Teleworkers are becoming fewer and fewer in number in Canada, but they are increasingly remote.
The number of Canadians working from home is declining. The proportion of employees who usually worked most of their hours from home has fallen from 21.5% in June 2022 to 15.1% last month, Statistics Canada reported two weeks ago.
This decline is not observed everywhere, however. It is mainly due to teleworkers whose home is in the same city or, at least, close enough to their workplace to make the daily commute.
The others, whose residence is in a completely different region from that of their employer, have seen their numbers remain stable and even increase. Their relative weight has therefore increased, going from 17.2% of all teleworkers in Canada two years ago to almost a quarter (24.2%) today.
Most of these remote teleworkers live in the same province, it was found The duty based on data provided by Statistics Canada. This was the case for more than 377,000 people last month, or almost 14% of all teleworkers, compared to less than 10% in 2022. More than 167,000 people worked from another Canadian province, or the equivalent of 6.2% of all teleworkers. This proportion was 5% two years ago.
And then there are those who work from even further away. That is, from another country. Last month, Canadian employers had a total of 112,000 of these types of employees, or just over 4% of all Canadian teleworkers. In 2022, this phenomenon affected just over 84,000 Canadians, representing 2.3% of all teleworkers.
In addition to self-employed workers who may interact with clients located in other countries, Canadians who are employed and work from home can also indicate that their place of work is located in another country, provided their employer hires them through a Canadian subsidiary, Statistics Canada explained two years ago.
The (small) size of the subgroups involved and the poor quality of the data prevent us from having the same figures for Quebec, the federal agency responded by email to DutyWhat we can say about it is that the number of teleworkers has also decreased over the past two years, with the total number of those working nearby having fallen from approximately 793,000 to 480,000, while those who are located elsewhere in Quebec (83,000) or who work from another province (a little over 30,000) have remained just as numerous.
The pandemic effect
After a long period of stagnation, the use of telework has surged, in Canada and elsewhere, with the COVID-19 pandemic. According to one of the measures used by Statistics Canada, the proportion of Canadians who work the majority of their hours from home has jumped in the space of just a few months, going from 7.2% to more than 40% in April 2020.
This proportion then varied as the pandemic evolved — even briefly rising to 43% at the start of 2022 — before gradually starting to decline for good, in favour of a return to the workplace and hybrid formulas.
For many, this episode was a revelation of the possibility for employers to expand their labour pool and for workers to apply for more jobs than previously thought possible, Statistics Canada observed in a 2022 study.
But not all workers are equal in this regard, the Institut de la statistique du Québec noted in another study earlier this year. In 2022, women, workers aged 25 to 54 and people with a university education were more likely than others to work remotely. This was particularly true for those with professional and managerial jobs in sectors such as finance, professional services and public administration, and who enjoyed high compensation.