Does government have enough office space for full-time return to office?
HR professionals should be ready as the Ontario government’s full-time return-to-office (RTO) mandate has officially taken effect as of today, Jan. 5, 2026.
After years of working remotely since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly half of Ontario’s 60,000 public service workers are set to return to the office full time this week.
Still, the government won’t confirm if it has enough office space to accommodate a full-time return of all provincial civil servants.
Both the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Treasury Board have declined to provide details on the number of workspaces available or whether additional space is needed, according to a Global News story.
“We have reviewed all government office space, and the vast majority of OPS offices have adequate space for a successful return to office,” a government spokesperson said. “The Ministry of Infrastructure is working with other ministries to address any limited instances of space constraints.”
The spokesperson said there are 4,200 facilities across Ontario that could support a return to the office. However, in response to repeated questions from Global News, the government did not categorically state it has enough space to accommodate all civil servants.
“Our expectation is that the Ontario Public Service will be back in the workplace five days a week by January 5, 2026,” the spokesperson said, acknowledging that many employees had requested work-from-home accommodations.
Lack of space for RTO mandates
In recent months, questions were raised about whether the province had sufficient office capacity to bring all civil servants back in person. That came after the Doug Ford government announced during the summer that it would end remote work options for Ontario Public Service (OPS) employees, requiring all civil servants to return to the office five days a week beginning the first workweek of 2026.
Previously, Dave Bulmer, president of AMAPCEO—which represents 17,000 professional, administrative and supervisory employees in the Ontario public service—claimed that ministries and agencies across the province are struggling to accommodate the influx of workers, with some locations missing “entire floors worth of space,” according to a CBC report.
“There’s had to have been a lot of ad hoc arrangements being made by local managers and directors, because they just don’t have the space to accommodate people,” he said. “So, things are not going exactly to plan.”
Ontario Health, for one, “does not have sufficient space to accommodate employees” and is “having to temporarily resort to desk-sharing assignments as they transition back to five days a week in-office,” according to AMAPCEO.
Business impact of RTOs
An economist interviewed by CTV News argued that extended reliance on remote work has weighed on local economies, particularly in downtown Toronto.
Colin Mang, an economist at McMaster University, said that because many workers have stayed away from office districts, “it’s led to basically a local economic depression.”
Ford himself has seen the impact firsthand, he previously said.
“I’ll just use downtown Toronto, for example, the PATH. You know there’s hardworking entrepreneurs that basically their businesses just died when they weren’t seeing the flow of traffic,” he said when he announced the province’s full RTO mandate back in the summer.
“Having people come and commute to your downtown core, it generates a lot of economic activity, and that’s really been missing the past couple of years with back-to-work mandates, both in the private sector and in the public sector,” Mang explained, noting that Toronto’s downtown, specifically the PATH, has lost some of the “vibrancy” it had pre-COVID.
RTOs have their pros, cons, and legal hurdles, according to one expert.
