President of the Canadian Treasury Board, Mona Fortier has backed away from issuing a blanket mandatory order for Federal employees to be allowed to work from home during the latest COVID-19 surge, saying she will leave the decision to individual Departments.
In a letter to Public Service unions, Ms Fortier (pictured) said such a one-size-fits-all approach would not work for some 100 Departments and Agencies.
“Each department has a different mandate and operational requirements,” Ms Fortier said.
“Also, Deputy Ministers are responsible for their Departments, including the health and safety of employees,” she said.
“Recognising that each Department will have its own operational requirements, there can be no one-size-fits-all approach, and as it has been the case throughout the pandemic, there are some Public Servants whose work cannot be done remotely.”
Ms Fortier was responding to a letter from 13 unions that asked the Treasury Board’s Chief Resources Officer to send a clear order to Deputy Ministers that employees who could work from home should be able to do so, now and for future waves of the pandemic to come.
The unions argued that working from home, if possible, should be mandatory for the remainder of the pandemic as it was when Public Servants were first sent home to work in March 2020.
With the vaccine mandate in place, Departments had been slowly phasing in back-to-office plans when the highly infectious Omicron variant of the virus hit.
The Government then issued new guidelines encouraging Departments to put plans to return more workers to the office on hold and to review existing levels of staffing in Federal workplaces.
For now, the unions’ concerns are moot – Public Servants who can do their jobs from home are doing so as Omicron tightens its grip.
They worry, however, about what happens in the coming months, with no end to the pandemic in sight.
Ottawa, 19 January 2022
