Who Really Wins with Return-to-Office Mandates?

And how politics, productivity myths, and mentorship collide in Canada’s back-to-the-office debate

Mike Moffatt

Sabrina Maddeaux

, and

Meredith Martin

Sep 17, 2025

In this episode of The Missing Middle, Sabrina Maddeaux and Mike Moffatt break down Ontario’s new return-to-office mandate and the big banks’ similar policies, asking what they really mean for younger workers and families already facing high housing costs, long commutes, and stagnant wages.

They explore the trade-offs between productivity, commuting, and control, while producer Meredith Martin joins to share her perspective as a former union leader on mentorship, collaboration, and what might be lost if remote work fully takes over.

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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, which has been lightly edited.

Sabrina Maddeaux: So Mike, the Ontario Provincial Government announced that it would be mandating the public service back to the office four days a week starting in the fall, and five days a week starting in the new year. This announcement came a short while after Canada's four big banks made similar announcements.

Now I've got my own thoughts on why this is bad for younger workers, but I'd like to hear from you first. What do you think of return-to-office mandates?

Mike Moffatt: Well, I think we can look at it three ways, or ask three kinds of questions: what's good for employers, what's good for workers or employees, and what's good for society as a whole.

So let's start with employers. I think it's naturally not one-size-fits-all. I think it really depends on the industry, the type of work, that kind of thing. The theory is that the return to the office will increase productivity. You get everybody in the same room, and they're more productive.

There's really not a lot of evidence either way to show it makes people more or less productive. There are some conflicting studies out there, and I suppose it's really not that surprising. Productivity is hard to measure. We've just come out of the pandemic, so this is all very new. The evidence is mixed, which leads to the question: if the evidence is so mixed, why are we seeing such a push to return to the office?

There are quite a few reasons to believe that remote work is actually better for the company's bottom line. The obvious one is that you just need less real estate; you need fewer offices. More importantly, remote work allows you to get talent from a larger geographic area. You can hire people who are unable to commute to the office for one reason or another.

A business allowing its employees to work remotely is a bit of a moneyball strategy. It allows you to access more talent at a lower price.

If there are cost savings to working remotely, it is a little bit unusual that we are seeing this big push to return to office. So why is that?

Well, it could just be that workplaces think that their employees will be more productive in the office, even if there isn't a lot of evidence to back that up, but I also think there are some alternate explanations.

One is that I think some companies use it as a loyalty test. Let's say if the company needs to downsize for whatever reason, they can say, “Okay, everybody's got to return to the office,” knowing that some will just be like, “to heck with it, I'm out of here,” and they're probably the least engaged employees - at least that's what the theory might be. So it is a way to see who's interested in continuing work there and who may wander off.

But I think at the end of the day, the biggest reason is control.

I think that managers really want to have that control over people. They want to be able to look over their shoulders, and letting people work remotely is just inherently harder to monitor. So if you're a kind of control freak manager or risk-averse business, it may be that they just want to watch over people, even if it costs some talent.

Let's get into what Premier Ford is doing. The Premier made it clear that the return to office for the public sector isn't just about the performance of those workers, but it's also about getting more people downtown. It's having them take their lunches downtown and so on.

This isn't just about the performance of the organization, but it's these spillover effects to the rest of the economy. I think there's a trade-off there, though, because as you bring in more people downtown, obviously, there's a lot more traffic. You've got your workers stuck in their cars or on the TTC for 30, 45, 60 minutes a day.

That's lost time that they could be working. So that's my kind of long-winded take. I'd love to hear yours.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, obviously, every workplace is different and there are a lot of different factors at play, but I am really concerned about how return to office mandates impact younger employees and also those with growing families.

For one thing, we know that salaries have not kept pace with soaring rents or let alone the cost of buying. Young people and young families have had to move further and further out from the downtown cores, where most jobs are.

Commuting also comes with extra costs, even if that's just transit, let alone driving or parking or buying lunches. It's expensive for people, and if they're moving away, you're looking at commutes that can be an hour, two hours or more, which will have an impact on productivity, on happiness, on the ability of young people to spend time with their families and partners. Really, it's younger workers who are going to probably feel the biggest brunt of this.

You mentioned productivity, the banks are always going on and on about how unproductive the Canadian workforce is, and:

It's true, we do have a productivity problem, but I'm skeptical about how we can fix that when you have people trapped on streetcars or in their cars or trains, hours a day commuting downtown, right? Not only is that not time they're spending working in their regular jobs, but then maybe they aren't starting that side hustle or that next business, so it's going to have larger impacts there.

Then there’s congestion. We know Toronto traffic is such a mess; commutes that used to take 20 minutes now take 45 minutes to an hour. It's hard to predict how long it takes to get anywhere, and this is only going to make it that much worse.

There's this other interesting contradiction I keep seeing raised: on one hand, we have all these corporate Environmental, Social, and Governance [ESG] commitments and government climate targets, but on the other hand, they're forcing people back into cars for commutes that weren't necessary during the pandemic. How do you make sense of that disconnect?

Mike Moffatt: I think there is a real disconnect there, and Statistics Canada has some data on commutes, and we could put that in the show notes. We absolutely saw the length of commutes, even for people who were still going to the workplace every day, drop substantially during the pandemic because there was less traffic.

If you were a nurse, a teacher or had a job that you have to do on-site, your commute got a whole lot better. Now, as everybody's returning to the office, we're seeing those commute lengths get back up to pre-pandemic levels. In some locations like Kitchener-Waterloo, it's actually worse than before the pandemic because of extra population growth and so on. This is a real problem.

And you mentioned the ESG mandates. One of the challenges companies always have is measuring the scope of their emissions. There's what they call scope one, scope two, scope three emissions, which are basically how distant your emissions are from your operations. You can look at emissions that happen within the company, emissions that happen in the supply chain and so on.

