Federal RTO puts risks of recalling long-time remote workers in spotlight

Global Affairs Canada (GAC) employees were expressing feelings of anger and betrayal last week, as they reacted to news they were being required to relocate to the Ottawa–Gatineau region after working remotely for, in some cases, several years.

Many of the workers were hired by the agency to work remotely – according to CBC reporting, the employees feel “blindsided” by the return-to-office (RTO) order as they feel they were hired under false pretenses.

The workers, who spoke under condition of anonymity, said they accepted their roles with the verbal understanding that they would be allowed to continue to work remotely indefinitely: “That was definitely one of my preliminary questions,” said one employee in French.

“Had I known that, after a while, I risked losing my job for that reason, I would never have applied.”

GAC stands on its assertion that its verbal telework agreements are separate from employment offer letters, which stipulate location of work and are signed by employees, according to CBC reporting.

However, employment lawyer Nadia Zaman of Rudner Law says it’s not so simple, warning employers that context matters as much in courts as written contracts: “Even if there is a written contract, it can be amended through the actions of the employers and the employees.”

When RTO becomes constructive dismissal

With that in mind, the question for employers is where the line is drawn between reasonable RTO requests and constructive dismissal – and Zaman says it’s a question that depends not only on fundamental legal principles, but also on what the parties agreed to and how they behaved.

“Constructive dismissal occurs where there's a unilateral and substantial change to a fundamental term of the employment agreement or employment relationship,” she explains – such as job title, pay, duties and location.

If a contract clearly reserves the right to change the workplace location, there is more room to move and the employer will generally be allowed to enforce RTO, Zaman says.

But there is a distinction between short-term pandemic work-from-home solutions and long-running remote arrangements that could potentially supersede these terms, she adds.

“If the employee always worked in the office and was just sent home temporarily, then the employer would be able to instruct them to return to the office, generally speaking.”

When remote work is a condition of employment

Where employers cross into constructive dismissal territory, Zaman notes, is when remote work carries on long enough for it to become a condition of employment – especially where employees are seen to have organized their lives around it and have become dependent on the arrangement in some capacity.  

When this is the case, employees may be able to argue that the arrangement has become a protected term of their job, Zaman notes.

“At some point, allowing employees to work from home – when it's not mandated by the government, for example – can give rise to an argument that they have effectively changed the terms of the relationship,” she says.

“If the employee can establish that working remotely became an established practice … they may be able to assert that the right to work from home has become a term of their contract and the employer cannot unilaterally change it.”

According to CBC, hundreds of GAC employees were working fully remotely at the end of 2025, because they lived more than 125 kilometres from their workplace. Details about telework arrangements, including how requests are assessed, were not specified.

Recalling remote workers

Zaman says that if employers who are already deep into remote work want to recall staff, clarity and lead time matters – how change is communicated can heavily influence whether employees push back legally or grudgingly comply, she says.

Appropriate notice may be more than a few weeks, she warns – particularly if no valid written contract exists, in which case common law would be applicable. For this reason, she recommends a measured approach to RTO policies.

“Depending on the relevant factors, like the employee's age, nature of service, availability of comparable employment, length of service, the nature of the position – the employee could be entitled to months of reasonable notice, as opposed to weeks,” says Zaman.

“In a lot of cases, a gradual shift would be better than imposing four or five days in-person work immediately to take effect.”

Best practices for recalling remote employees

Linda Schweitzer, professor of management at Carleton University, says that to avoid backlash from employees who feel misled by remote work promises or verbal agreements, employers should be clear about why in-person work is needed.

“There has to be a good reason, a clear, obvious, mission-critical reason why you need these people in the office,” she says, explaining that many employers say their main reasons for recalling employees into the office are along cultural lines, saying it’s to improve collaboration and connection.

But for Schweitzer, that explanation is too broad for employees to accept as worthy of the time and expense involved for many of them to return to the office.

“There has to be meaningful presence while they're there,” she says, meaning office attendance should include actual, practical benefits to the team.

“It can't just be, ‘Oh, well, you're here together, good things will happen somehow, magically.’ There has to be some effort made to leverage the fact that everyone is in the office.”

Calling employees back into the office – especially those who feel it’s a condition of their job – will not only breed resentment, she adds, but will cut into productivity, as well; in fact, she shares that some hybrid working employees report that they use their at-home workdays as “catch-up” days after more “fun, social” days in-office.

Manager training for effective hybrid workplaces

As opposed to more casual, self-determined flex or anchor days in-office, Schweitzer says many employees are content with a limited, well-structured onsite presence, provided it is purposeful – for employers, that means planning office days intentionally, rather than assuming colocation alone creates value.

According to Schweitzer, this may reveal skills gaps among leaders whose management experience was built in traditional, all in-office workplaces, but that it is their responsibility to step up to learn new methods of scheduling and team-planning.

“The problem we have is that our current managers … they were never trained in a hybrid workplace or a virtual workplace,” she explains.

“I can see why they would want to go back to the old way of working, because that's what they do, that's what they know. Upskilling to be able to manage in a virtual or hybrid workplace is something that's going to take effort. And I would argue that it is managers that need that training.”

Clarity and communication breeds retention

It was reported that some GAC employees will be forced to resign rather than relocate, due to family or other circumstances – for Schweitzer, this highlights that unilateral changes in approaches to remote work can alienate employees who have used the opportunity to gain access to the workforce they didn’t previously have, such as women with children and disabled employees.

She warns employers that take a hard line to RTO risk pushing valuable talent out. She goes a step further, framing remote work as a differentiator in the ongoing competition for talent; although it is currently an employer’s market, that will not always be the case, she stresses, and decisions made now will shape future employee loyalty and retention.

“People will remember this, and they will be looking for another job, and when they find other jobs, they will move.”