is coming in a couple weeks, when holidays are over, schools are back and the number of public servants at the office four days a week swells into the thousands.

PSAC has spent the summer mobilizing them. It’s gearing up for a strike vote this fall over wages, job security, remote work and protections around AI and surveillance.

Let’s take remote work and wages. Workers have begun to attach a monetary value to remote work. They see it as part of total compensation. With the Carney government’s RTO-4 policy, the days that workers once spent working from home now translate into real out-of-pocket dollars.

And for many, it’s the equivalent of a 10-per-cent pay cut.

And then there’s the history. Hard to believe now, but 30 years ago the roles were reversed: the government liked the idea of remote work. Unions not so much. Now, the unions are fighting to enshrine it in contracts and the government is trying to put limits on it. 

Let’s dig in.

Today:
A “female-dominated ghetto”: PSAC’s fear in 1994.

Beyond the home: Studying the broader implications. 
Oh, the days when…: Government liked remote work.
ISED’s “tunnel vision”: The case of a worker with PTSD.
All those AI gains: But who reaps the benefit?

THE PRICE OF RTO
Did I just get docked 10 per cent?

Across the country, RTO has a patchwork of rules. In some provinces, it’s three days. In others, it’s four or five, and governments have never really explained the rationale for any of them. But those differences matter.

Remote work has changed the employment bargain. Now unions are trying to get it written into the contract permanently so management can’t take it away arbitrarily or without explanation.

Public servants have plenty of familiar reasons to push back against returning to the office: more flexibility, more control, better management of home and work life, less commuting, no parking costs, cheaper lunches at home.

The trickle-down effect. Remote work also has broader implications. The need for less office space would have saved taxpayers some money. Fewer would people need daily public transit. Emissions would drop with fewer drivers on the road every day. Caregiving, accessibility, gender equality: it's all affected by remote work.

Researchers at the Institute on Research for Public Policy are examining the bigger picture around RTO mandates and how they can particularly affect women and equity-seeking groups.

Workers clearly value remote work as a non-monetary benefit, says IRPP senior research director Shaimaa Yassin.

Shaimaa Yassin

A hiring experiment in the U.S. found that employees would accept eight-per-cent less pay to work from home.

As someone close to contract talks negotiations said: “People generally assume remote work is worth about 10 per cent of their salary. So, eliminate it, they feel like they’re getting poorer.”

Wages are the traditional backbone of the employment contract. Treasury Board’s opening offer is a 3.5-per-cent raise over four years, well below inflation:

• 2.0 per cent in 2025
• 0.5 per cent in 2026
• 0.5 per cent in 2027
• 0.5 per cent in 2028

That is galvanizing workers who no longer see remote work as a side issue. It’s part of the wage fight driving PSAC toward a strike vote this fall, with the union seeking 4.75 per cent a year for the next three years.

No trading allowed. Promise? Union demands are typically sorted into categories: wages in one, non-monetary asks in another. RTO would be in the latter. But not this round. Workers are looking at a low wage offer and an RTO mandate that feels like it’s chipping away at their salary. Increasingly they see both as part of their compensation package.

Over the summer, PSAC members have grilled the union at town halls, demanding assurances that union leaders won’t trade away remote work for a wage deal or vice versa.

“That’s a terrible rumour,” one official said at a July meeting. “The team is not willing to take remote work over wages or wages over remote work. That is absolutely not a discussion ... any of the bargaining teams are even thinking about entertaining. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.”

The other side of the paycheque. This round also comes as the public-service wage bill hits a historic $73 billion and is on track to reach $86 billion by 2030-31, even as the government cuts 40,000 jobs and squeezes operating budgets. The fastest-growing slice of the compensation pie is health, dental and disability insurance, as we wrote about here. It is a very different backdrop from 2023: a majority government preoccupied with spending restraint, job cuts and a trade war with the U.S.  

So there the two sides stand: at loggerheads. Mediation is scheduled for late September.

It usually takes a few months to get to legal strike position. Normally, the Public Interest Commission (PIC) process has to be worked through when the parties hit an impasse. But the labour board let PSAC skip it for PA, EB, TC and CRA workers. It’s a rare move that means a strike vote could come a lot sooner than expected.

TELEWORK IN 1994

Fears of a “female-dominated ghetto”

PSAC’s worries about remote work go back to 1994, when Treasury Board ran its first telework pilot. PSAC sounded the alarm then. The government pitched it as a flexible way to work, improving work-life balance, productivity and reducing costs.

