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Work-from-home is the new normal in Canada

146 points by djkivi 4y ago

neerd 4y ago
Canada has some of the most unaffordable housing in the world. It makes sense that people want the freedom to work from cheaper locations. I moved from Vancouver to Calgary when I went 100% remote and I have not regretted the decision at all
- TheRealPomax 4y ago
  And yet, we get the short end of the stick when you get a job at a company that applies a location factor, where even living in a rural backwater in Washington pays more than living in downtown Vancouver, BC.
  - j45 4y ago
    Companies don’t owe anyone anything unfortunately, it’s about funding one that prioritizes the things you do
    - TheRealPomax 4y ago
      What does this have to do with "owing" anything? They will tell you they use location factor to determine salary, and then use a location factor that isn't actually based on cost of living so that a Canadian city that is far more expensive to live in still ends up paying less than a place where the cost of your Vancouver single-room apartment buys you two houses and several acres of land out in the US boonies, and your monthly living cost outside of rent pays for an entire family.
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        The location factor is based on the local job market (what your next best option is), which is related to the cost-of-living, but is not directly such a measure. (I'm not arguing that this is right or wrong; I'm just saying how I think it is. This is an "is", not an "ought", argument.)
        TheRealPomax 4y ago
        Indeed, which is how Canada gets the short end of the stick.
      - ipaddr 4y ago
        They probably are using Seattle rate for the entire state. They probably get most applicants from Seattle so it makes sense. Someone could move to a smaller town in state and profit over the difference.. you could do the same in BC or move to rural Alberta. Policies like this are sometimes made because US employees might have state/federal tax breaks. Usually it is because the average developer wage in a region is a certain amount. Why pay $500k when $250k lands the same group of candidates. If it's too low let them know and move on.
      - j45 4y ago
        First a typo.. funding=finding. When there is a complaint about a company not providing things a certain way, there’s a degree of unfairness owed that was perceived. Companies do not owe anyone a location based factor of San Francisco and allow the employee to arbitrage it, or not. They have a hard enough time staying sustainable. My preference is that location indexes are always in the employees favour. I’m a familiar with some of Vancouver’s challenges, incl downtown. Depending on one’s situation, it’s often easier to live elsewhere and fly to Vancouver on weekends to live, or schedule flights in advance cheap enough to be in for work meetings. Anyone who’s had an Amazon recruiter chase them from outside of Vancouver to move there may have done the math. Van has a lot of sustainability challenges, between schools closing, the amount of household income required to buy a home from outside of its circle, the cost of living. If someone is able to live in Vancouver, and if they have a family, those kids may not be able to own a home of their own. And bask in the 230 or so days a year that aren’t precipitating in some way. Incredible city those 100-130 days a year though when the sun is out.
    - bigbillheck 4y ago
      > Companies don’t owe anyone anything Maybe they should.
      - TheRealPomax 4y ago
        Companies can only owe what they contractually agreed to owe. So by definition they already do. Getting paid based on cost of living is a request based on an argument of fairness, something which companies (rather than people - companies are ant colonies, not ants) don't need to care about in the slightest. And thus, Canadians get the short end of the stick. The end, no moral.
        bigbillheck 4y ago
        Companies exist only because of the law, which can certainly (in theory) mandate that they owe additional things to their employees, such as "a minimum wage" and "a safe workplace free of harassment".
      - j45 4y ago
        I agree, the best way to make change happen is start a company and set your own table.
  - __turbobrew__ 4y ago
    Yea this pains me greatly as someone who lives in BC. I work for a fully remote bay area company and I get paid less than someone who is a full job level below me living in Kansas. I once worked it all out: if I was located in Seattle instead of BC I would be making over double for the exact same remote position I am in. Not only would I receive a 40% pay bump, but I would also not pay state income tax, and housing is cheaper in Washington than British Columbia. On top of that almost every single good/commodity is cheaper in the USA than in Canada. All in all I would guess my purchasing power working in BC is around 35% of what it would be if I worked in Washington. If I wasn’t happily married to someone who is very against living in the USA I probably would have jumped ship and moved to the USA like many of my Canadian peers. The TN visa is easy enough to get as a software engineer.
- morkalork 4y ago
  We can't all live in Vancouver or the GTA, nor should we. WFH is exactly what a large and sparsely populated country needs. Heck, the government should be encouraging it as much as they can. Maybe they can turn the tide around in some of those dying rural towns out east.
  - quantiq 4y ago
    The housing crisis has cemented in people’s minds that living in Vancouver or the GTA is essentially an impossible feat because everything is zoned for cars and single-family housing. I suppose if your POV is very narrow and limited, then yes it is impossible. But giving up easily when things become difficult is a Canadian cultural staple, so rural dying towns for everyone it is.
afavour 4y ago
As someone who has been working from home since the pandemic and preferring it these articles still bug me: the new normal for who? Not for retail workers, agricultural workers, manufacturing, first responders, those who work in trades etc etc etc. It’s a very notable shift for office workers. It just so happens that every newspaper opinion writer is in the exact socio-economic group most affected and way too often it’s talked about as if it’s universal. It also leads to under coverage of important side effects: for example, here in NYC the economics of the subway system have been messed up since the start of the pandemic. If every office worker works from home the system suddenly loses a ton of revenue. But if they cut back on service it’ll disproportionately affect the (typically lower income) workers that still depend on it. Not unsolvable but rarely talked about.
- xwdv 4y ago
