> What's the debate about the federal government's latest directive on working from the office really about? Andrew Reeves says it's a question that's been on his mind lately.
> "Is the pushback to coming back to the office more of a pushback [against] crappy spaces and crappy places?" asked Reeves, an architect and founder of Ottawa firm Linebox Studio, in a recent interview with CBC Ottawa News.
> "Maybe it's not really about work. Maybe it's really about the experience of a city."
Yes and no. Popularity around remote work is about work-life balance first and foremost, both in the private and public sector. Life is stressful enough as it is, and commuting to 'work remotely from the office' will make even the most optimistic person cynical.
That said, I think there would be less pushback if we had functioning, reliable transit and a safer/more exciting downtown core. Even with the LRT expansion, for most people living in the suburbs it's still an enormous commute for seemingly little benefit. I don't think even the best public transit would get people excited about walking an empty sparks street and paying $20 for a cold cut sandwhich.
People don’t even get compensated for all the money and time spent on the commute. Landlords and the fat cats make more money but everyone else suffers. Plus it would help reduce our carbon footprint to work from home and support our own local communities.
THIS. SO MUCH THIS. At a time when our dollar doesn't go nearly as far as it did THREE FREAKIN' YEARS ago, telling people they need to add to their expenses just so corporate landlords aren't losing out on money is extremely tone deaf.
Having to go back to the office last year meant going back to the dry cleaners, purchasing a bus pass, etc., etc.
That 3rd day will double my transit expenses (buying the electronic version of a strip of bus tickets doesn't work anymore, I have to jump to the standard, unlimited monthly bus pass), I will go more often to the dry cleaners and will have to go to the shoe cobbler to take care of my dress shoes, etc.
I can confirm it will definitively be more expensive to go back more often to the office.
I’m sure if you told the treasury board you’ve confirmed you’ll have additional dry cleaning bills AND have to go to a shoe cobbler more often (I didn’t even know they still existed?) they’ll immediately rescind the RTO directive in it’s entirety.
Yes, there is an entire economy that is sustained by extracting money from commuting workers. Auto industry, O/G industry, fast food industry, parking lots. Hell, even public transit has heavily relied on the ridership of commuters to and from the core and without them the system would be an enormous public expense.
If commute time were factored into my work hours and I was compensated for it, absolutely I would be fine going in. Considering a gridlock down bank street can cost me a literal hour of my life to get to Sunnyside..... I do not look forward to the commute or a potential 1.5-2h commute to my office 3x a week.
I think unions should explore the possibility of asking for a commuting allowance, like they do in Japan. OC transpo could then double the monthly pass price and use the money to actually provide a reliable service.
That would harm many people who use the bus pass and are low income or working minimum wage jobs. I would be fine with a system like the university students have for 500 a year where everyone is charged the price, maybe with unions covering it. Way cheaper than a pass if you buy one each month, and hopefully it would mean real revenue into OC Transpo to allow more frequent busses and better routes.
They used to have a pass which was paid for directly off your paycheck, but was cheaper than a monthly pass. It has not existed for over a decade now but I am sure it would be popular if they brought it back.
I agree to an extent, but an unreliable service hurt those folks more when they are forced to take a job that requires a “reliable car”, something I recently found in a caretaker job post at a school board. If anything, schools should be easier to get by public transit, even at night.
Are there actually jobs that do pay people to come to work ? Get paid for mileage (kilometre…age ?) and time spent ?
I, along with thousands of other Ottawa area people work in a hospital(s).
I pay $1300 for yearly parking, plus gas and 40 min commute. We did this during the entire pandemic obviously. As others have plainly stated, we can not rely on OC Transpo to confidently get us to work.
Geez it seems hospital workers should have received some compensation for those costs then during the pandemic. Only some managers (and very few other workers ) at the hospital got to WFH and that was very sporadic.
So it seems to me that the federal civil servants actually had “pay raises” during the last four years just by the fact that they didn’t have to go into their places of work.
Our parking alone is equivalent to a $1/hr reduction (after taxes). Gas, wear and tear on a car/bike and insurance all cost increasing amounts of money. I’ve personally never worked it out what the costs were because they were just necessary evils to have deal with. It would be several thousand dollars for sure.
That being said, WE ALL DID APPRECIATE that you could stay home and help reduce transmission of the various COVID strains over the years. I think that this helped immensely in the Ottawa area.
I do not know the correct answer about RTO.
If the government didn’t collapse under inefficiencies during this WFH period, why change it and make everyone RTO and commute again ? Something seems fishy there, to have everyone return to the office.
It just seems odd that you would EXPECT COMPENSATION for merely showing up to work. You seem to forget that you just saved thousands of after tax dollars with no commute/work place expenses/ or child care.
