Fewer and fewer employers letting Canadians work from home, data shows

Commute times return to pre-pandemic levels New data from Statistics Canada shows that commute times have returned to pre-pandemic levels. CTV News’ Colton Praill on the added time.

The proportion of Canadians working from home has been falling for the past three years, according to a new report.

Statistics Canada says 18.7 per cent of employees worked mostly from home in May 2024, which is the most recent month with available data. That’s down from a high of 24.3 per cent in May 2021.

The number has edged down each year since the pandemic, though significantly more people are still working remotely this year than in the past. The report compares current numbers to 2016, when only 7.1 per cent of workers were at home.

The share of people working remotely dropped this year in Quebec, Saskatchewan and Ontario, but went up in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.

Ontario still had the highest share of remote workers at 21.7 per cent, while Saskatchewan came in at the bottom with 10.1 per cent, the report says.

More commuters, longer commutes

Statistics Canada defines commuters as "employed people who work most of their hours outside the home, either with a usual fixed place of work or with no fixed work location" — those who don’t commute are defined as working from home.

In May, there were 16.5 million commuters in Canada, 585,000 more than in 2023. Employment also grew by 373,000 during that time.

And as more people return to commuting, the average trip to work is also taking longer. In May, the average commute time was 26.4 minutes, similar to the previous high of 26.3 minutes in 2016

For the past three years, the proportion of commuters with a trip of at least an hour has also gone up. Nearly one in 10 people — 9.2 per cent — spent 60 minutes or more travelling to work. That’s up from 8.7 per cent in 2023 and 8.1 per cent in 2022.

Long trips to work are most common in Oshawa, Ont., where one-fifth of commuters (20.0 per cent) travel an hour or more. Next on the list are Toronto (15.7 per cent), Barrie, Ont. (14.6 per cent), Abbotsford–Mission, B.C. (14.2 per cent) and Hamilton, Ont. (13.8 per cent).

Public transit still not back

The percentage of commuters taking public transit hit a record low of 7.8 per cent in 2021. It’s bounced back to 11.4 per cent this year, but that figure is still lower than levels in 2016, where it was 12.6 per cent.

Comparing 2024 to 2016, transit-taking was especially down in Ottawa–Gatineau (-6.6 percentage points), Winnipeg (-4.3 percentage points) and Quebec City (-2.4 percentage points).

Conversely, the Ontario regions of Kitchener–Cambridge–Waterloo (+2.8 percentage points) and Hamilton (+2.4 percentage points) are both currently seeing a higher proportion of people taking transit compared to pre-pandemic.