The home of the federal government leads all Canadian cities in the proportion of workers toiling mostly from home, new data from Statistics Canada indicates.
Over one-third of all people in the Ottawa-Gatineau workforce are working mostly from home, putting it well ahead of 14 other municipal areas surveyed in the data from May 2024.
The number of federal employees in the Ottawa-Gatineau capital region working mostly from home will likely decline starting on Sept. 9, as the government has announced that date as the start of a new protocol ordering “core public administration who are eligible for a hybrid work arrangement” to work three days in the office per week, while executives will be required to work at least four days from the office.
The Ottawa-Gatineau area was home to approximately 135,000 public service employees in 2021 but that total has risen to 155,000 this year. Toronto, a city that is both Canada’s largest and also home of over 40,000 provincial government employees, has 24.7% of employees mostly teleworking.
The working-from-home trend has contributed to a record-high vacancy rate in Canada’s office sector. At the start of this year, CoStar News reported that Canada's downtown office vacancy rate hit a record high of 19.4% in the fourth quarter of 2023.
The working from home trend has affected Canada's largest city, with Toronto seeing its total rise to 17.4% from 15.8% from the third quarter to the fourth quarter of 2023. Toronto also has the most office properties to fill, including First Canadian Place, Canada's largest office structure.
In Montreal, Canada’s second-largest city, that rate sits at 20.6%, while 22.4% of workers work mostly from home in Vancouver, Canada's third-largest city.
The percentage of Canadians in the workforce who are working mostly from home has been on the decline since May 2021, but it still stands at 24.3% of all workers. The percentage is also over triple the rate of May 2016 when it was 7.1%, according to Statistics Canada.
The share of employed people working from home has dipped in most of the country over the past year. The portion of workers toiling mostly from home dropped 3.8% to reach 18.4% in the province of Quebec between May 2023 and May 2024, while other provinces saw lower rates of decline, including Ontario that saw a 1.4% drop to its current 21.7% percent, the highest rate of teleworking of any province. Saskatchewan had the lowest rate of working from home, with only 10.1% of employees working mostly from home.