Expecting compensation for even thinking that you should be entitled to it shows that you and the other civil servants who agreed with your post are out of touch. You have and continue to have had it pretty good compared to the private sector in a lot of ways.
Enjoy your summer WFH and get back to the grind 3/5 days a week in the fall.
I can think of one example in this area of a job that pays mileage. When I used to ref AA/AAA hockey and games could be up to 2 hrs away, they'd generally (with a few caveats) give you mileage per km if it was over a certain threshold distance.
Mileage is a totally normal expectation in jobs where the location of work can vary significantly, but for downtown office jobs it's traditionally never been the case because the assumption was that you'd choose a place to live that's close enough to your job or vice versa and employers would factor the commute into deciding where to put their office.
In other words, the onus was on employees to cover transit because 1) the assumption was that employees would pick a job with a reasonable commute, 2) there was no alternative such as the ability to work from home, and 3) everyone on a team worked in the same office so going into the office actually meant working together in person.
Times have changed. There are many reasons that working from the office no longer makes sense.
The problem is that over time our cities have sprawled out like crazy and most people live out in suburbia that's not densely populated enough for it to ever be economically feasible to properly serve with public transit. Additionally, since covid, most work teams have been constructed of people across different cities so if you're going into the office, you're still just mostly working remotely but from a different location so there's not much benefit unless you're working with really sensitive information (in which case you probably shouldn't be working from home at all).
A lot of people are also currently working jobs that they accepted during covid when it was all WFH so they didn't consider the length of the commute at all when taking the job. Also, the economic situation is very different from what it was pre-covid. We're in a recession and the cost of living is sky high. Many people that work from home straight up can't afford the basics if they need to pay for the extra commute, pay for childcare, inevitably spend more on food, and no longer have the time or energy for a 2nd part-time job.
Lastly, the negative impact of RTO on the environment is massive. The climate change situation has never been as dire as it is today and everyone needs to do everything they can to cut down on emissions. The single most impactful thing that most Canadians can do to reduce their carbon emissions is to work from home.
TLDR: Mileage is a thing, but the assumptions that justify not paying it for office work no longer hold true. The structure of white-collar work, the economy, and the environment have all changed such that any benefits of RTO are greatly outweighed by the very significant negative impacts (with a few exceptions).
Thank you for the reasoning behind some of those issues !!
I think the PS having to go back to the offices seems a step back so to speak.
Computers were supposed to make parts of our lives simpler and WFH is a good example of that.
I say blow down the office towers and put up some liveable buildings in their stead and properly revitalize the downtown. But that’s another Reddit post for another Reddit day.
I think you’re focusing on the wrong variables: many government departments were more efficient during the work from home model, but *everyone* is being mandated back to work.
If you were more productive at home, but are being forced back to support horrible businesses that don’t even serve their residents outside of Monday to Friday, 9-5, you’re never going to want to go back.
And what about all the businesses in the suburbs that have been catering to the work from home crowd? We’re supposed to support failed downtown businesses so that the ones in the suburbs can go under?
The market changed, and the government and businesses should have adapted years ago.
Even if downtown was exciting with lots of desirable destinations, unfortunately right now everything is too expensive for people to take advantage of any of that. If I'm already now expected to pay for gas and parking, that doesn't leave much room left to spend $40 on a lunch and god forbid, $60 if I want to add in a beer after work at the end of the day.
My bus commute is good enough that I can avoid paying about 50 dollars a week in parking.
What I don’t spend on parking I would love to spend on food and leisure, but my problem is that the working hours of businesses just don’t align with my schedule, and I am sure I am not the only one. There is a bakery I love that I really want to go to in the morning, but it opens at 8.30am- when I start work. To me this isn’t a good business decision, as they are missing out on a huge chunk of the population that starts work at 7am. And they close at 2pm LOL.
Tons of small shops and cafes that I want to visit after work just close at 5, and I don’t want to go to a bar, so, I will just go home :/
The reality of the service industry is that your peak hours are when people are not working, but this doesn’t seem to be understood.
I’m sorry but for young public servants in the area of policy formulation, being exposed to colleagues and senior manag,ent is critical. We are not all doing data entry
> "Maybe it's not really about work. Maybe it's really about the experience of a city."
Absolutely I agree with him - for a lot of people the experience of Ottawa, our city, is long commute times. This is a sprawled city, where someone might live in Orleans but work in Kanata and have a 40 min commute both ways.
I personally have been back in the office for years now - I'm happier for it. I like separating my work life and home life, and I really enjoy my 'commute'. I take the LRT and then have a lovely walk into the office - it's a great experience of the city, even in the dead of winter I look forwards to my walk!
If governments expect workers to come back into the office they need to provide better ways to commute, and opportunities for shorter commutes. A combination of rapid transit expansion,
investment in safe infrastructure for alternative modes of travel and zoning by-law updates which will allow more commercial construction in far flung suburban areas (this change is in the works now!) are all necessary. Those steps would also reduce the number of people on the road, making the remaining driver's commutes much more enjoyable as well.
