Employers reminded of legal obligations, best practice in requiring people return to office
Amid the Ontario government’s bid to bring workers back to the office full-time starting January 2026, stakeholders are raising questions about the government’s readiness to undertake such a task.
Premier Doug Ford has given a directive that public service employees must increase their in-office attendance to four days per week as of last week and transition to full-time in-office hours by January 2026.
However, unions say the government does not have the infrastructure or processes in place to support such a move.
Dave Bulmer, president of AMAPCEO—which represents 17,000 professional, administrative, and supervisory employees in the Ontario public service—claims that ministries and agencies across the province are struggling to accommodate the influx of workers, with some locations missing “entire floors worth of space,” according to a CBC report.
“There’s had to have been a lot of ad hoc arrangements being made by local managers and directors, because they just don’t have the space to accommodate people,” he said. “So, things are not going exactly to plan.”
Ontario Health, for one, “does not have sufficient space to accommodate employees” and is “having to temporarily resort to desk-sharing assignments as they transition back to five days a week in-office,” according to AMAPCEO.
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