Today marks the first day of the federal government's four-day return-to-office mandate, and CAPE is demanding that Prime Minister Mark Carney do something his government has so far refused to do: explain who this policy is actually for.
To mark the occasion, CAPE and its allies delivered Carney a large invoice for the cost of forced RTO to workers, taxpayers, and public services, and an oversized cheque for the banks, representing the amount of cancelled savings from not reducing the office footprint, as was already underway. As a former banker, he should know how to read them.
“We’ve heard a lot of empty and insulting justifications for RTO – from better collaboration to 'philosophical choices,' ” said CAPE President Nathan Prier. “None of them add up, so we did our own math. And we’re left with a question the prime minister needs to answer: is this policy protecting workers and taxpayers, or is it protecting banks and commercial real estate investors who made bad bets on office space?”
The numbers are hard to ignore. Four major Canadian banks carry an estimated $10 billion in exposure tied to commercial real estate, including CIBC at approximately $6.1 billion, National Bank at $2.6 billion, BMO at $1.5 billion, and RBC at $550 million. A federal workforce reliably filling downtown office towers is worth something to institutions holding that kind of risk.
At the same time, Canadians are being told to accept cuts to federal jobs, programs, and services in the name of fiscal responsibility, while the government quietly shelves $40 billion in projected savings it had already planned to capture by reducing its office footprint. That money is now effectively being left on the table, and no one in government has explained why.
The Brookfield connection sharpens the public interest question. Before entering politics, Carney held senior roles at Brookfield Asset Management, a major commercial real estate investor whose own investor filings warned investors that remote and hybrid work threatened office demand, occupancy, rents, and property values. During his time there, Reuters reported that a Brookfield subsidiary defaulted on loans tied to two Los Angeles office towers, and a Brookfield real estate executive later called the U.S. office market “the world’s most oversupplied.” None of this proves that commercial real estate interests shaped the RTO decision. But it does mean the government's silence on the question is no longer good enough.
"The question for Canadians is simple: who benefits?" said Prier. "If this is about collaboration or culture, show us the evidence. Right now, the only people with an obvious interest in keeping federal offices full are the banks and real estate investors who need them filled. Public servants deserve a straight answer, and so do taxpayers."
CAPE is calling on Prime Minister Carney to release the analysis behind the RTO mandate, including any consideration of commercial real estate risk or financial sector exposure, and to explain why $40 billion in planned savings was abandoned without public justification.