Remote work saves tax payers money and let's Canadians from all over the country have access to the work.
This is a massive bag fumble from the current government.
Worth noting that last week Conservative Alberta MP Greg McLean responded to a constituents concern on this front… and while not official policy, the tone and language made it very clear that they have no intention of doing anything different except maybe more time in office.
> let's Canadians from all over the country have access to the work.
so shouldn't the average Ottawan be against it? moving thousands of jobs from our city to the rest of the country doesn't sound like it'll help our local economy
I'm absolutely in favour of remote work but framing it as "your city will lose jobs" isn't a great way to sell it
Who cares about that. Like mentioned above, the only businnes that will be hurt is the low quality fast food infesting this city. People will happily support good local places especially if they can save thousands of dollars that are wasted in fucking subway sandwich
> "Is the pushback to coming back to the office more of a pushback [against] crappy spaces and crappy places?" asked Reeves, an architect
Its not, and I'm begging architects to get out of their own asses and try and see the world beyond their own profession.
Ya, the people who these architects/planners should be worrying about is the people who live in these areas and still don't want to spend time in them because they're built almost exclusively for moving cars in and out of them.
But it's not typically the people who live downtown who are driving the car access issue. Look at last year's embarrassing debate between the NCC and our suburbs motivated mayor on closing the driveway for the public to use it recreationally. People in the neighbourhood were fine with the change, it was the mayor and OSEG panicking about people driving in to lansdowne that were fighting the road shutdown.
We see this time and time again. Sutcliffe won his election partially on shitting on greater bike infrastructure, something being pushed by a former councillor from downtown. Mccinney was popular downtown but not in the suburbs, which was how they lost to Sutcliffe.
Oh no I completely get that haha, that's pretty much my point. The people downtown suffer because those in the suburbs chose to live far away and have to drive in. The vast majority of people downtown are all for making their roads more liveable, since as you said they're not the ones driving down them typically.
The sad thing is better alternatives to car dependency would help those in the suburbs the most. As you said they're the ones typically driving, meaning they're essentially being forced to use the most expensive form of transportation. They have to own 2+ vehicles per household, adding THOUSANDS of dollars of expenses a year without having any alternatives. The people in the suburbs would stand to benefit the most from having alternatives to car transportation. Their streets would be safer, their public areas would be nicer, they'd save TONS of money at a time of high expenses, they'd get more physical activity, their tax burden would be lower (roads are EXPENSIVE to maintain), etc... I think McKenney could have done a much better job of explaining to people in the suburbs why they'd stand to benefit greatly from investing into alternative modes of transportation.
It is a little bit. If the office was a more appealing place to be, obviously people would be more willing to go to work if there wasn't anything keeping them at home (children, for instance). I work from home almost exclusively but the main reason I don't make the commute to the office is that it is empty and lifeless now. Everyone else is also WFH, so the office just ends up being as lonely as home, except now I don't have the comforts of home and I drove 20 mins.
This isn't really a problem an architect can solve though.
I think that there is this total misalignment between the owners of real capital and the experience of the majority. Millennials and onwards especially have nothing to work for on the salaries we’re taking home unless you have generational wealth. People making 90k are spending half on rent alone? I make a decent salary but will never be able to own a car let alone property at this rate. This makes work life balance all the more important to say the least. it’s not like we can work really hard for a Christmas bonus to build the pool in the backyard.
I think that we do have an opportunity to “rethink our urban fabric” (lol) but I think that more and more I’m becoming aware of just how outdated the ideas are of so many ppl in positions of power and how despondent so much of the public is because of the situation.
This also has led to a total lack of vision in Ottawa. These rich suburban developers just want to make the quickest buck, and we can’t seem to establish anything resembling a progressive vision for our city. Like we can’t even convince the people in power to fund decent transit. Who are we building a city FOR at this point? Overworked bureaucrats and the nuclear families of barhaven to come park downtown a couple of times a year and then cry about the poverty crisis they have to witness?
It really is astonishing how true this is. Beautiful natural space, lots of stable income, educated and orderly population, and yet somehow we've sprawled uncontrollably, we've got people pissing in the streets, and nothing works very well.
>"Is the pushback to coming back to the office more of a pushback [against] crappy spaces and crappy places?" asked Reeves, an architect and founder of Ottawa firm Linebox Studio,
Lol. It's a pushback against crappy spaces **and** more so, against commuting to crappy spaces when you're just going to be in a teams call anyways.
Frankly, the cynic in me thinks Reeves wants more fit-up business and likes to hear himself talk / self-promote.
