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.

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.

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-...

2: https://ici.radio-canada.ca/info/2022/coronavirus-covid-19-p... (click on Hospitalizations)

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

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.

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.

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,

“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.

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)_/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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

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

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