Ottawa Citizen, April 21, 1994

At that year’s union convention, a policy paper warned that working from home could turn into a “female-dominated ghetto.”

PSAC warned the reality would be longer hours and a “triple day”: paid work, child care and housework, all under one roof.

The fear was that remote work could isolate workers from colleagues and from their union, and open the door to piecework, contracting out. It pointed to other countries where telework meant closed offices and lower wages.

Ah, 1999, those were still the days. By '99, the government was still making the case for telework when few public servants were asking for it. TBS's first policy:

By 2020, the directive was explicitly talking about reducing stress, supporting work-life balance and inclusion, creating healthy workplaces and reducing transportation emissions.

Then the pandemic changed everything. The pandemic forced public servants home for their health and safety, giving them a taste of the flexibility and control the government had once said telework could deliver. They liked what they experienced. Then, as the health crisis receded, the government began sending them back to the office.

It took three decades, but the pandemic flipped the argument. Unions began fighting to protect the very thing they once warned against.

But PSAC argues today — like it did back in 1994, when it was waving the red flags — that telework shouldn’t be left to management to decide. It should be negotiated and enshrined in the collective agreement. However, recognizing the benefits of remote work and having a right to it are two different things.

Unions took a lot of heat in 2023 for not getting remote-work rights enshrined in the collective agreement when they signed a letter of agreement to end their strike that year.

But the unions believed they and Treasury Board were on the same page, several labour officials have explained. Hybrid work was here to stay, and they were simply polishing the language to reflect that new reality. No sooner was that deal signed than the cracks in that understanding began to appear.

The language changed. The latest directive in 2025 went from making the case for why telework was good for the public service to simply laying out the rules for when managers could allow it, and left it at that. Now, after public servants have come to value remote work, the government is sending them back to the office with less flexibility than before the pandemic.

Just goes to show: telework has always been about money and power.

The four-day return-to-office was supposed to settle the remote-work question.

But the battle has moved to new fronts: grievances, human-rights cases and legal challenges. No big wins so far, but small ones that together could quietly nudge where you work closer to becoming part of the employment contract.

In the last bargaining round, PSAC focused largely on protecting access to telework through the 2023 letter of agreement. It required case-by-case consideration and written reasons, but said telework was voluntary, required mutual agreement and was not an entitlement.

This time, PSAC isn’t fighting to give everyone a right to work from home. Management can still decide where people work, but the union wants stronger rules around how it exercises that discretion. It’s demanding case-by-case consideration, a 28-day response deadline, detailed written reasons for denials and no arbitrary group caps.

Management’s discretion to decide who can work remotely is now being tested beyond the bargaining table. That’s why a recent labour tribunal ruling over a discrimination complaint is significant. 

DUTY TO ACCOMMODATE
The case of the computer engineer

A federal computer engineer with PTSD had worked from home for nearly four years and been promoted twice. When Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) ordered him back, his medical specialists warned the change could trigger a relapse.

The department stuck to its guns, offering a quieter cubicle, noise-cancelling headphones and less busy office days.

The board found ISED had applied the RTO policy with “tunnel vision.” It ordered ISED to pay the engineer $28,000 in damages for pain and suffering and reckless conduct, and it ordered the department to let him work remotely for two more years.

Most importantly, the ruling drove home that “the duty to accommodate trumps the return-to-office order, not the other way around.”

It doesn’t create a general right to work from home. But when a disability creates a barrier to working in the office and telework is the accommodation needed to address it, RTO cannot simply override that duty.

“ISED repeatedly treated telework as a last resort instead of one of many possible accommodation measures in an appropriate case, concluded the ruling.”

The ruling pre-dated four-day RTO, but unions say a big concern is that the mandate has brought a new rigidity to accommodation. Arrangements once handled flexibly may now face a much tougher review. They will be watching.

The ruling also matters because nearly 60 per cent of federal disability claims are now for mental-health conditions, with cancer a distant second. Women account for nearly 75 per cent of approved mental health claims though they make up about 57 per cent of the public service.

And then there’s AI. Bigger questions have begun to loom with AI. Public servants are starting to question what happens to the gains reaped from doing more with less. Bureaucrat Jacob Beaulieu recently wrote about the “time dividend” that previous waves of technology brought: Productivity increased output. But it also led to the advent of the weekend, paid vacation and the eight-hour day. People got more time, not just more work. It was a societal shift.

We’re at one of those junctures. When does a change in how work gets done become part of the employment contract?

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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 reported 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.