Feds Could Shed Thousands Of Ottawa Jobs: STANKOVIC

Looking back at all the office space and work announcements made by the Treasury Board from the COVID pandemic, it’s confusing.

Some of this confusion comes from the recent shift in policy over the future of remote work and the return to the office (RTO).

The Treasury Board Secretariat mandated that, starting on Sept. 9, civil servants had to return to the office for a minimum of three days and potentially four days each week. Previously, the RTO requirement was two days week. Yet, in May 2022, when TBS was undertaking an internal review of RTO options, the recommendation then was to go with a “Flexible First” approach without “prescribed office parameters” which would provide an “opportunity to build diverse and geographically distributed talent pools (hire the best talent where it is)” as well as the “potential for the largest real property (office) reductions resulting in higher potential net environmental benefits”.

The latter benefit would have also eventually supported the federal government’s 2024 Budget directive to PSPC to reduce its office portfolio by 50 per cent over 10 years and to convert underused federal offices into homes. In 2021, PSPC said “most public servants don’t want to return to the office like it was before … what they want the office for is collaboration, creativity, community and caring.”

Indeed, the PSPC initiative to reduce the federal office portfolio, including leased space, by 50 per cent actually was started in 2020 as part of the department’s long term real estate “optimization plan” reflecting budgetary pressures to reduce costs and the trend towards remote hybrid work. PSPC’s website still states as one of its goals “to provide a variety of work environments that allow public servants to work anywhere, anytime, with anyone, on a variety of device”.

So now we have a TBS directive for federal government employees to return to the office for at least three days each week while at the same time, PSPC is shrinking its office portfolio in the national capital region. Moreover, the number of federal government employees today is far greater than there were in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. The total public-service population, including both the Core Public Administration and Separate Agencies (but excluding Canadian Armed Forces and RCMP members, CSIS and National Capital Commission) increased by 23,179 or 24.5 per cent  between 2020 and 2024 and that’s just on the Ontario side of the national capital region.

Most of these recently hired public servants are now adding to the demand for space in a limited and shrinking office supply. Many of the newly hired employees probably never worked in an office or at least in a federal government office. Civil servants are going to workspaces with no assigned seating as desks must be booked in advance with some of them having to return home if a cubicle is not available.

And not only that, according to the Treasury Board’s Directory of Real Property, 325 office buildings are located in the City of Ottawa as of Oct. 13. A total 100 buildings are Crown owned (another 125 buildings are leased). Of the total number of office buildings, 28 buildings are in poor shape with another 28 buildings and another 28 listed as being in critical condition. All of the 56 buildings are Crown owned, representing an astonishing 53 per cent of the federal government’s total owned office space inventory in the city.

There is little doubt that the pandemic and the shift to remote and hybrid work led to a system shock to the federal government. The federal government is a huge organization with an incredibly varied workforce, diverse cultural traditions between departments and an enormous real-estate portfolio that really doesn’t function well today as becoming the hubs for collaboration, mentorship, innovative thinking, team development and connection. The federal government is faced with two crises – an office crisis and a work crisis.

And it’s anybody’s guess what will happen if (when?) the Poilievre government takes over with their promise of reducing the size of the federal bureaucracy. Tomorrow’s Ottawa crises could be the redistribution of federal government jobs outside of the National Capital Region and the slashing of thousands of employees.

Dan Stankovic is an Ottawa consultant and former municipal public servant in economic development and housing.

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