  More people work in offices than all those industries put together.
  - acc_297 4y ago
    Canada actually has a larger resource extraction industry as percent of gdp than any other oecd country and I would be surprised if office workers outnumber primary industries +retail+food service+trades+manufacturing
  - fknorangesite 4y ago
    I'm genuinely curious if that's the case; can you provide some actual numbers?
    - manuelmoreale 4y ago
      Since Canada is the subject of the article maybe this can be helpful? https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1410020201&pickMembers%5B0%5D=1.1&pickMembers%5B1%5D=2.1&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2022&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2022&referencePeriods=20220101%2C20220101 https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=141002...
- 4y ago
robswc 4y ago
I'm thankful that I'll never have to work in a city again. It used to be that WFH jobs were "rare" or special case but I've seen tons of postings for totally remote. Young adults will no longer have to uproot their lives to live in an expensive city. They could probably even get a job right out of college without having to stress about living situations.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Though, in fairness, many college-educated young professionals are precisely one of the demographics that often want to live in that expensive city right out of school.
  - robswc 4y ago
    That's the ones that should (enjoy life and take more risks when you're young). I know a lot of people have "no choice" if they want a shot at a decent job though. Also, much harder if you want to start a family, it honestly seems like a win-win for both types of people. Less competitive housing prices.
    - cudgy 4y ago
      Financially though we can be better off saving when we’re young so we can enjoy the fruits of compounding interest over a longer period. This could leave more money to invest in one’s own business once we are older with more experience and contacts to leverage, resulting in higher success rate of ventures.
      - doubled112 4y ago
        > enjoy the fruits of our interest I realize you probably don’t mean actual interest (more investments), but the concept of interest gains is hilarious to me at this point. A Canadian high interest savings account is paying out at 0.050% and only if you have $5000 or more in it.
      - robswc 4y ago
mikeryan 4y ago
So one thing I’ve noticed with Canadian companies, much more so then US based one’s is that they have a much higher reliance on contractors. Many “full-time” employees at the companies I’ve worked with (generally the tech side of cable cos, Shaw and Quebecor) have been on 6 month contracts. I think this is likely more common in European countries as well and likely has a lot to do with socialized medicine. The nature of this model leads to some pretty higher turnover then I’ve seen in the US as people roll onto different opportunities. I’m guessing this may have a large role in how this is shaping up. I also don’t know what the laws are in Canada but I’m the US dictating where and when work gets done is the primary measure (from the IRS’s perspective) of whether you’re a full time employee or not. If it’s similar in Canada and you have a high number of contractors as part of your workforce it’s going to limit your leverage on forcing them to work from the office. Of course this is also all anecdotal so who knows? ¯\_(ツ)_/
- throwawaysleep 4y ago
  Canada is an extremely risk averse place, so nobody likes to hire anyone all that permanently outside of high growth companies. Whether it be the government, telecom, banks, etc, many start with a 12 month contract. I have a friend who is a lawyer for the government and she can only expect a permanent job in 3 years or so.
- treespace8 4y ago
  As a contractor in Canada, it's because it's a way to get paid more. I've been contracting for so long I might be out of touch with current IT salaries. But when I switched in the mid 2000s 100,000 CAD was a hard cap. Also Canadian companies don't offer equity. The option programs that I have encountered have always been they type that you lose at the end of your employment. I've also seen companies fire everyone on the eve of a takeover to cancel any options.
blindriver 4y ago
If/when a recession hits, every single employer is going to use that to force people back into the office. No ifs, ands or buts. You can see the largest tech companies like Google, Facebook, etc. start to enforce RTO, with the veiled threat of being laid off. By the end of next year, I assume most people will be back in the office at least 4 days a week if not 5. Employers will definitely use layoffs as the hammer to get people back in and working under their watchful gaze.
- Clubber 4y ago
  I see them trying, but they might realize that losing access to half the talent pool might not be worth it.
- morkalork 4y ago
  Big employers sure but small and medium? I doubt it. A whole lot of smaller businesses just discovered they don't need the overhead of a real estate lease and the owners are quite happy to keep working and pocket that extra money.
- throwawaysleep 4y ago
  Why you want to work for fully distributed companies that are smaller and thus couldn't afford to do that. At my job 1, the city with the most employees has only 20% of the staff. The rest are spread throughout Canada.
- bnchrch 4y ago
  Anecdotally there were plenty of remote only companies before the pandemic. So no. I don’t see this happening for every remote position. Some sure. But not all. Source: a Canadian who has been working remote only for a decade across many different companies
- dghlsakjg 4y ago
  The company I work for took COVID as an opportunity to bail on their large office lease. They moved to a cheaper and smaller office that really doesn't have room for what you propose. I don't doubt that there are some companies that will try to do that, but it just makes life easier for remote companies that are hiring.
gamesbrainiac 4y ago
Not for everyone. A new societal class has emerged, comprising individuals who can work remotely indefinitely (I'm lucky to be one of them). In contrast, workers in industries requiring proximity to their workplaces, such as truck drivers, caregivers, and healthcare providers, face a different set of challenges. I wonder if the differences in society will be exacerbated due to this or if governments will take measures to make commuting and living near workspaces affordable again.
- surgical_fire 4y ago
  With remote workers possibly leaving big cities to less expensive places, the lives of the people who can't work from home might become easier and more affordable.
rlt 4y ago
It occurs to me that those who can most easily work from home are at the highest risk of being displaced by AI...
- Clubber 4y ago
