Canadian employers have been mandating workers back to in-person work through blanket return-to-office policies. On top of harming workplace equity, these policies have broader repercussions for the public as children head back to school and respiratory illness season looms.
On Aug. 14, Doug Ford’s Ontario Progressive Conservative government announced that all public workers were being ordered back to the office full-time. This followed the federal government’s controversial mandate that requires federal workers to be in the office at least three days a week, despite mass union pushback.
The private sector is also rescinding workplace flexibility, with both Toronto-Dominion (TD) and the Royal Bank of Canada mandating their employees back in the office.
While employers may be rushing to undo COVID-19 era changes, viral illnesses have other plans.
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Respiratory illness season
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the state of public health in Canada remains bleak. Alberta has broken the record for the deadliest flu season three years in row, with a staggering 239 deaths in the 2024-25 season. At the same time, Ontario has seen its influenza numbers spike to levels not seen in over a decade.
(NIAID), CC BY
The “tripledemic” of respiratory infections — COVID-19, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) — can wreak havoc on health-care systems. Thousands are hospitalized every year, overloading our hospitals, while many more more ride out acute sickness at home, burdening family members and other unpaid caregivers.
As fewer people get seasonal flu vaccinations and viral illness spreads, Canadian employers continue to dismantle the few pandemic-induced policies that helped families manage their workplace responsibilities during viral illness season.
Work structure and COVID-19
One of the few benefits of the COVID-19 pandemic was how workplaces amended their day-to-day structure. Arrangements that did not seem possible before, like holding meetings over Zoom, became commonplace.
These changes had the unintended consequences of reducing workplace inequality, especially among women with care-giving responsibilities. In Canada, women’s employment recovery after the acute stages of the pandemic was rapid, with core-aged women achieving the highest employment rates ever recorded. The changes made it so they could better manage conflicts between work demands and the uncertainty of family life and childhood illness.
Our research in Alberta — a province that has been grappling with especially difficult viral illness outbreaks, deaths and waning vaccinations — overwhelmingly shows that flexible, remote work options benefit workers.
Using survey data] from the 2023 Alberta Viewpoint Survey from more than 1,000 people, we found that since September 2022, over half missed work due to their child or other family member being sick. Nearly one-third missed one to six days and near 20 per cent missed one to four weeks. Women were more likely than men to miss extended periods away from work, and many participants worried about how their bosses viewed their absences to care for sick children.
The spread of viral illness throughout the 2022-2023 season clearly affected the workforce, but the larger consequences of illness depended on workplace remote options and flexibility.
Parents who had access to remote, flexible options were able to manage the ongoing unpredictability of illness far better than those who were mandated to be in the workplace. Crucially, these parents were also less likely to send their children to school or daycare sick, thereby reducing the circulation of illness.
Parents who did not have this option, especially those with jobs that required in-person interactions with the public, felt immense pressure to be at work while limited sick days were being used up quickly. Many were left with no choice but to send their children to child care even though they were sick.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck
Parents who feared losing a day’s pay, their boss’s good will or even their job tried to mask children’s symptoms with medications. Even so, while they were at work, they were anxious about getting “the call” from school or child care telling them that their child needed to be picked up immediately.
Remote work does not just benefit parents, either. It saves workers’ time in commuting, improves well-being and can increase workplace productivity and performance. It has been especially beneficial for people with disabilities and chronic health conditions who often face a range of barriers for accessing employment.
During the pandemic, people with disabilities employed in jobs with flexible and remote work options had lower levels of economic insecurity and were often protected from illness. Since the pandemic, greater access to jobs that provide the ability to work from home has been a key driver in increasing labour force participation among people with disabilities.
Despite all of the evidence that work-from-home options are a public health and equity win, and in the face of worker and union protest, Canadian employers continue to choose policies that disrupt families and add to multiple public health crises.
Risks of ending remote work
While it’s too early to see the effect these mass policies will have on the Canadian labour market, early data from the United States shows a mass exodus of women from the workplace after the implementation of return-to-office policies. Based on federal labour force statistics, the proportion of women who have young children in the workforce has reached its lowest level in more than three years.
Read more:
Combatting the measles threat means examining the reasons for declining vaccination rates
Canadian employers turned to work-from-home and remote work to meet the unprecedented risks of the COVID-19 pandemic. More than five years on from the start of the pandemic, it’s clear that these policies have other benefits for both workplaces and for Canadian society as a whole.
Work-from-home and remote-work flexibility has driven gains in workplace equity. It also limits outbreaks of respiratory infections by enabling parents to keep their kids home from school or child care when they’re sick. Removing remote work policies during the back-to-school season is a dangerous game to play, especially with declining vaccination rates.
As illness spreads again this fall, this game may very well lead to productivity losses and more expenses for governments and businesses across Canada.
