Good morning. Companies can’t seem to get the face time they want from their workers – more on that below, along with Donald Trump’s latest tariff threat and the generic Ozempic coming to Canada. But first:
Today’s headlinesOpen this photo in gallery:
Three of the Big Five banks want workers in four days a week.Cole Burston/The Globe and Mail
WorkOffice politics
J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon is – to put it very mildly – not a fan of remote work. At a corporate town hall in February, just before the investment bank launched its five-day in-office mandate, Dimon made clear exactly what he thought happened when his staffers logged on from home. “A lot of you were on the Zoom and you were doing the following: looking at your mail, sending texts to each other about what an asshole the other person is, not paying attention, not reading your stuff,” he told them, along with another expletive that I took out. Dimon added, “I call a lot of people on Fridays, and there’s not a goddamn person you can get a hold of.”
He isn’t the only white-collar exec desperate to get workers back into the building. Tech giants Amazon and Dell announced their own full-time mandates earlier this year; Toronto-based investment firm Canaccord followed suit last month. As of September, three of Canada’s Big Five banks – RBC, BMO and Bank of Nova Scotia – will compel employees to return to the office at least four days a week. That’s currently the policy for executives in the federal government, and though the rest of Canada’s civil servants have been told to come in three days for now, Ottawa hasn’t ruled out raising the requirement.
Except it might want to focus instead on enforcing the mandate already in place. According to the federal government’s own data, large numbers of public servants routinely flout Ottawa’s back-to-the-office rules. The policy was imposed in September, 2024, and by the end of that month, compliance rates at the biggest federal department, Employment and Social Development Canada, stood at just 73 per cent. It barely moved in January. Over at the National Department of Defence, compliance averaged 72 per cent in September. By January, it had slipped to 60 per cent.
It’s the same story at Fortune 500 firms: Return-to-work requirements might go up, but people aren’t really returning. A recent study out of Stanford University found that while in-office policies hiked 10 per cent since early 2024, actual attendance didn’t budge much past 1 per cent. Threatening to fire employees for non-compliance – as Dimon did, telling staff “you don’t have to work at J.P. Morgan … you can walk with your feet” – hardly makes a difference, either. Companies with rigid full-time policies saw roughly the same in-person attendance as those with more flexible rules.
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It’s quiet downtown.Cole Burston/The Globe and Mail
That might explain why Canada’s downtown foot traffic has been slow to rebound even as office mandates increase. New data from Environics Analytics, provided exclusively to The Globe, showed a gradual ramp up in business-district workers once pandemic restrictions ended in the spring of 2022. But that growth tapered off in early 2024. And it’s held stubbornly steady into the spring of 2025. As of April, foot traffic in Toronto’s downtown core is still 43 per cent less than it was in January, 2020. In both Montreal and Vancouver, that number hovers around 50 per cent.
Maybe that will change. Maybe employees can be coaxed back to the office and a thousand Starbucks will bloom in business districts. But it doesn’t seem like the next generation of CEOs wants to go to war against remote work. In fact, a new Stanford study found that the younger the executive, the more likely staffers were to do their jobs from home. When that CEO was under 30, they spent just 56 per cent of their week in the office – compared with 80 per cent for workers whose CEO was at least 50. Incidentally, Jamie Dimon turned 69 this year.
The Shot“You just have to have a strong heart.”Open this photo in gallery:
That’s some A+ pedalling.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Brienne Glasgow is a very courageous six-year-old who’s learning to ride a bike (without training wheels!) at a neighbourhood camp in Toronto. Read more here about the kids figuring out this summertime rite of passage.
The WrapWhat else we’re following
At home: Ontario colleges are losing more than 8,000 jobs after Ottawa capped international study permits, in what may be one of the largest mass layoffs in the province’s history.
Abroad: Europe’s top human rights court ruled that Russia committed flagrant violations of international law in Ukraine, including extrajudicial killings and kidnapping.
Tax: Donald Trump slapped a 50-per-cent tariff on imports from Brazil for its “witch hunt” trial against former president Jair Bolsonaro.
Tech: OpenAI is going up against Google Chrome by launching its own AI-powered web browser in the next few weeks.
Drugs: U.S. telehealth platform Hims & Hers says it plans to sell generic versions of Ozempic and Wegovy in Canada once their patents expire in January.
Stunts: In a brutally tough real estate market, agents are trying all sorts of gimmicks to make a sale.