  I don't see why. Offshoring perhaps, but if a company can replace you with AI, they don't care where your seat resides.
  - rlt 4y ago
    I mean the jobs that can most easily be done from home are most easily replaced because all they require is a sufficiently intelligent agent, human or artificial, on the end of an internet connection, no physical presence. Not talking about any given company or person’s decision to work from home.
iosystem 4y ago
It better stay as the new normal because most cannot afford to work downtown in cities and while being paid what previous generations were paid but nowadays in timelines where inflation/housing cost is ridiculously high for no justified reason other than making existing housing owners richer.
adriand 4y ago
This is just based on my own experience, but I wonder if the preference for working from home is really more a preference to not have to be in a company office. I worked from home for months and then ended up getting my own office space, a beautiful light- and plant-filled private space of my own. Close enough to my home to walk to work (25 mins), but downtown, where’s there’s lots of restaurants and amenities. I love it and I much prefer it to working from home now. I know it’s a huge privilege, but I wonder if companies offered to pay a portion of people’s office rent, if a lot of WFH folks would work out of their own offices.
- LeSaucy 4y ago
  This is an important distinction. The difference is "private office" which happens to be at home vs "cubicle farm" or "hotel desk farm" at work. Prior to 2010~ era where it wasnt so uncommon to have private/semi-private offices for knowledge workers this would be a different discussion.
  - cudgy 4y ago
    Agreed. A proper office with walls is critical for many people and roles. However, even if a proper office were provided at the company location, not having to commute is a huge time and cost savings for the worker that if difficult to ignore.
- ghaff 4y ago
  25 minutes walk to work is also a huge factor. Even with cubes, if I could easily walk to the office I'd do so some days. As it is, my assigned office is about a 30 minute drive and I haven't gone in for 4 years or something like that. Have to go into another office for customer visits now and then but that's almost 2 hours each way.
- anonymoose456 4y ago
  Pretty much the reason in my case. I like being in an office itself well enough, but mainly just don't like packed-in seating arrangements. If things were spaced out more and I had the feeling of more personal space, it could feel completely different. I don't generally have a problem focusing in a busy cafe for example. But after years of WFH I've found I can't easily go back to work in that stress-inducing (for me) environment anymore. I've tried and couldn't make it more than a couple days. My coping skills have atrophied. I'd say it's even worse now with hybrid and online meetings or discussions from desks at the office. Guess I'm lucky I still have a choice, but I'd jump at the chance of my own private office.
arcticbunny 4y ago
The government should be encouraging it. A way to take pressure off of the urban centers would be to get people to WFH and work in small towns where you can get houses for 50-100k. Yes would not work for everyone but it could revitalize the dying small farm towns that are spread out across the country.
- ghostpepper 4y ago
  Isn't it cheaper per capita for the government to provide services to people who are clustered together? You'd think they would want to encourage it.
  - arcticbunny 4y ago
    These towns exist already and they need to provide services to the people living there.
chollida1 4y ago
Two things that makes Canada a bit different from teh US that might help accelerate this trend. 1) We've got really high housing prices 2) Partially related we only have 4-5 big cities. one of the US's strengths is that there are great cities in almost every state where someone can move to and find a job no matter their profession. Canada has Toronto, Vancouver, and maybe Montreal, Calgary and Ottawa. I don't say that to shit on those cities and the ones I didn't mention but we don't have alot of huge job creating cities. We just don't have the big job generating cities like other countries do because we're very concentrated in 2-3 areas. That means our population is drawn to live in the GTA(surrounding area of Toronto) or Vancouver. Work from home allows our population to spread out a bit, which is something our huge country sorely needs. it should also have the benefit of allowing people to move elsewhere and lower our property prices in the big cities. We also have had dry runs for remote work in the form of satellite US offices with minimal supervision for a long time so we've got atleast some experience in our work force with remote work before the pandemic started. WFM won't be a panacea that fixes our housing prices alone, we'll probably need to start taxing people who own multiple homes very heavily, but its a trend that could help bring them down and spread our population out to other areas,
- yashap 4y ago
  Mostly agree, but it doesn’t make sense to call Vancouver a big city, but Montreal only “maybe” a big city. Montreal’s metro population is 4.3 mil, Vancouver’s 2.6 mil, Montreal is a much bigger city than Vancouver, not the other way around. Also, if you’re listing Ottawa and Calgary, you should list Edmonton too, all have metro populations in the 1.4-1.5 mil range.
- dalyons 4y ago
  Pretty much identical story in Australia - without remote everyone’s forced to live in crazy expensive Sydney and Melbourne.
- AHOHA 4y ago
  Exactly! In Canada the remote work should be encouraged, before the pandemic, a friend used to drive from his small city to the train station to go to Toronto, then public transport to the office plus walk, totaling 2+ hours in the morning and another 2+ going back, I remember him always exhausted, that or taking the 401 by car plus the wasted gas. Now, he enjoys the time with family and more energetic most of the time, while staying in his small city, contributing to its economy, how’s that a bad thing from the gov perspective?
Waterluvian 4y ago
Been WFH in Canada for about five years now. Never ever going back. Before I had kids it wasn’t a big deal. But now it’s such precious time that I cherish. I always thought avoiding the commute would be valuable. It is. But the real value for me is just being seconds away from my kids as they grow up. I had a singular moment at my last job that sold it for me. I had a stupid meeting that ran until 6. It was completely pointless, serving to compensate for the incompetence of sales and product. I raced home and my 1yo was already asleep. Wife said he went to bed asking where I was. 12 days later I wasn’t working there anymore. Life is fleeting.
- AHOHA 4y ago
