Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc.

ONTARIO PREMIER DOUG Ford has always had a certain uncle-ness about him, no more so than when he talks about remote work, which he does not particularly care for. “How do you mentor someone over a phone? You can’t,” he said back in August. “You’ve gotta look them eye to eye, train them, comradery!”

He’s been happy about the decision to order civil servants back to the office, which kicked in this January. “It’s great to get everyone back to work, like every other normal citizen,” he said this month. But even Doug was forced to admit this week that the push back to the office has gotten off to a pretty rocky start.

“We’ll get through this,” he conceded last Monday. “There’s a little bump, we’ve been working on this for the last little while.”

It started with space and desks, of which there wasn’t enough to accommodate everyone returning to the office. Even at the start of 2026, the government was avoiding the question of whether there was space for everyone, with officials saying, “The vast majority of OPS offices have adequate space”, which is kind of like saying the majority of your size 12 foot will fit in this size nine boot.

“Things are not going exactly to plan,” said Dave Bulmer, president of AMAPCEO, one of the unions representing administrative staff.

Then came the snow days: last Thursday, with a raft of snowfall warnings, school snow days and highway closures announced — the kind of interruptions remote work is designed to accommodate — some department staff were told to get their butts into the office or burn a personal day, that there would be no working from home that day. (It took about an hour for common sense to prevail there.)

Whatever your personal feelings on the Ontario RTO mandate, its rollout has been rough, as it fell into the desk-space trap many large organizations did in the preceding 12 to 18 months, when companies like JP Morgan, Amazon and others (including the federal government!) found that ordering people back to the office didn’t magically conjure enough desks for them.

“Space-related headaches are reflective of broader questions about where and how it’s best for people to work, and what sort of planning needs to be put into it,” wrote Business Insider’s Emily Stewart. “The space problem is one that companies should fix, [but] whether they actually will is another question.”

As for Ontario, while the public servants’ union continues to grumble, it seems a few early hiccups won’t be derailing the plan any time soon. Whether that means the desk space question will be resolved is another question. Asked for an update, all Ford had to say was, “We’re working on that.”

HEALTH & WELLNESS

The economic benefits of friendship

A company in Sweden wants employees to spend more time with their friends — and they are paying them to do it

SWEDEN, LIKE MANY nations around the world, has a loneliness problem on its hands. Much like Canada (where 13 per cent of adults say they often feel lonely), 14 per cent of Swedish adults report feeling lonely some or all of the time, with eight per cent of adults saying they don’t have a single close friend, according to Statistics Sweden.

But rather than just sound the alarm about this, one large company is trying to actually address it, by giving staff paid time at work, and a bit of spending money, to boost their social life.

In the past year, the pharmacy group Apotek Hjärtat launched a pilot project that gives employees one hour a month, plus a stipend of around $130 CAD, to put towards strengthening friendships or making new friends. “We try and see what the effects are from having the opportunity to spend a bit of time every week on safeguarding your relationships,” said Monica Magnusson, the company’s CEO.

The firm says the idea is building out on programs that are already relatively common in Swedish workplaces — wellness spending money and an hour of wellness time every month, calling the friendship time “a reflection on that, but targeting loneliness and relationships instead.”

The idea to offer ‘friendcare benefits’ is also interesting in the sense that it is a collaboration between the business community and the economy-focused centre-right Swedish government, which has made loneliness a public health priority. “We need to have greater awareness about this,” the government’s health minister told the BBC. “This is something that really affects health and affects the economy as well.”

Sweden is one of several countries that have started to target loneliness as a wider social issue — and part of a growing awareness that loneliness incurs economic penalties. In recent years, Gallup’s workplace polling efforts have asked about loneliness, noting that globally, loneliness rates sit around 20 per cent, and have argued that the data suggest that workplaces can be the ideal place to begin addressing the problem, and that social interaction and workplace engagement often go hand in hand.

For the pharmacy company’s workers, the benefit is being embraced. “I’m really tired when I go home. I don’t have time or energy to meet my friends,” said one 45-year-old employee, who makes use of her allotted friendcare time to make plans or even just chat with a friend on the phone. “I wanted to make it better for myself, kick myself in the back to do stuff. I feel happier. You can’t live through the internet like most people do these days.”  

TECHNOLOGY

The AI glass ceiling: Is uncertainty blocking progress?

Why women may avoid AI and what it means for tech diversity

THERE’S A COMMON thread that links many of the enthusiastic endorsements, promotions and celebrations of the latest in AI technology made over the last few years: it’s a lot of men doing the talking. And researchers believe they have started to uncover the source of what some are calling an ‘AI gender gap’ — specifically, that women as a group see the risks differently than men.

Looking at survey data from 8,000 workers in the UK, a pair of British researchers recently argued in a paper that the source of the AI gender gap (studies have shown that the share of women adopting AI tools lags men by somewhere between 10 and 40 per cent) may come down to differences in the way the two groups perceive risk.

Across almost all demographics, they found women were more attuned to the various risks AI presents —job loss, energy usage, mental health concerns and so on — than men and are more likely to shy away from adoption because of it.

“Risk perceptions play a central role in shaping the gender gap in AI use,” wrote Fabian Stephany and Jedrzej Duszynski, a pair of researchers at the University of Oxford’s Oxford Internet Institute. “These wider gaps are driven not by increased use among men but by substantial decreases in AI use among women.”

“It doesn’t surprise me that women notice stories [about these risks] and think, ‘that’s horrible, that’s dystopian, I don’t want any part of that,’” noted McMaster University business professor Catherine Connelly, speaking to HR Reporter. “I think that level of skepticism is very understandable.”

Some worry that this skepticism (and the lower adoption rates that come along with it) comes at a cost. “These gaps are bad for women because they’re not being as productive as they could be,” reasoned Harvard Business School professor Rembrand Koning, who has also studied the implications of the AI gender gap. “But they’re also bad for the economy because we’re losing out on economic growth we could have had.”

If AI use is to become more equal, the University of Oxford team argues that now is the best time to start addressing risk, in part because their research also showed that addressing the concerns women have with AI can reverse the gap.

“When individuals become more optimistic about AI’s broader impacts,” they wrote, “women — especially younger women — exhibit the largest behavioural change. Policies that address these societal concerns through credible oversight, stronger privacy and accountability mechanisms, or clearer evidence on environmental and labour impacts, may yield more equitable update.” 

WORKPLACE

Painting a picture of work

A first-ever survey aims to better understand the physical and psychological working conditions of Canadians

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