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From overcrowding to performative presence, Ontario’s RTO mandate is off to a rocky start

ONTARIO PREMIER DOUG Ford has always had a certain uncle-ness about him, no more so than when he talks about remote work, which he does not particularly care for. “How do you mentor someone over a phone? You can’t,” he said back in August. “You’ve gotta look them eye to eye, train them, comradery!”

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He’s been happy about the decision to order civil servants back to the office, which kicked in this January. “It’s great to get everyone back to work, like every other normal citizen,” he said this month. But even Doug was forced to admit this week that the push back to the office has gotten off to a pretty rocky start.

“We’ll get through this,” he conceded last Monday. “There’s a little bump, we’ve been working on this for the last little while.”

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It started with space and desks, of which there wasn’t enough to accommodate everyone returning to the office. Even at the start of 2026, the government was avoiding the question of whether there was space for everyone, with officials saying, “The vast majority of OPS offices have adequate space”, which is kind of like saying the majority of your size 12 foot will fit in this size nine boot.

“Things are not going exactly to plan,” said Dave Bulmer, president of AMAPCEO, one of the unions representing administrative staff.

Then came the snow days: last Thursday, with a raft of snowfall warnings, school snow days and highway closures announced — the kind of interruptions remote work is designed to accommodate — some department staff were told to get their butts into the office or burn a personal day, that there would be no working from home that day. (It took about an hour for common sense to prevail there.)

Whatever your personal feelings on the Ontario RTO mandate, its rollout has been rough, as it fell into the desk-space trap many large organizations did in the preceding 12 to 18 months, when companies like JP Morgan, Amazon and others (including the federal government!) found that ordering people back to the office didn’t magically conjure enough desks for them.

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“Space-related headaches are reflective of broader questions about where and how it’s best for people to work, and what sort of planning needs to be put into it,” wrote Business Insider’s Emily Stewart. “The space problem is one that companies should fix, [but] whether they actually will is another question.”

As for Ontario, while the public servants’ union continues to grumble, it seems a few early hiccups won’t be derailing the plan any time soon. Whether that means the desk space question will be resolved is another question. Asked for an update, all Ford had to say was, “We’re working on that.” Kieran Delamont