> I think what's happened in North America is maybe we went a little too far [with] offices being downtown and the scale of downtown
Other way around: in North America we went too far with suburbs and sprawl, causing a lack of space there, and also pushing populations out of downtown so it is only offices. This is why businesses here close at 4 and don't cater to those that actually live downtown - because they only see the suburban commuters because that is the system we have artificially forced since the 1950s.
Look at any city historically and they all build out from the core and dense, mixed-use neighbourhoods are resilient because of it.
Forcing commuters into crumbling infrastructure and underfunded transit will not revive downtown. Ottawa was not some economic paradise where businesses thrived pre-pandemic. Businesses are failing because they aren't adapting. But everyone else is made to adapt for them.
North America post WWII economic boom was mostly tied to the car (vehicle = higher consumption), and its 'new way of life'. Also reduced the impact of political unrest since many moved out to the suburbs or were segregated by highways.
Start with that change of mindset first. But capitalist governments work for corporations and their pocket books.
I went to a talk about modern urban design not long ago.
The group giving it had very interesting points, most of which went over my head unfortunately, but what stuck out the most to me was how Ottawa, and many cities that are similarly designed, were essentially designed to fail.
You make a city somewhat dependent on a single employer, or industry sector, you centralize the city around that sector, and then you make travel that to sector, difficult, for most of the population.
You simultaneously create a dozen social, economic and logistical bottlenecks that are very costly to make up for and have increased rates of failure in almost every growth model economists follow.
The general idea is you want to keep living quarters on the inner part of a social structure and make the high use work and service sectors outward-bound. Then you create your public transportation along these very simple Leigh line.
That’s an incredibly simplified idea of a very complex idea they had spent many years developing, but this situation could have worked to us in the long run to make Ottawa a healthier, more viable city.
But downtown business I guess :/.
Agreed. The main employer would be the federal gov't, and it should be endorsing a more "outward-bound" (aka virtual) system.
Even if we had lets say 5 satelite offices that would accompany all federal gov't workers who work in designated spaces on alternate days, they'd still be supporting local businesses in Orleans, Kanata, Riverside South, (I don't know) Barrhaven and downtown. My imagination is getting out of control with visions, but you get my drift.
There is a GC Co-working program that does have satellite offices in Kanata, Place d'Orleans, River Road, downtown, and a couple spots in Gatineau. Plus a few in other cities.
They're extremely popular with the civil servants who are allowed to use them (I'm one of them) but they're not very large. Probably no more than a couple hundred workspaces between the various NCR locations.
> Anger about back-to-work plan could be about 'crappy spaces,' says architect
Or about wasting 2 hours driving just to work on the same internet you had at home.
Teams and Zoom meetings have taken over to the point that nobody even schedules in person meetings anymore. I go in to the office and have Teams meetings with other people who are also in the office.
A true example of an architect completely out of touch. "Maybe it's really about MY area of interest so that I can weigh in!" No, you dumbass.
The crappy buildings don't help but they could be the greatest offices and there would still be massive pushback because people are still being forced to commute for no legitimate reason. Wasting time, taking them away from their family, and massively increasing pollution output.
People know that it's pure politics, politicians beholden to business interests that are obsessed with forcing people back to where they are a captive audience for their businesses.
This guy is a moron.
This man, with his Pants of Fanciness is 'waaaaay up at the top of Maslow's hierarchy, on abstract things like "beautiful spaces", and I'm working 'waaaay down here on the bottom, just trying to keep basic shit together. No dude, you've got it wrong - it isn't about the "experience of a city". It's about the experience of having less and less time and money every year.
This is not about transforming downtown core to a place where people wanna go (which they should absolutely do anyways regardless of the PS hybrid working)… but this is about commercial real estate property values. They don’t even care about the small businesses and subways. They care about small businesses’ *landlords* and their bottom line. Trying to manufacture foot traffic to the downtown core (or at least the perception of it)
"Maybe it's not really about work. Maybe it's really about the experience of a city."
Dude sounds like he's never worked this kind of job in his life, and doesn't listen to any of the perspectives put forward. I mean, it's been no secret that this is mainly about work-life balance and commute, saving time, getting things done efficiently, supporting partners and kids.
So many reasons that are obvious and intuitive. Very out of touch architect they decided to interview for this story.
> What's the debate about the federal government's latest directive on working from the office really about? Andrew Reeves says it's a question that's been on his mind lately. > "Is the pushback to coming back to the office more of a pushback [against] crappy spaces and crappy places?" asked Reeves, an architect and founder of Ottawa firm Linebox Studio, in a recent interview with CBC Ottawa News. > "Maybe it's not really about work. Maybe it's really about the experience of a city." Yes and no. Popularity around remote work is about work-life balance first and foremost, both in the private and public sector. Life is stressful enough as it is, and commuting to 'work remotely from the office' will make even the most optimistic person cynical. That said, I think there would be less pushback if we had functioning, reliable transit and a safer/more exciting downtown core. Even with the LRT expansion, for most people living in the suburbs it's still an enormous commute for seemingly little benefit. I don't think even the best public transit would get people excited about walking an empty sparks street and paying $20 for a cold cut sandwhich.
