Doug Ford’s Tories have “no plan” to lease or buy new offices for the province’s workers

Ontario public sector workers hardly need more to fume over, but the Doug Ford government has provided it. According to a statement to the CBC, Queen’s Park has not signed any new leases or purchased any new real estate to accommodate the 60,000 civil servants who were ordered to return to their offices five days a week starting at the beginning of this year.

The news comes as provincial workers say they’ve been crammed into overcrowded common areas—often sharing desks, working out of conference rooms or being sent home early by their managers due to a lack of space.

Related: Ontario public sector union boss Dave Bulmer on Doug Ford’s return-to-office mandate

Dave Bulmer, the president and CEO of the workers’ union, blames the chaos on the province’s poor planning. In January, Bulmer told Toronto Life that Ford’s return-to-office mandates were a “complete shock” and “feel like a return to the Stone Age.”

“My members have a contractual right to request flexible work, and more than 6,000 of them have recently asked for as much, but the Ontario public sector employer never consulted us,” Bulmer said. “Had a proper consultation occurred, we could have mutually figured out how much additional office space was required and which workers would be coming in on which days.”

Related: Are bigger units the answer to Toronto’s condo crash?

Ontario’s in-person-work push has spurred demand in the GTA’s office market as more and more tenants are absorbing space that sat vacant during the pandemic. But the policy has also affected morale and productivity, with employees routinely complaining about gridlocked commutes, workplace inefficiency and disruption to their professional routines.

While the province hasn’t released its own data on the subject, Statistics Canada reports that federal public service productivity grew by 4.5 per cent between 2019 and 2023, during the peak of the remote work revolution.