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And remember, this will cost tens of millions of dollars over the coming years, between the extra leases, maintenance, and fit-up/renewal. If it's for productivity, I'm all for it. But if it's for downtown, then we should call it what it is: a subsidy for businesses. That's not a judgement call; I'm not saying it is a good or bad thing. But in our era of limit dollars, where the government is saying that they don't have the money to meet teachers' requests, we need to accept that this is likely a policy choice to spend more money to support businesses and real-estate companies, just like why Doug Ford said Ontario is doing this.
I think there is a third option, using this as an indirect tool to shrink the GoA workforce. They are hoping for a significant portion of workers to quit. The fact it will be the most competent/qualified staff doesn't matter to UCP leadership because they truly don't believe that anyone who works a government job is anything other than a parasite.
I'm sure that's part of it, but it wouldn't be enough. For example, almost everyone in Tech and Innovation is completely virtual 5x per week, so they'll have to be put somewhere.
Why will they need more money for extra leases? I don't think the number of government employees here has really expanded that much over the last few years.
They've spent the last four years renovating offices to make workspaces smaller and only have as many as are needed to accomodate the average number of people working in-person on a given day - not the total number of people who technically work in said building. This has allowed the GOA to get out of a lot of leases, with an objective of eventually not having to lease any buildings (with some exceptions). Keep in mind that each lease costs per office range from hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars annually, and each office requires periodic renewal work that can cost tens of millions of dollars. So, the fewer leases on the books, and fewer offices needing renewal, saves taxpayers quite a bit. There are a large number of ministries that quite literally don't have enough workspaces for everyone, and will either need to renovate their offices to convert some common areas into workspaces, or enter new leases to fill the gap.
Yep. Like I said, not saying it's an illegitimate decision or something, just making sure people are aware of the financial cost. Budgets have finite dollars, after all.
Perhaps more bad government decisions over the last four years then, the "new normal" wasn't forever after all. Kind of like people who bought homes in remote places and then had to go back to work in the office.
On the first one, I think it's an empirical question whether WFH or hybrid policies make organizations less or more productive, taking into account the benefits of being able to recruit and retain talented people. I'm sure you could find evidence either way, depending on the situation, but it's certainly not a categorical "WFH/hybrid is bad" situation.
I mean, there's no reason why it couldn't be forever. See also: the City of Edmonton and the Government of Canada. And if the work was getting done (which I think is safe to say it was, since the GOA did not cite productivity in their press release, which would have been low hanging fruit and an easy punching bag), and the policy was in place for multiple years, would it not have been a waste of taxpayer dollars to spend millions of dollars annually to lease/maintain surplus office space in the off-chance that the policy gets changed? I personally would have thought that when we're in a deficit, taxpayers would want government to reduce its own operating costs where possible, in order to protect spending for priority areas like education and healthcare.
