‘There’s a very real human toll to the commute:’ Workers prepare for longer drives amid push for return to office

CUPE members at Ontario Health atHome will hold a province-wide day of action to protest Premier Doug Ford's return to office mandate. Rahim Ladhani reports.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to remove the last name of a source who spoke with CTV News at the time of publication.

On winter mornings in York Region, Mike scrapes ice from his windshield before sunrise and points his car south toward Highway 404.

On a good day, the drive from Keswick to North York takes about 50 minutes.

However on a bad one with snow, freezing rain, and an accident — he says it can stretch to three hours.

“In the peak of the worst weather, they expect us to be scraping the car off and driving through horrible weather,” he said.

As Ontario sends tens of thousands of public servants back to the office as of this week, Mike worries those bad days are about to become routine.

In August, the province announced that all 60,000 Ontario Public Service employees will be required to be in the office full time starting in January, while federal public servants have already been ordered back at least three days a week.

Rogers Communications has also said that it will require its employees to be in the office five days a week as of February.

Mike, a 34-year-old emergency management worker with the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services, is one of the public servants who has been impacted by the push for more employees to work exclusively from the office.

He was previously commuting to work in North York three days a week but will now be going in five days a week, something that he says will mean hours more fighting through GTA traffic.

“Morale is at an all time low that I’ve never seen before,” he says. “There was no kind of warning or reason to do this. There was no performance shortcoming in the ministries, for them to prompt this.”

‘Barely scraping by’ on top of the new mandate

Statistics Canada says Toronto already has the longest average commute in the country — 34.9 minutes in May 2025, up 1.6 minutes from a year earlier and notes commute times rise as workers spend more days physically in the office.

For his part, Premier Doug Ford has defended the return to office for Ontario’s civil servant as necessary for better productivity.

But Mike says the commute and the cost of it is putting unneeded pressures on many workers.

“Making 100 grand used to be like this golden ticket,” he said. “Now, it’s like you’re barely scraping by… you’re paycheck to paycheck, and you’re making boiled pasta like five nights a week.”

Mike lives in Keswick with his partner and their nine-year-old daughter.

Each morning, he drives from near Woodbine and Highway 404 toward North York, parking near a TTC lot before heading into work.

His current commute is manageable on paper.

However, he says the mandate has already forced his family to buy a second car to manage childcare emergencies and overlapping schedules.

“This mandate has forced me to purchase a second car,” he said. “Now I’ve got the added cost… because my wife now needs to have a car... what if there’s an emergency at school?"

He says every vehicle his family has owned has surpassed 200,000 kilometres — a sign, he argues, of long-term financial strain that commuting only worsens.

Meanwhile, others say the pressure isn’t limited to just car owners.

In past few weeks, CTV News Toronto has heard from dozens of residents who say the shift is leaving them anxious about longer drives, higher costs and less time with their families.

‘Stress and panic attacks’

Liz Morris, who lives in Hamilton and is currently on parental leave, says the idea of returning to downtown Toronto even three days a week fills her with dread.

Morris is also a civil servant but is not an Ontario Public Service member and won’t be subject to the five-day a week requirement, unless her employer follows suit.

“The first word that comes to mind is stress followed by panic attacks,” she said.

Morris is currently expected to attend the office a minimum of three days a week.

When required to be in office, Morris wakes at 4:30 a.m., drives to a GO station and catches a 5 a.m. train to Toronto for a start time of 7 a.m., returning home around 5 p.m. on a good day.

“If I get home at five, by the time I get my dinner ready, her dinner ready, bath, all that stuff… I’ve gotten maybe an hour of fun time with her, and then it’s bedtime,” she said.

“I am spending at minimum 4 hours of my day unpaid in commute for a job that can be completed entirely from home and has been for a few years now successfully.”

She estimates commuting alone costs more than $30 a day, on top of already high daycare fees.

“I choose to live in Hamilton, but I also cannot afford to live in Toronto,” Morris said. “That is not an option for me.”

Losing out on the ‘ideal life’

In Scarborough, Shreya Mistry says her commute from Woodbridge to North York used to take about 20 minutes.

Now, it routinely takes more than an hour.

“The ideal life is you go to the gym maybe three to five days a week,” she said. “I can’t do that… it’s a luxury right now.”

Mistry is a healthcare worker who has always been required to be onsite fulltime but she worries that the return of more white collar workers to the office will also impact her commute.

Using Highway 407 to avoid traffic would cost her roughly $60 a day — an expense she says is unrealistic.

“If I were to use it on a daily basis, that’s unimaginable,” she added.

What experts have to say

Some transportation experts warn the system may not be able to absorb what’s coming.

“I think people should be very concerned, both policy-makers and commuters themselves, about the impact that a back-to-work mandate is going to have on the commute,” said Jennifer Keesmaat, a former chief planner for the City of Toronto.

• ‘Toronto traffic, transit congestion likely to worsen with in-office mandates: experts

She said even small increases in vehicle traffic can push roads past a tipping point, especially when transit ridership remains slow to recover.

University of Toronto professor Matti Siemiatycki, however, says working from home doesn’t eliminate travel — it changes when and how people move.

“When people are working from home, it doesn’t mean they’re not on the roads,” he said. “It just means they’re using those roads differently.”

Peak-hour office trips, he noted, are the ones transit is best designed to handle — yet transit systems are struggling to regain ridership.

“The big question mark for me is, can transit get its mojo back?” Siemiatycki said. “Because, if not, as more people come back… we will have a traffic nightmare on our hands.”

The debate comes as Toronto braces for additional pressure next summer, when the city is set to host World Cup matches.

For commuters like Mike, the issue feels less theoretical.

“There’s a very real human toll to the commute,” he said. “There’s been no proof showing that the full five days is going to benefit anyone… it’s going to cause pain and suffering and generate no economic gain.”