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Please, public servants, resist the return to the office | Opinion

Brigitte Pellerin: There is no reason to force people to get downtown, especially when OC Transpo is so unreliable.

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No responsible journalist should encourage civil disobedience but in the case of this colossally stupid and arbitrarily idiotic return to office mandate for the public service, I am going to make an exception. Don’t RTO, at least not until we have a fully functioning public transit system.

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The federal government, defying the immutable laws of common sense, has decided to frogmarch public servants back to their cubicles four days a week as of July. I should say “frog-crawl,” since there is no way people will get downtown in reasonable time, what with cancelled buses and sad, pathetic single-car LRT trains. And not enough parking downtown to accommodate thousands more vehicles every day, assuming they get there despite construction traffic everywhere. Oh, and there’s not enough desks to march everyone back to since many offices were rearranged during the pandemic because of remote work.

People will waste upwards of two hours a day commuting in order to do the same job they’ve been doing remotely without problems for years, just so the employer can say it’s exercising its right to enforce large-scale misery. It’s so dumb I can’t believe we have to keep pointing it out.

And for what? What exactly is the purpose of this mandate? What problem is it the solution to? And it’s not just for the thousands of public servants directly concerned. It’s also for the small army of people in Ottawa who work in national associations and various non-profit organizations whose bosses reflexively follow what the federal public service is doing. Stop it! Let people do their best work wherever makes sense to them.

Yes, some people prefer working in the office. These people are already at the office and I’m genuinely happy for them. Many public servants work in jobs where physical presence is required. They’re also already where they need to be. At this point, those who are still working remotely do so because they really don’t want to go back to the office.

You can tell this idiotic RTO mandate is a real problem because it has prompted my friend Bruce Fanjoy, Liberal MP for Carleton (a riding that includes Stittsville, Riverside South and Manotick, where many federal public servants live) to issue a declaration against his own government.

He is asking for it to reconsider, for three reasons: 1) it will make it harder to reduce the operating cost of government and it won’t do anything for affordability or the environment; 2) there is little evidence that such a mandate will improve productivity or service to Canadians; and 3) it makes it harder for public servants to balance work with their other responsibilities.

Let me pause here for a minute to note that when we talk about balancing work with other responsibilities, this affects women more than men even if it’s less pronounced than in previous decades. Regardless of gender, should we not allow people the flexibility to balance all aspects of their lives if we can show that they are doing their job?

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Oh, and as a fun aside, an article in the New York Times earlier this month showed how remote work helps juice fertility as people feel the hours they save by not commuting to work allow them more flexibility to fulfil their parenting duties. A study from Stanford University says that when “both parents move from full time in the office to working at home at least one day a week, they will average about 0.5 extra children,” and that COVID-induced remote work contributed to roughly 290,000 more children a year born in the United States.

There is no reason to force people to get downtown, especially when we don’t have a reliable transit system, and plenty of reasons to allow flexible, hybrid models that work for people. Please, public servants, resist this RTO.

Brigitte Pellerin (they/them) is an Ottawa writer.

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