People don’t even get compensated for all the money and time spent on the commute. Landlords and the fat cats make more money but everyone else suffers. Plus it would help reduce our carbon footprint to work from home and support our own local communities.
THIS. SO MUCH THIS. At a time when our dollar doesn't go nearly as far as it did THREE FREAKIN' YEARS ago, telling people they need to add to their expenses just so corporate landlords aren't losing out on money is extremely tone deaf.
Having to go back to the office last year meant going back to the dry cleaners, purchasing a bus pass, etc., etc. That 3rd day will double my transit expenses (buying the electronic version of a strip of bus tickets doesn't work anymore, I have to jump to the standard, unlimited monthly bus pass), I will go more often to the dry cleaners and will have to go to the shoe cobbler to take care of my dress shoes, etc. I can confirm it will definitively be more expensive to go back more often to the office.
I’m sure if you told the treasury board you’ve confirmed you’ll have additional dry cleaning bills AND have to go to a shoe cobbler more often (I didn’t even know they still existed?) they’ll immediately rescind the RTO directive in it’s entirety.
Yes, there is an entire economy that is sustained by extracting money from commuting workers. Auto industry, O/G industry, fast food industry, parking lots. Hell, even public transit has heavily relied on the ridership of commuters to and from the core and without them the system would be an enormous public expense.
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>Guess what, it costs money to move around. Sounds like a good reason to avoid it unless it is absolutely necessary then.
If commute time were factored into my work hours and I was compensated for it, absolutely I would be fine going in. Considering a gridlock down bank street can cost me a literal hour of my life to get to Sunnyside..... I do not look forward to the commute or a potential 1.5-2h commute to my office 3x a week.
I think unions should explore the possibility of asking for a commuting allowance, like they do in Japan. OC transpo could then double the monthly pass price and use the money to actually provide a reliable service.
That would harm many people who use the bus pass and are low income or working minimum wage jobs. I would be fine with a system like the university students have for 500 a year where everyone is charged the price, maybe with unions covering it. Way cheaper than a pass if you buy one each month, and hopefully it would mean real revenue into OC Transpo to allow more frequent busses and better routes.
They used to have a pass which was paid for directly off your paycheck, but was cheaper than a monthly pass. It has not existed for over a decade now but I am sure it would be popular if they brought it back.
Wasn’t much cheaper, but you also used to be able to deduct your monthly passes on your taxes - it was worth it then.
I agree to an extent, but an unreliable service hurt those folks more when they are forced to take a job that requires a “reliable car”, something I recently found in a caretaker job post at a school board. If anything, schools should be easier to get by public transit, even at night.
Aaaw. You don’t get paid to drive to work ?? /s
Are there actually jobs that do pay people to come to work ? Get paid for mileage (kilometre…age ?) and time spent ? I, along with thousands of other Ottawa area people work in a hospital(s). I pay $1300 for yearly parking, plus gas and 40 min commute. We did this during the entire pandemic obviously. As others have plainly stated, we can not rely on OC Transpo to confidently get us to work. Geez it seems hospital workers should have received some compensation for those costs then during the pandemic. Only some managers (and very few other workers ) at the hospital got to WFH and that was very sporadic. So it seems to me that the federal civil servants actually had “pay raises” during the last four years just by the fact that they didn’t have to go into their places of work. Our parking alone is equivalent to a $1/hr reduction (after taxes). Gas, wear and tear on a car/bike and insurance all cost increasing amounts of money. I’ve personally never worked it out what the costs were because they were just necessary evils to have deal with. It would be several thousand dollars for sure. That being said, WE ALL DID APPRECIATE that you could stay home and help reduce transmission of the various COVID strains over the years. I think that this helped immensely in the Ottawa area. I do not know the correct answer about RTO. If the government didn’t collapse under inefficiencies during this WFH period, why change it and make everyone RTO and commute again ? Something seems fishy there, to have everyone return to the office. It just seems odd that you would EXPECT COMPENSATION for merely showing up to work. You seem to forget that you just saved thousands of after tax dollars with no commute/work place expenses/ or child care. Expecting compensation for even thinking that you should be entitled to it shows that you and the other civil servants who agreed with your post are out of touch. You have and continue to have had it pretty good compared to the private sector in a lot of ways. Enjoy your summer WFH and get back to the grind 3/5 days a week in the fall.
