From two compulsory days since March 2023, we went to three. For the executives we are moving forward with four. From September 9.
The news, revealed by The right Monday, then confirmed by the Treasury Board on Wednesday, fell like a bomb, triggering loud cries from Public service unions.
Rightly, they protest against the government’s lack Of transparency in this matter. Usually, we consult for a lot less. There, no one was warned, no prior discussion on the effectiveness of the current operation and the need to change the formula took place.
Officials reacted strongly to the return two days a week last year. It was written in the sky that adding a third day would go badly.
We have seen better strategies than silence then the blow of the hammer, to create support.
In the middle of this mess of grievances expressed from all sides, including threats of prosecution from the Public Service Alliance, important with its 70,000 members, elephants have invited themselves into the room.
Themes that should be talked about but that no one dares to talk too much about: the number of civil servants who don’t want to return another day to the office because, for a plethora of reasons, they don’t love their job, the quantity of managers who have no more desire than their troops to return to the office and the real productivity of the civil service since the start of confinement in 2020.
Heard in Ottawa-Gatineau several times in recent days: if the government is making this decision it is because there has been a real drop in productivity, even if no study seems to have been done to demonstrate this.
However, to say so would be to admit that for four years, the machine has not been operating at full capacity.
We can hear the screams from here – of joy or of anger? a mix? — from the opposition. And the smile of Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, in the face of an admission of state inefficiency would probably be wide enough to cross the Ottawa River.
The federal government is caught in its own trap.
If the minister responsible for the Treasury Board and the public service granted interviews, we could ask her these questions and allow her to explain herself. Unfortunately, radio silence from Anita Anand.
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Is it a good thing to spend more time at the office? There is no answer to this question because the public service is far too huge a machine to be able to declare that one way of doing things is better than another.
It’s both very simple and very complicated: some positions require real team presence and others do not. Some civil servants function much better when they are around their colleagues. Others are more productive when they are isolated, at home. What are the proportions of these groups? And all the variations? There is the question.
We can also say that the hours spent traveling to the office and then home constitute a significant amount of time rendered useless. But it would be naive to believe that civil servants at home do not take another non-negligible amount of time, during their paid day, for non-professional activities.
To know where to stay, we need precise studies drawing typical portraits of everyone’s schedules. According to the ministries, according to the types of employment. Depending on each individual’s circumstances.
However, we search in vain for such information.
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Relatively little time has passed since a real return to normal in our daily lives, post-pandemic. It is normal that we still ask ourselves questions about how to organize the rest of things. It is completely acceptable to take another moment to reflect in depth on the real needs of the public service and Canadians. Let’s get rid of the partisanship from all this!
The economic vitality of our city centers should not be part of the decision.
The towers filled during the day and empty at night, where workers are roped into their cubicles, do not have to be refilled. Let’s think about quality of life at work. There is surely a link between that and the desire, or not, to return “to the office”.
Let’s talk honestly about these issues. Of those who are freeloaders, of those who have been saved by teleworking. Let’s talk about the needs of the public served by public servants.
Let us manage without fear, with transparency.
We can say that presence in the office must increase, that no one is fooled by the laxity that the confinements have surely allowed, without imposing a cookie-cutter solution like the one announced this week.