  You did the right thing, would never prioritize work let alone useless meetings over my family
- Royaljj 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing, that situation is not great and you did the right thing. One a side note, is your username a reference to the University of Waterloo?
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    UW is my alma mater but I also grew up in Waterloo.
AHOHA 4y ago
>In other words, even if it’s true that working from home is less productive, people put more time into their work, so it’s hard to know how these effects balance out. I don’t get this part, if people put more time towards work, how is that less “productive”, what’s productivity definition by those employers?! I personally left my previous job a couple weeks ago due to mandating full time at the office, even though I was working more at home and sometimes 15hrs a day -and wasn’t even paid those extra overtime-, but it was less stressful than 6hrs at the office, less wasted time at commuting, can snack any time, using my comfy chair/desk, quiet environment, no distractions in the “open office” or even catching other illnesses as all my peers working full at office were getting sick week after another, other peers who have families they liked spending more time with their kids as before the 2020 they barely see them a couple hours in the weekend, and I’m sure there are more benefits as those from my personal perspective. I understand it’s not for everyone, but going full crazy demanding everyone cramped in an area that is not even suitable for a call-center job let alone other type of jobs require extra focus, how about making the office more favorable to lure more people back to the office, how about having own closed office for all employees, relaxed schedules so people won’t waste time in the traffic, and so on, but that won’t happen, corps want the same old way which’s way worse than how work environment was back in the 60s for example, yeah employees won’t thats not gonna happen again.
consumer451 4y ago
In the long term, WFH jobs are jobs which can be replaced by an artificial agent, no?
DustinBrett 4y ago
I'm WFH but would happily come in a few days a week if others would. I miss the connection of talking to people. Sadly the new normal at my office has meant the buildings are ghost towns now.
btbuildem 4y ago
You can't exactly trust the National Post, even though it's one of Canada's largest newspapers - it's owned by the Postmedia Network, itself majority owned by New Jersey-based Chatham Asset Management. I'd like to point out a couple of falsehoods in the article, right off the bat: - Italy having lowest excess deaths -- popularized myth, but patently false. Compare here with some G7 and other Nordic countries [1] - "as the pandemic dissipated in 2022 and 2023" -- the baseline Covid hospitalization rate across Canadian provinces is steadily climbing, already higher than peaks of some of the "waves" in 2021 and 2022. While coverage of the pandemic might have dissipated, the health emergency itself has become endemic [2] It's interesting to see the Post take a WFH-friendly tone, up until recently they've been pro RTO. Wonder if C.A.M. has shuffled their holdings around, or perhaps insurance companies are starting to feel the weight of LTD payouts? 1: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-per-100k-economist?tab=chart&country=USA~CAN~GBR~DEU~SWE~NOR https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-... 2: https://ici.radio-canada.ca/info/2022/coronavirus-covid-19-pandemie-cas-deces-hospitalisations/ https://ici.radio-canada.ca/info/2022/coronavirus-covid-19-p... (click on Hospitalizations)
nnurmanov 4y ago
Did they study the long term impact? What happens if a large group of people wfh for a long time? Does it increase their stress levels? What’s the impact on productivity long term? IMO without proper studies I wouldn’t normalize WFH
cudgy 4y ago
“Employers contend there is lower productivity when their employees work from home. The CEO of the Royal Bank of Canada, Dave McKay, has asserted that two plus years of work-from-home has had a negative impact on productivity and innovation.” Huh? The best evidence for lower productivity of wfh is a statement from a bank CEO who is de facto incentivized by commercial real estate loans.
- TeeMassive 4y ago
  Every managers from small and big rims I've heard or talked to say the same thing about remote working, not just CEOs of RBC and Elon. Remote work kills productivity. It's great as an option, especialy during storms and for parents, and maybe keep the rockstar Brent around, but apart from that it's a net loss.
  - warning26 4y ago
    As someone who hates WFH and always has, I believe that working from an office brings intangible benefits. WFH breeds isolation. If you're WFH, I ask you this: when was the last time you met up with someone outside of your household for longer than 10 minutes?
    - surgical_fire 4y ago
      > WFH breeds isolation. If you're WFH, I ask you this: when was the last time you met up with someone outside of your household for longer than 10 minutes? What if the vast majority prefer some level of isolation? What if they prefer to socialize with people outside of work?
      - warning26 4y ago
        > What if the vast majority prefer some level of isolation? Many preferences are not necessarily the best for us. I would prefer to eat nothing but hamburgers and never exercise, but that doesn’t mean I should. > What if they prefer to socialize with people outside of work? For most people, I would argue this simply doesn’t happen very often. (Hence my question in my parent comment)
Tiktaalik 4y ago
Our office has been back open for months and months now. Barely anyone comes in. Unmentioned in this article is what I think is one of the big reasons why, which is the housing affordability and vacancy crisis. For older and wealthy workers they may have housing near the office, but for the new generation they've been priced out of anything in the cities, and young designers and programmers at my work are often still living at home in their parents' suburban basements. Of course they'd rather WFH than waste their day commuting in. I don't blame them. On the other end of things many older workers with families used the opportunity to move elsewhere hours and hours away from the office and get a "cheap" SFH. They now have no option but to WFH. Basically the government's complete inaction on housing policy has created an environment where everyone, except those lucky enough to already have housing, is worse off continuing to work in the big cities. When I was a 20 year old I moved to Vancouver and got a cheap apartment in a cool part of town and I didn't even have that good of a job. Due to bad housing policy, that sort of opportunity is completely closed to young people these days.