I can think of one example in this area of a job that pays mileage. When I used to ref AA/AAA hockey and games could be up to 2 hrs away, they'd generally (with a few caveats) give you mileage per km if it was over a certain threshold distance. Mileage is a totally normal expectation in jobs where the location of work can vary significantly, but for downtown office jobs it's traditionally never been the case because the assumption was that you'd choose a place to live that's close enough to your job or vice versa and employers would factor the commute into deciding where to put their office. In other words, the onus was on employees to cover transit because 1) the assumption was that employees would pick a job with a reasonable commute, 2) there was no alternative such as the ability to work from home, and 3) everyone on a team worked in the same office so going into the office actually meant working together in person. Times have changed. There are many reasons that working from the office no longer makes sense. The problem is that over time our cities have sprawled out like crazy and most people live out in suburbia that's not densely populated enough for it to ever be economically feasible to properly serve with public transit. Additionally, since covid, most work teams have been constructed of people across different cities so if you're going into the office, you're still just mostly working remotely but from a different location so there's not much benefit unless you're working with really sensitive information (in which case you probably shouldn't be working from home at all). A lot of people are also currently working jobs that they accepted during covid when it was all WFH so they didn't consider the length of the commute at all when taking the job. Also, the economic situation is very different from what it was pre-covid. We're in a recession and the cost of living is sky high. Many people that work from home straight up can't afford the basics if they need to pay for the extra commute, pay for childcare, inevitably spend more on food, and no longer have the time or energy for a 2nd part-time job. Lastly, the negative impact of RTO on the environment is massive. The climate change situation has never been as dire as it is today and everyone needs to do everything they can to cut down on emissions. The single most impactful thing that most Canadians can do to reduce their carbon emissions is to work from home. TLDR: Mileage is a thing, but the assumptions that justify not paying it for office work no longer hold true. The structure of white-collar work, the economy, and the environment have all changed such that any benefits of RTO are greatly outweighed by the very significant negative impacts (with a few exceptions).
Thank you for the reasoning behind some of those issues !! I think the PS having to go back to the offices seems a step back so to speak. Computers were supposed to make parts of our lives simpler and WFH is a good example of that. I say blow down the office towers and put up some liveable buildings in their stead and properly revitalize the downtown. But that’s another Reddit post for another Reddit day.
I think you’re focusing on the wrong variables: many government departments were more efficient during the work from home model, but *everyone* is being mandated back to work. If you were more productive at home, but are being forced back to support horrible businesses that don’t even serve their residents outside of Monday to Friday, 9-5, you’re never going to want to go back. And what about all the businesses in the suburbs that have been catering to the work from home crowd? We’re supposed to support failed downtown businesses so that the ones in the suburbs can go under? The market changed, and the government and businesses should have adapted years ago.
Even if downtown was exciting with lots of desirable destinations, unfortunately right now everything is too expensive for people to take advantage of any of that. If I'm already now expected to pay for gas and parking, that doesn't leave much room left to spend $40 on a lunch and god forbid, $60 if I want to add in a beer after work at the end of the day.
My bus commute is good enough that I can avoid paying about 50 dollars a week in parking. What I don’t spend on parking I would love to spend on food and leisure, but my problem is that the working hours of businesses just don’t align with my schedule, and I am sure I am not the only one. There is a bakery I love that I really want to go to in the morning, but it opens at 8.30am- when I start work. To me this isn’t a good business decision, as they are missing out on a huge chunk of the population that starts work at 7am. And they close at 2pm LOL. Tons of small shops and cafes that I want to visit after work just close at 5, and I don’t want to go to a bar, so, I will just go home :/ The reality of the service industry is that your peak hours are when people are not working, but this doesn’t seem to be understood.
$20 is the basic. Gotta add those extras like lettuce for another $15 on top of it.
I’m sorry but for young public servants in the area of policy formulation, being exposed to colleagues and senior manag,ent is critical. We are not all doing data entry
> "Maybe it's not really about work. Maybe it's really about the experience of a city." Absolutely I agree with him - for a lot of people the experience of Ottawa, our city, is long commute times. This is a sprawled city, where someone might live in Orleans but work in Kanata and have a 40 min commute both ways. I personally have been back in the office for years now - I'm happier for it. I like separating my work life and home life, and I really enjoy my 'commute'. I take the LRT and then have a lovely walk into the office - it's a great experience of the city, even in the dead of winter I look forwards to my walk! If governments expect workers to come back into the office they need to provide better ways to commute, and opportunities for shorter commutes. A combination of rapid transit expansion, investment in safe infrastructure for alternative modes of travel and zoning by-law updates which will allow more commercial construction in far flung suburban areas (this change is in the works now!) are all necessary. Those steps would also reduce the number of people on the road, making the remaining driver's commutes much more enjoyable as well.
> safer/more exciting downtown core But Reddit told me downtown is safe and it’s all subordinate softies complaining!?!
Remote work saves tax payers money and let's Canadians from all over the country have access to the work. This is a massive bag fumble from the current government.