Companies, for the most part, don't measure the emissions of their workers who have to commute back and forth. If they did, as part of their ESG mandates, I don't think we'd see as many return-to-office mandates because they would absolutely realize that having people drive in every day, or even take transit every day, increases emissions. This is a real, real problem.

We always chat about these issues in our group chat. We started discussing this whole return to office mandate and when it first came up, our producer, Meredith Martin had some thoughts on it that she wanted to convey, and she was kind of saying like, Hey, can you say this? Can you say that? And then we just kind of realized, why don't we just have Meredith say those things? So we're bringing her on right now!

Meredith, Sabrina and I really don't like back-to-the-office mandates. You have a different take, would love to hear it.

Meredith Martin: Thank you guys for allowing me to pop in like this. It is something I've thought about for a really long time, in part because I was a union branch president during the pandemic, so I helped the employer navigate everybody moving to work-from-home and then back to hybrid; it was a very tumultuous time. I heard from a number of employees about that experience, both good and bad, and it made me think about the office in a way that I hadn't before.

One of the things I realized is that the office is one of the few places where people get together with people that they did not choose.

You might come from a different social background, a different cultural background. You might work with people much older, much younger, people from different class systems, and you might not like them, but you still have to work with them and get the job done. It's a place where you learn how to do that.

I don't know if you guys have noticed, but I feel like society's fraying a little bit, and I think it's because we stopped being able to work together.

I have a couple of kids and they are now in university, or one is anyway; they're going to be eventually launching into the job market. I feel like Boomers and Gen X and Millennials all had the opportunity to spend up to the first 10 years in the office, where they learn from older workers how to navigate work life.

The other thing Doug Ford talked about was mentorship when he made the announcement, and I agree with him. I think it's virtually impossible to mentor people one hundred percent remotely. And who this impacts the most are the youngest workers.

It's true Sabrina, what you said about families. It probably does help families with work-life balance, but you can't have just the youngest workers coming in and the oldest workers on remote because you're not going to get the in-office psychosocial development that you need. The last thing I'll say is that, and I've seen this stat a few different places:

30% or a third of people met a romantic partner at their office or through work. We already know that people aren't hitting major life milestones. They're not coupling up, they're not having kids. If you take away the place where up to a third of people have the potential to meet that romantic partner, I think it has huge social implications that we aren't thinking about and that aren't discussed.

These are intangible things that are often just left to the side. There are real-life consequences for us choosing not to interact with one another. So, I'm sympathetic to banks and governments, and I know I'm going to get hate mail for this, but I do think people should be in the office four to five days a week.

Sabrina Maddeaux: You know, Meredith, a lot of what you said is true. There are all these intangibles, and there is a lot of value to meeting coworkers face-to-face for sure, and mentorship is harder to do virtually. I think, unfortunately, if you polled young people who could face up to a two-hour commute, they'd probably still pick virtual over that in-person mentorship.

The other thing is, I also question how much employers who are forcing this return to office five days are actually meaningfully investing in that company culture and that mentorship. Again, no question, both are important, but in my experience, a lot of workplaces invest a lot less in those things than in years and decades past.

As well, physical office spaces have gotten significantly worse. Hotel desking, where workers don't have their own space anymore, or overcrowded offices where there's not even enough desks for people unless they show up at 7 a.m.

There are really inhospitable environments for having that social, mentorship and professional development that you're talking about. I think a lot of younger workers ultimately don't feel that employers are holding up their end of the bargain on this front, which isn't about them being entitled, but that's the bargain that employers themselves are putting on the table when they make the arguments for return to office.

Meredith Martin: Yeah, I would just say that it's a tricky thing to navigate, but a lot of the work mentorship that I had in my job was organic, and the culture was organic.

If leadership is bad, you're going to have a bad work environment, so you need to have good leaders. I would say if there are more and more people returning to the office and their experience within that office isn't good, there are things that workers can do to push back on bad environments, and that is to organize.

This is why I think this is maybe politically not the best idea for the Ford government to be mandating people. I think he is going to face backlash from just an insane amount of traffic, because although I am in favour of people working in an office, I'm not in favour of people losing two hours of their lives to commuting. That's a terrible idea. I think we all agree that people should have more housing options, and a lot more of those should be closer to where there are big employers.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, I would say I think it's a little bit different than when you and I were younger, because the office experience is just different than it was in 2005. Even if you have everyone in the office, we weren't on Zoom in 2005. A lot of the work that happens in the office is still, at the end of the day, remote work. You're still talking into a screen. You're still talking into a camera. You're just doing it in a different building.

I do see benefits in the mentorship, but I think we overestimate the amount of mentorship that goes on. Yes, people still form romantic relationships at work, but you could do that remotely if you are on screen like this.

I'm happily married, so this is not me talking, but you see somebody in a Zoom chat, and you get to know each other, and you find out you're both single. So I still think that these things can happen.

Overall, I fear we may end up romanticizing the office experience or thinking that the office experience is like it was for young workers in 2005 and 1995. I think it's fundamentally changed, and I don't think we're going to get that toothpaste back in the tube.

Meredith Martin: You might be right, and you might be wrong. I guess we'll find out, won't we? We'll see if there's another hit show that comes out of this next round of back to the office.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Could make for a good sitcom, I'm sure.

Meredith Martin: For sure, it could.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Well, thank you, everyone, for watching and listening, and to our producer, Meredith Martin, and thank you for coming on and actually making an appearance today!

Meredith Martin: Thanks for having me.

Mike Moffatt: If you have any thoughts or questions about how to ask out your co-workers in a remote work scenario, please send us an email to missingmiddlepodcasts at gmail.com.

Meredith Martin: And we'll see you next time!