Five years ago, the pandemic forced millions of people to work from home. Overnight, our offices collapsed into our kitchen tables. By April of 2020, about 40 per cent of Canadians were working primarily from their homes. When schools started reopening in September, parents could pick their kids up from school and still clock in for their last meeting of the day. People could take the dog for a walk between calls. Digital nomads could log on from halfway across the world, as long as they had half-decent Wi-Fi. CEOs, managers and interns were all in the same boat, often working four feet from where their families were making breakfast. It was a strange and stressful time, but it also decisively proved that office workers didn’t really need to be in the office.

By November of 2023, the share of Canadians working primarily from home had dropped to about 20 per cent. From 2023 through early 2025, the average person worked from home just once per week. Now, employers are looking to reset work culture all over again with mass return-to-office mandates. Companies like Google and Dell are still improvising the details of their RTO pushes as they go: shifting recommended office days into required ones, changing rules with just days of notice, or announcing attendance policies that differ from team to team. In Ottawa, federal public servants were ordered back into the office three days a week, a decision that the workers’ union called purely political. The union head called for an investigation into the move, saying there was a complete unwillingness from the government to provide any data or backing for the decision.

Publicly, companies frame the shift away from remote work as a decision motivated by productivity. When RBC announced in 2023 that employees had to return to the office at least three days a week, CEO Dave McKay cited productivity as the main reason. When Apple CEO Tim Cook........

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