Premier Ford Encourages Ontario Municipalities to Bring Staff Back to Office Full Time

Ontario Premier Doug Ford speaks with media before the First Ministers Meeting at the National War Museum in Ottawa on March 21, 2025. The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is encouraging the province’s municipalities to have their public service employees return to the office five days a week.

Speaking at the annual Association of Municipalities of Ontario conference on Aug. 18, Ford said that having public service workers return to the office full time will “bring the public service in the municipalities closer to the people they serve, and will revitalize our workplaces in downtowns across Ontario.”

The province announced on Aug. 14 that Ontario public service employees will be returning to work full time in January. Ford said that Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown announced on Aug. 15 that his municipality would follow suit by having its public service workers return to the office five days a week as well.

“I want to thank Mayor Brown for his leadership, and encourage other municipalities to follow his lead,” Ford said at the conference.

Treasury Board President Caroline Mulroney announced in an Aug. 14 statement that Ontario public service workers would be returning to the office full time as of Jan. 5, 2026.

While more than half of the province’s public servants are already required to attend the workplace full time, those who attend the office three days per week will start going to the office four days a week starting Oct. 20 as part of a “gradual transition period to the full time in-office standard,” Mulroney said.

The decision to have workers return full time reflects what the province is seeing in business across Ontario, Ford said at the Aug. 18 conference.

“The government has been closely monitoring the evolution of in-workplace standards for public and private sector organizations,” Mulroney said in her statement, adding that a five days per week in-workplace standard “represents the current workforce landscape” in the province.

In April 2022, the province established a policy that required provincial government employees to work in the office three days a week.

Ford addressed the upcoming provincial change at an unrelated Aug. 14 press conference, saying there are a variety of benefits to returning to full-time office hours, such as productivity and increased revenue for small businesses that rely on foot traffic from office workers.

“There’s hard-working entrepreneurs that their businesses basically just died when they weren’t seeing the flow of traffic,” Ford said, referring to Toronto businesses located by government buildings that took a hit because of pandemic-era remote work policies.

Meanwhile, the president of the union for Ontario’s professional employees pledged to fight the new policy and accused the province of using the policy to remove employees’ previously negotiated work-from-home rights.

The provincial announcement came not long after Canada’s four big banks—RBC, Scotiabank, BMO, and TD Bank—announced they would require employees to be in the office four days a week as of September.

3-Day-a-Week Federal Mandate

Last year in May, the federal government announced a three-day-a-week in-office mandate for public servants, and said government departments had to implement the policy by Sept. 9, 2024.

The government said the move would put confidence back into its services and establish a consistent approach to hybrid work. Additionally, the policy would attract talent, meet diversity, inclusion, and accessibility objectives, and develop a public service culture of excellence, the government said.

Meanwhile, the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) has sought legal action in an attempt to overturn the return to office mandate. The union said 91 percent of its members were “strongly opposed” to the new mandate in June last year.

Earlier this year, federal data indicated large numbers of public servants were not following the federal government’s three-days-a-week in-office rule.

Estimated compliance rates in various departments at the time included 60 percent in the department of national defence, 80 percent in the Canada Revenue Agency, 75 percent in Employment and Social Development Canada, 93 percent in Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, and 60 percent in the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

While a Treasury Board document indicates that penalties for violating the in-office mandate could include verbal reprimand, written reprimand, suspension without pay, and termination of employment, the PSAC said it had not heard of any members being suspended or laid off for breaking the rules.

Chandra Philip, Jennifer Cowan, and The Canadian Press contributed to this report.