146 points by djkivi 4y ago

Canada has some of the most unaffordable housing in the world. It makes sense that people want the freedom to work from cheaper locations. I moved from Vancouver to Calgary when I went 100% remote and I have not regretted the decision at all

TheRealPomax 4y ago
And yet, we get the short end of the stick when you get a job at a company that applies a location factor, where even living in a rural backwater in Washington pays more than living in downtown Vancouver, BC.
- j45 4y ago
  Companies don’t owe anyone anything unfortunately, it’s about funding one that prioritizes the things you do
  - TheRealPomax 4y ago
    What does this have to do with "owing" anything? They will tell you they use location factor to determine salary, and then use a location factor that isn't actually based on cost of living so that a Canadian city that is far more expensive to live in still ends up paying less than a place where the cost of your Vancouver single-room apartment buys you two houses and several acres of land out in the US boonies, and your monthly living cost outside of rent pays for an entire family.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      The location factor is based on the local job market (what your next best option is), which is related to the cost-of-living, but is not directly such a measure. (I'm not arguing that this is right or wrong; I'm just saying how I think it is. This is an "is", not an "ought", argument.)
      - TheRealPomax 4y ago
        Indeed, which is how Canada gets the short end of the stick.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      They probably are using Seattle rate for the entire state. They probably get most applicants from Seattle so it makes sense. Someone could move to a smaller town in state and profit over the difference.. you could do the same in BC or move to rural Alberta. Policies like this are sometimes made because US employees might have state/federal tax breaks. Usually it is because the average developer wage in a region is a certain amount. Why pay $500k when $250k lands the same group of candidates. If it's too low let them know and move on.
    - j45 4y ago
      First a typo.. funding=finding. When there is a complaint about a company not providing things a certain way, there’s a degree of unfairness owed that was perceived. Companies do not owe anyone a location based factor of San Francisco and allow the employee to arbitrage it, or not. They have a hard enough time staying sustainable. My preference is that location indexes are always in the employees favour. I’m a familiar with some of Vancouver’s challenges, incl downtown. Depending on one’s situation, it’s often easier to live elsewhere and fly to Vancouver on weekends to live, or schedule flights in advance cheap enough to be in for work meetings. Anyone who’s had an Amazon recruiter chase them from outside of Vancouver to move there may have done the math. Van has a lot of sustainability challenges, between schools closing, the amount of household income required to buy a home from outside of its circle, the cost of living. If someone is able to live in Vancouver, and if they have a family, those kids may not be able to own a home of their own. And bask in the 230 or so days a year that aren’t precipitating in some way. Incredible city those 100-130 days a year though when the sun is out.
  - bigbillheck 4y ago
    > Companies don’t owe anyone anything Maybe they should.
    - TheRealPomax 4y ago
      Companies can only owe what they contractually agreed to owe. So by definition they already do. Getting paid based on cost of living is a request based on an argument of fairness, something which companies (rather than people - companies are ant colonies, not ants) don't need to care about in the slightest. And thus, Canadians get the short end of the stick. The end, no moral.
      - bigbillheck 4y ago
        Companies exist only because of the law, which can certainly (in theory) mandate that they owe additional things to their employees, such as "a minimum wage" and "a safe workplace free of harassment".
    - j45 4y ago
      I agree, the best way to make change happen is start a company and set your own table.
- __turbobrew__ 4y ago
  Yea this pains me greatly as someone who lives in BC. I work for a fully remote bay area company and I get paid less than someone who is a full job level below me living in Kansas. I once worked it all out: if I was located in Seattle instead of BC I would be making over double for the exact same remote position I am in. Not only would I receive a 40% pay bump, but I would also not pay state income tax, and housing is cheaper in Washington than British Columbia. On top of that almost every single good/commodity is cheaper in the USA than in Canada. All in all I would guess my purchasing power working in BC is around 35% of what it would be if I worked in Washington. If I wasn’t happily married to someone who is very against living in the USA I probably would have jumped ship and moved to the USA like many of my Canadian peers. The TN visa is easy enough to get as a software engineer.
morkalork 4y ago
We can't all live in Vancouver or the GTA, nor should we. WFH is exactly what a large and sparsely populated country needs. Heck, the government should be encouraging it as much as they can. Maybe they can turn the tide around in some of those dying rural towns out east.
- quantiq 4y ago
  The housing crisis has cemented in people’s minds that living in Vancouver or the GTA is essentially an impossible feat because everything is zoned for cars and single-family housing. I suppose if your POV is very narrow and limited, then yes it is impossible. But giving up easily when things become difficult is a Canadian cultural staple, so rural dying towns for everyone it is.

afavour 4y ago

As someone who has been working from home since the pandemic and preferring it these articles still bug me: the new normal for who? Not for retail workers, agricultural workers, manufacturing, first responders, those who work in trades etc etc etc. It’s a very notable shift for office workers. It just so happens that every newspaper opinion writer is in the exact socio-economic group most affected and way too often it’s talked about as if it’s universal. It also leads to under coverage of important side effects: for example, here in NYC the economics of the subway system have been messed up since the start of the pandemic. If every office worker works from home the system suddenly loses a ton of revenue. But if they cut back on service it’ll disproportionately affect the (typically lower income) workers that still depend on it. Not unsolvable but rarely talked about.