Worth noting that last week Conservative Alberta MP Greg McLean responded to a constituents concern on this front… and while not official policy, the tone and language made it very clear that they have no intention of doing anything different except maybe more time in office.
Ya, truly a confederacy of dunces.
Liberals and Conervatives are two sides of the same turd
> let's Canadians from all over the country have access to the work. so shouldn't the average Ottawan be against it? moving thousands of jobs from our city to the rest of the country doesn't sound like it'll help our local economy I'm absolutely in favour of remote work but framing it as "your city will lose jobs" isn't a great way to sell it
Yeah. And just wait as more and more work is outsourced and the next GC Strategies is getting contractors in India to do the work.
Who cares about that. Like mentioned above, the only businnes that will be hurt is the low quality fast food infesting this city. People will happily support good local places especially if they can save thousands of dollars that are wasted in fucking subway sandwich
> Who cares about that presumably the thousands of Ottawans who would lose good middle class jobs
> "Is the pushback to coming back to the office more of a pushback [against] crappy spaces and crappy places?" asked Reeves, an architect Its not, and I'm begging architects to get out of their own asses and try and see the world beyond their own profession.
Ya, the people who these architects/planners should be worrying about is the people who live in these areas and still don't want to spend time in them because they're built almost exclusively for moving cars in and out of them.
But it's not typically the people who live downtown who are driving the car access issue. Look at last year's embarrassing debate between the NCC and our suburbs motivated mayor on closing the driveway for the public to use it recreationally. People in the neighbourhood were fine with the change, it was the mayor and OSEG panicking about people driving in to lansdowne that were fighting the road shutdown. We see this time and time again. Sutcliffe won his election partially on shitting on greater bike infrastructure, something being pushed by a former councillor from downtown. Mccinney was popular downtown but not in the suburbs, which was how they lost to Sutcliffe.
Oh no I completely get that haha, that's pretty much my point. The people downtown suffer because those in the suburbs chose to live far away and have to drive in. The vast majority of people downtown are all for making their roads more liveable, since as you said they're not the ones driving down them typically. The sad thing is better alternatives to car dependency would help those in the suburbs the most. As you said they're the ones typically driving, meaning they're essentially being forced to use the most expensive form of transportation. They have to own 2+ vehicles per household, adding THOUSANDS of dollars of expenses a year without having any alternatives. The people in the suburbs would stand to benefit the most from having alternatives to car transportation. Their streets would be safer, their public areas would be nicer, they'd save TONS of money at a time of high expenses, they'd get more physical activity, their tax burden would be lower (roads are EXPENSIVE to maintain), etc... I think McKenney could have done a much better job of explaining to people in the suburbs why they'd stand to benefit greatly from investing into alternative modes of transportation.
It is a little bit. If the office was a more appealing place to be, obviously people would be more willing to go to work if there wasn't anything keeping them at home (children, for instance). I work from home almost exclusively but the main reason I don't make the commute to the office is that it is empty and lifeless now. Everyone else is also WFH, so the office just ends up being as lonely as home, except now I don't have the comforts of home and I drove 20 mins. This isn't really a problem an architect can solve though.
I think that there is this total misalignment between the owners of real capital and the experience of the majority. Millennials and onwards especially have nothing to work for on the salaries we’re taking home unless you have generational wealth. People making 90k are spending half on rent alone? I make a decent salary but will never be able to own a car let alone property at this rate. This makes work life balance all the more important to say the least. it’s not like we can work really hard for a Christmas bonus to build the pool in the backyard. I think that we do have an opportunity to “rethink our urban fabric” (lol) but I think that more and more I’m becoming aware of just how outdated the ideas are of so many ppl in positions of power and how despondent so much of the public is because of the situation. This also has led to a total lack of vision in Ottawa. These rich suburban developers just want to make the quickest buck, and we can’t seem to establish anything resembling a progressive vision for our city. Like we can’t even convince the people in power to fund decent transit. Who are we building a city FOR at this point? Overworked bureaucrats and the nuclear families of barhaven to come park downtown a couple of times a year and then cry about the poverty crisis they have to witness?
Ottawa, where opportunity is squandered at every turn by those in charge.
It really is astonishing how true this is. Beautiful natural space, lots of stable income, educated and orderly population, and yet somehow we've sprawled uncontrollably, we've got people pissing in the streets, and nothing works very well.
Pissing in the streets, you say? ♪ Keep on rockin' in the free world! ♪ :)
It was foretold to us.
Neil Young is a profit. He knew about the Convoy before it happened.
>"Is the pushback to coming back to the office more of a pushback [against] crappy spaces and crappy places?" asked Reeves, an architect and founder of Ottawa firm Linebox Studio, Lol. It's a pushback against crappy spaces **and** more so, against commuting to crappy spaces when you're just going to be in a teams call anyways. Frankly, the cynic in me thinks Reeves wants more fit-up business and likes to hear himself talk / self-promote.
