Telecommuting and vacant premises | Ottawa in nothingness

Ottawa does not know how many of its public servants are working from home and has no idea of ​​the occupancy rate of its millions of square meters of office space, more than two and a half years after the start of the pandemic.

Maxime Bergeron
Investigative team, La Presse

“They have lost control, completely,” thunders Conservative Senator Claude Carignan, who has sent two formal requests for information to the federal government in recent months.

The laconic replies received left him speechless. Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) “does not record the proportion or number of federal public servants working from home” and “does not systematically collect data relating to occupancy rates”, can we read in the documents that were provided to it. provided by the government.

“I fell out of my chair,” says Claude Carignan. What employer doesn’t know how many of its employees work from home? And how do you want to exercise your role as an employer and make sure you have an effective service when you have no idea how many of your employees are working from home, when their main function is to provide direct services to citizens , like at passport offices? »

According to the senator, this lack of data is all the more worrying since Ottawa has increased hiring since the start of the pandemic.

The federal government had 319,600 civil servants at the end of 2021, almost 40,000 more than in 2019, according to the most recent data available.

Claude Carignan also reacted to the article published Monday by The Press, which revealed that neither Quebec nor Ottawa have carried out a study or analysis on the productivity of their public servants working from home since the start of the pandemic. “It’s worrying,” he said.

The Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS), which oversees all federal government departments, confirms that it has not compiled aggregate data on the number of public servants teleworking. “This is done at the level of ministries,” spokesman Martin Potvin said by email.

Ministries more diligent than others

The Press has sent requests to most federal departments for this data under the Access to Information Act. Some have responded to us, such as Fisheries and Oceans Canada, indicating that 7,476 of its 15,666 employees have a hybrid work agreement, and that 682 work remotely full-time.

However, it was impossible to have an overview, since several ministries did not respond or sent partial responses to our questions.

Moreover, Ottawa has not decreed a uniform policy regarding the return of its employees to the office.

“Each department and agency is developing its own roadmap,” said the TBS spokesperson.

Data on the number of square meters of occupied offices – or not – are also collected “at the level of the ministries”, indicates Martin Potvin. “What we can tell you is that all departments have increased the occupancy rate of their respective workplaces since the spring and that more and more core public administration officials are now regularly going to their offices. »

Too short an answer in the eyes of Nicolas Gagnon, director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation for Quebec. He considers it “outrageous” that the federal government ignores the number of its civil servants teleworking and the quantity of its premises left vacant. He calls for “a cleaning up” in the government workforce, as public deficits widen and a recession looms on the horizon.