xwdv 4y ago
More people work in offices than all those industries put together.
- acc_297 4y ago
  Canada actually has a larger resource extraction industry as percent of gdp than any other oecd country and I would be surprised if office workers outnumber primary industries +retail+food service+trades+manufacturing
- fknorangesite 4y ago
  I'm genuinely curious if that's the case; can you provide some actual numbers?
  - manuelmoreale 4y ago
    Since Canada is the subject of the article maybe this can be helpful? https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1410020201&pickMembers%5B0%5D=1.1&pickMembers%5B1%5D=2.1&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2022&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2022&referencePeriods=20220101%2C20220101 https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=141002...
4y ago

robswc 4y ago

I'm thankful that I'll never have to work in a city again. It used to be that WFH jobs were "rare" or special case but I've seen tons of postings for totally remote. Young adults will no longer have to uproot their lives to live in an expensive city. They could probably even get a job right out of college without having to stress about living situations.

ghaff 4y ago
Though, in fairness, many college-educated young professionals are precisely one of the demographics that often want to live in that expensive city right out of school.
- robswc 4y ago
  That's the ones that should (enjoy life and take more risks when you're young). I know a lot of people have "no choice" if they want a shot at a decent job though. Also, much harder if you want to start a family, it honestly seems like a win-win for both types of people. Less competitive housing prices.
  - cudgy 4y ago
    Financially though we can be better off saving when we’re young so we can enjoy the fruits of compounding interest over a longer period. This could leave more money to invest in one’s own business once we are older with more experience and contacts to leverage, resulting in higher success rate of ventures.
    - doubled112 4y ago
      > enjoy the fruits of our interest I realize you probably don’t mean actual interest (more investments), but the concept of interest gains is hilarious to me at this point. A Canadian high interest savings account is paying out at 0.050% and only if you have $5000 or more in it.
    - robswc 4y ago

mikeryan 4y ago

So one thing I’ve noticed with Canadian companies, much more so then US based one’s is that they have a much higher reliance on contractors. Many “full-time” employees at the companies I’ve worked with (generally the tech side of cable cos, Shaw and Quebecor) have been on 6 month contracts. I think this is likely more common in European countries as well and likely has a lot to do with socialized medicine. The nature of this model leads to some pretty higher turnover then I’ve seen in the US as people roll onto different opportunities. I’m guessing this may have a large role in how this is shaping up. I also don’t know what the laws are in Canada but I’m the US dictating where and when work gets done is the primary measure (from the IRS’s perspective) of whether you’re a full time employee or not. If it’s similar in Canada and you have a high number of contractors as part of your workforce it’s going to limit your leverage on forcing them to work from the office. Of course this is also all anecdotal so who knows? ¯\_(ツ)_/

throwawaysleep 4y ago
Canada is an extremely risk averse place, so nobody likes to hire anyone all that permanently outside of high growth companies. Whether it be the government, telecom, banks, etc, many start with a 12 month contract. I have a friend who is a lawyer for the government and she can only expect a permanent job in 3 years or so.
treespace8 4y ago
As a contractor in Canada, it's because it's a way to get paid more. I've been contracting for so long I might be out of touch with current IT salaries. But when I switched in the mid 2000s 100,000 CAD was a hard cap. Also Canadian companies don't offer equity. The option programs that I have encountered have always been they type that you lose at the end of your employment. I've also seen companies fire everyone on the eve of a takeover to cancel any options.

blindriver 4y ago

If/when a recession hits, every single employer is going to use that to force people back into the office. No ifs, ands or buts. You can see the largest tech companies like Google, Facebook, etc. start to enforce RTO, with the veiled threat of being laid off. By the end of next year, I assume most people will be back in the office at least 4 days a week if not 5. Employers will definitely use layoffs as the hammer to get people back in and working under their watchful gaze.

Clubber 4y ago
I see them trying, but they might realize that losing access to half the talent pool might not be worth it.
morkalork 4y ago
Big employers sure but small and medium? I doubt it. A whole lot of smaller businesses just discovered they don't need the overhead of a real estate lease and the owners are quite happy to keep working and pocket that extra money.
throwawaysleep 4y ago
Why you want to work for fully distributed companies that are smaller and thus couldn't afford to do that. At my job 1, the city with the most employees has only 20% of the staff. The rest are spread throughout Canada.
bnchrch 4y ago
Anecdotally there were plenty of remote only companies before the pandemic. So no. I don’t see this happening for every remote position. Some sure. But not all. Source: a Canadian who has been working remote only for a decade across many different companies
dghlsakjg 4y ago
The company I work for took COVID as an opportunity to bail on their large office lease. They moved to a cheaper and smaller office that really doesn't have room for what you propose. I don't doubt that there are some companies that will try to do that, but it just makes life easier for remote companies that are hiring.

gamesbrainiac 4y ago

Not for everyone. A new societal class has emerged, comprising individuals who can work remotely indefinitely (I'm lucky to be one of them). In contrast, workers in industries requiring proximity to their workplaces, such as truck drivers, caregivers, and healthcare providers, face a different set of challenges. I wonder if the differences in society will be exacerbated due to this or if governments will take measures to make commuting and living near workspaces affordable again.

surgical_fire 4y ago
With remote workers possibly leaving big cities to less expensive places, the lives of the people who can't work from home might become easier and more affordable.

rlt 4y ago

It occurs to me that those who can most easily work from home are at the highest risk of being displaced by AI...

