The mayor of Montreal is defending her administration’s decision to require municipal employees to work in the office three days per week just as negotiations with the workers’ union got underway. The administration announced the new telework policy in an email to white-collar workers last Wednesday. The new policy for the roughly 6,000 employees — or 30 per cent of the workforce — will begin on Sept. 14, the mayor’s spokesperson confirmed to CTV News. The remainder of the workforce already comes to the office three days per week. “Three days a week. That’s a good balance,” Montreal Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada told reporters on Thursday. She said the new policy will help develop collaboration, innovation, and creativity among the public sector workforce. She also rejected criticism from the workers’ union that the new policy was the city’s way of “pleasing” the Montreal Chamber of Commerce. “No, not at all. The Chamber of Commerce doesn’t run the city. It’s the city’s general manager who runs the city,” the mayor said. “We decided that we needed to provide a workspace that’s balanced once again where people also work together, not just remotely.” The Chamber of Commerce released a report last January that stated 18.6 per cent of offices in downtown Montreal were vacant, compared to a vacancy rate of just under 10 per cent in 2019. The decrease in activity translates into $14.1 million in economic losses every week for downtown businesses. The Syndicat des fonctionnaires municipaux de Montréal (SFMM - SCFP 429), one of the largest municipal unions in Quebec, denounced the decision, one week after negotiations started with the city. “Clearly, the City of Montreal is demonstrating that it does not want to negotiate and that it prefers to use its workers to score political points,” the group said on social media. “Last week, the union sat down at the negotiating table with a reasonable and well-thought-out list of demands. For its part, the City of Montreal presented a list of demands that were excessive and regressive. Less than a week after the first meeting, the City of Montreal confirmed its strategy of provocation.” The mayor said she was following in the footsteps of other municipal governments, which have also changed their hybrid work policies. Public servants at the provincial level in Quebec were told to work in the office three days per week last December. The City of Ottawa went further than Montreal when it ordered all its workers to be in the office five days per week since Jan. 1 of this year. At the federal level, the Liberal government ordered all public servants in the core public administration to be in the office at least four days a week by July 6, 2026, while executives are expected to be on-site five days per week by May 4, 2026. The current hybrid work policy in the federal government is three days per week for public servants and four days per week for executives. Other major Canadian businesses, such as RBC and Scotiabank, have reconfigured their hybrid work policies for workers, requiring four or five days at the office.