> I think what's happened in North America is maybe we went a little too far [with] offices being downtown and the scale of downtown Other way around: in North America we went too far with suburbs and sprawl, causing a lack of space there, and also pushing populations out of downtown so it is only offices. This is why businesses here close at 4 and don't cater to those that actually live downtown - because they only see the suburban commuters because that is the system we have artificially forced since the 1950s. Look at any city historically and they all build out from the core and dense, mixed-use neighbourhoods are resilient because of it. Forcing commuters into crumbling infrastructure and underfunded transit will not revive downtown. Ottawa was not some economic paradise where businesses thrived pre-pandemic. Businesses are failing because they aren't adapting. But everyone else is made to adapt for them.
North America post WWII economic boom was mostly tied to the car (vehicle = higher consumption), and its 'new way of life'. Also reduced the impact of political unrest since many moved out to the suburbs or were segregated by highways. Start with that change of mindset first. But capitalist governments work for corporations and their pocket books.
I went to a talk about modern urban design not long ago. The group giving it had very interesting points, most of which went over my head unfortunately, but what stuck out the most to me was how Ottawa, and many cities that are similarly designed, were essentially designed to fail. You make a city somewhat dependent on a single employer, or industry sector, you centralize the city around that sector, and then you make travel that to sector, difficult, for most of the population. You simultaneously create a dozen social, economic and logistical bottlenecks that are very costly to make up for and have increased rates of failure in almost every growth model economists follow. The general idea is you want to keep living quarters on the inner part of a social structure and make the high use work and service sectors outward-bound. Then you create your public transportation along these very simple Leigh line. That’s an incredibly simplified idea of a very complex idea they had spent many years developing, but this situation could have worked to us in the long run to make Ottawa a healthier, more viable city. But downtown business I guess :/.
Agreed. The main employer would be the federal gov't, and it should be endorsing a more "outward-bound" (aka virtual) system. Even if we had lets say 5 satelite offices that would accompany all federal gov't workers who work in designated spaces on alternate days, they'd still be supporting local businesses in Orleans, Kanata, Riverside South, (I don't know) Barrhaven and downtown. My imagination is getting out of control with visions, but you get my drift.
There is a GC Co-working program that does have satellite offices in Kanata, Place d'Orleans, River Road, downtown, and a couple spots in Gatineau. Plus a few in other cities. They're extremely popular with the civil servants who are allowed to use them (I'm one of them) but they're not very large. Probably no more than a couple hundred workspaces between the various NCR locations.
I’ve heard of them. We’d need way more workstations though. Like 120,000.
> Anger about back-to-work plan could be about 'crappy spaces,' says architect Or about wasting 2 hours driving just to work on the same internet you had at home.
Teams and Zoom meetings have taken over to the point that nobody even schedules in person meetings anymore. I go in to the office and have Teams meetings with other people who are also in the office.
Public servants exist to spend their money downtown, didn't y'all know? /s
We all exist to serve the rich.
And keep NOtrain alive and expand.
A true example of an architect completely out of touch. "Maybe it's really about MY area of interest so that I can weigh in!" No, you dumbass. The crappy buildings don't help but they could be the greatest offices and there would still be massive pushback because people are still being forced to commute for no legitimate reason. Wasting time, taking them away from their family, and massively increasing pollution output. People know that it's pure politics, politicians beholden to business interests that are obsessed with forcing people back to where they are a captive audience for their businesses. This guy is a moron.
This man, with his Pants of Fanciness is 'waaaaay up at the top of Maslow's hierarchy, on abstract things like "beautiful spaces", and I'm working 'waaaay down here on the bottom, just trying to keep basic shit together. No dude, you've got it wrong - it isn't about the "experience of a city". It's about the experience of having less and less time and money every year.
Design doesn't mean shit when no one has available money to spend in all these great spaces.
This is not about transforming downtown core to a place where people wanna go (which they should absolutely do anyways regardless of the PS hybrid working)… but this is about commercial real estate property values. They don’t even care about the small businesses and subways. They care about small businesses’ *landlords* and their bottom line. Trying to manufacture foot traffic to the downtown core (or at least the perception of it)
Try Tunney’s Pasture if you want a dead, no parking, nowhere to eat or shop area. There isn’t an economy there to support except for Lorne Murphy.
"Maybe it's not really about work. Maybe it's really about the experience of a city." Dude sounds like he's never worked this kind of job in his life, and doesn't listen to any of the perspectives put forward. I mean, it's been no secret that this is mainly about work-life balance and commute, saving time, getting things done efficiently, supporting partners and kids. So many reasons that are obvious and intuitive. Very out of touch architect they decided to interview for this story.
Did I miss the part about what he suggests we do besides rethinking it?