Clubber 4y ago
I don't see why. Offshoring perhaps, but if a company can replace you with AI, they don't care where your seat resides.
- rlt 4y ago
  I mean the jobs that can most easily be done from home are most easily replaced because all they require is a sufficiently intelligent agent, human or artificial, on the end of an internet connection, no physical presence. Not talking about any given company or person’s decision to work from home.

iosystem 4y ago

It better stay as the new normal because most cannot afford to work downtown in cities and while being paid what previous generations were paid but nowadays in timelines where inflation/housing cost is ridiculously high for no justified reason other than making existing housing owners richer.

adriand 4y ago

This is just based on my own experience, but I wonder if the preference for working from home is really more a preference to not have to be in a company office. I worked from home for months and then ended up getting my own office space, a beautiful light- and plant-filled private space of my own. Close enough to my home to walk to work (25 mins), but downtown, where’s there’s lots of restaurants and amenities. I love it and I much prefer it to working from home now. I know it’s a huge privilege, but I wonder if companies offered to pay a portion of people’s office rent, if a lot of WFH folks would work out of their own offices.

LeSaucy 4y ago
This is an important distinction. The difference is "private office" which happens to be at home vs "cubicle farm" or "hotel desk farm" at work. Prior to 2010~ era where it wasnt so uncommon to have private/semi-private offices for knowledge workers this would be a different discussion.
- cudgy 4y ago
  Agreed. A proper office with walls is critical for many people and roles. However, even if a proper office were provided at the company location, not having to commute is a huge time and cost savings for the worker that if difficult to ignore.
ghaff 4y ago
25 minutes walk to work is also a huge factor. Even with cubes, if I could easily walk to the office I'd do so some days. As it is, my assigned office is about a 30 minute drive and I haven't gone in for 4 years or something like that. Have to go into another office for customer visits now and then but that's almost 2 hours each way.
anonymoose456 4y ago
Pretty much the reason in my case. I like being in an office itself well enough, but mainly just don't like packed-in seating arrangements. If things were spaced out more and I had the feeling of more personal space, it could feel completely different. I don't generally have a problem focusing in a busy cafe for example. But after years of WFH I've found I can't easily go back to work in that stress-inducing (for me) environment anymore. I've tried and couldn't make it more than a couple days. My coping skills have atrophied. I'd say it's even worse now with hybrid and online meetings or discussions from desks at the office. Guess I'm lucky I still have a choice, but I'd jump at the chance of my own private office.

arcticbunny 4y ago

The government should be encouraging it. A way to take pressure off of the urban centers would be to get people to WFH and work in small towns where you can get houses for 50-100k. Yes would not work for everyone but it could revitalize the dying small farm towns that are spread out across the country.

ghostpepper 4y ago
Isn't it cheaper per capita for the government to provide services to people who are clustered together? You'd think they would want to encourage it.
- arcticbunny 4y ago
  These towns exist already and they need to provide services to the people living there.

chollida1 4y ago

Two things that makes Canada a bit different from teh US that might help accelerate this trend. 1) We've got really high housing prices 2) Partially related we only have 4-5 big cities. one of the US's strengths is that there are great cities in almost every state where someone can move to and find a job no matter their profession. Canada has Toronto, Vancouver, and maybe Montreal, Calgary and Ottawa. I don't say that to shit on those cities and the ones I didn't mention but we don't have alot of huge job creating cities. We just don't have the big job generating cities like other countries do because we're very concentrated in 2-3 areas. That means our population is drawn to live in the GTA(surrounding area of Toronto) or Vancouver. Work from home allows our population to spread out a bit, which is something our huge country sorely needs. it should also have the benefit of allowing people to move elsewhere and lower our property prices in the big cities. We also have had dry runs for remote work in the form of satellite US offices with minimal supervision for a long time so we've got atleast some experience in our work force with remote work before the pandemic started. WFM won't be a panacea that fixes our housing prices alone, we'll probably need to start taxing people who own multiple homes very heavily, but its a trend that could help bring them down and spread our population out to other areas,

yashap 4y ago
Mostly agree, but it doesn’t make sense to call Vancouver a big city, but Montreal only “maybe” a big city. Montreal’s metro population is 4.3 mil, Vancouver’s 2.6 mil, Montreal is a much bigger city than Vancouver, not the other way around. Also, if you’re listing Ottawa and Calgary, you should list Edmonton too, all have metro populations in the 1.4-1.5 mil range.
dalyons 4y ago
Pretty much identical story in Australia - without remote everyone’s forced to live in crazy expensive Sydney and Melbourne.
AHOHA 4y ago
Exactly! In Canada the remote work should be encouraged, before the pandemic, a friend used to drive from his small city to the train station to go to Toronto, then public transport to the office plus walk, totaling 2+ hours in the morning and another 2+ going back, I remember him always exhausted, that or taking the 401 by car plus the wasted gas. Now, he enjoys the time with family and more energetic most of the time, while staying in his small city, contributing to its economy, how’s that a bad thing from the gov perspective?

Waterluvian 4y ago

Been WFH in Canada for about five years now. Never ever going back. Before I had kids it wasn’t a big deal. But now it’s such precious time that I cherish. I always thought avoiding the commute would be valuable. It is. But the real value for me is just being seconds away from my kids as they grow up. I had a singular moment at my last job that sold it for me. I had a stupid meeting that ran until 6. It was completely pointless, serving to compensate for the incompetence of sales and product. I raced home and my 1yo was already asleep. Wife said he went to bed asking where I was. 12 days later I wasn’t working there anymore. Life is fleeting.

AHOHA 4y ago
You did the right thing, would never prioritize work let alone useless meetings over my family
Royaljj 4y ago
Thanks for sharing, that situation is not great and you did the right thing. One a side note, is your username a reference to the University of Waterloo?
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  UW is my alma mater but I also grew up in Waterloo.

AHOHA 4y ago

>In other words, even if it’s true that working from home is less productive, people put more time into their work, so it’s hard to know how these effects balance out. I don’t get this part, if people put more time towards work, how is that less “productive”, what’s productivity definition by those employers?! I personally left my previous job a couple weeks ago due to mandating full time at the office, even though I was working more at home and sometimes 15hrs a day -and wasn’t even paid those extra overtime-, but it was less stressful than 6hrs at the office, less wasted time at commuting, can snack any time, using my comfy chair/desk, quiet environment, no distractions in the “open office” or even catching other illnesses as all my peers working full at office were getting sick week after another, other peers who have families they liked spending more time with their kids as before the 2020 they barely see them a couple hours in the weekend, and I’m sure there are more benefits as those from my personal perspective. I understand it’s not for everyone, but going full crazy demanding everyone cramped in an area that is not even suitable for a call-center job let alone other type of jobs require extra focus, how about making the office more favorable to lure more people back to the office, how about having own closed office for all employees, relaxed schedules so people won’t waste time in the traffic, and so on, but that won’t happen, corps want the same old way which’s way worse than how work environment was back in the 60s for example, yeah employees won’t thats not gonna happen again.

consumer451 4y ago

In the long term, WFH jobs are jobs which can be replaced by an artificial agent, no?

DustinBrett 4y ago

I'm WFH but would happily come in a few days a week if others would. I miss the connection of talking to people. Sadly the new normal at my office has meant the buildings are ghost towns now.

btbuildem 4y ago

You can't exactly trust the National Post, even though it's one of Canada's largest newspapers - it's owned by the Postmedia Network, itself majority owned by New Jersey-based Chatham Asset Management. I'd like to point out a couple of falsehoods in the article, right off the bat: - Italy having lowest excess deaths -- popularized myth, but patently false. Compare here with some G7 and other Nordic countries [1] - "as the pandemic dissipated in 2022 and 2023" -- the baseline Covid hospitalization rate across Canadian provinces is steadily climbing, already higher than peaks of some of the "waves" in 2021 and 2022. While coverage of the pandemic might have dissipated, the health emergency itself has become endemic [2] It's interesting to see the Post take a WFH-friendly tone, up until recently they've been pro RTO. Wonder if C.A.M. has shuffled their holdings around, or perhaps insurance companies are starting to feel the weight of LTD payouts? 1: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-per-100k-economist?tab=chart&country=USA~CAN~GBR~DEU~SWE~NOR https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-... 2: https://ici.radio-canada.ca/info/2022/coronavirus-covid-19-pandemie-cas-deces-hospitalisations/ https://ici.radio-canada.ca/info/2022/coronavirus-covid-19-p... (click on Hospitalizations)

nnurmanov 4y ago

Did they study the long term impact? What happens if a large group of people wfh for a long time? Does it increase their stress levels? What’s the impact on productivity long term? IMO without proper studies I wouldn’t normalize WFH

cudgy 4y ago

“Employers contend there is lower productivity when their employees work from home. The CEO of the Royal Bank of Canada, Dave McKay, has asserted that two plus years of work-from-home has had a negative impact on productivity and innovation.” Huh? The best evidence for lower productivity of wfh is a statement from a bank CEO who is de facto incentivized by commercial real estate loans.

TeeMassive 4y ago
Every managers from small and big rims I've heard or talked to say the same thing about remote working, not just CEOs of RBC and Elon. Remote work kills productivity. It's great as an option, especialy during storms and for parents, and maybe keep the rockstar Brent around, but apart from that it's a net loss.
- warning26 4y ago
  As someone who hates WFH and always has, I believe that working from an office brings intangible benefits. WFH breeds isolation. If you're WFH, I ask you this: when was the last time you met up with someone outside of your household for longer than 10 minutes?
  - surgical_fire 4y ago
    > WFH breeds isolation. If you're WFH, I ask you this: when was the last time you met up with someone outside of your household for longer than 10 minutes? What if the vast majority prefer some level of isolation? What if they prefer to socialize with people outside of work?
    - warning26 4y ago
      > What if the vast majority prefer some level of isolation? Many preferences are not necessarily the best for us. I would prefer to eat nothing but hamburgers and never exercise, but that doesn’t mean I should. > What if they prefer to socialize with people outside of work? For most people, I would argue this simply doesn’t happen very often. (Hence my question in my parent comment)

Tiktaalik 4y ago

Our office has been back open for months and months now. Barely anyone comes in. Unmentioned in this article is what I think is one of the big reasons why, which is the housing affordability and vacancy crisis. For older and wealthy workers they may have housing near the office, but for the new generation they've been priced out of anything in the cities, and young designers and programmers at my work are often still living at home in their parents' suburban basements. Of course they'd rather WFH than waste their day commuting in. I don't blame them. On the other end of things many older workers with families used the opportunity to move elsewhere hours and hours away from the office and get a "cheap" SFH. They now have no option but to WFH. Basically the government's complete inaction on housing policy has created an environment where everyone, except those lucky enough to already have housing, is worse off continuing to work in the big cities. When I was a 20 year old I moved to Vancouver and got a cheap apartment in a cool part of town and I didn't even have that good of a job. Due to bad housing policy, that sort of opportunity is completely closed to young people these days.