Downtown foot traffic is still far below prepandemic levels, despite push to boost in-office hours

Globe and Mail

08-07-2025

Foot traffic in the downtown cores of major cities across Canada is still approximately half of what it was before the pandemic, despite a growing push from employers for more in-office work days.
New data from the Toronto-based analytics company Environics Analytics – provided exclusively to The Globe and Mail – show that since much of the country ended pandemic lockdown restrictions in the spring of 2022, there was a gradual increase in the number of working people populating the central business districts of urban centres. But that growth tapered off in early 2024, and has held steady into the spring of 2025.
While foot traffic has been slow to rebound, major employers are now pushing to bring their white-collar work force into the office more frequently.
Royal Bank of Canada RY-T, Bank of Montreal BMO-T and Bank of Nova Scotia BNS-T recently announced new rules that ramp up in-office days: All three banks will require staff to work from the office four days a week come September. Tech giants Amazon Inc. AMZN-Q and Dell Technologies Inc. DELL-N began a five-day in-office policy earlier this year, marking a significant change in both companies' years-long hybrid work arrangements. Last month, the Toronto-based investment firm Canaccord Genuity Inc. introduced a full-time in-office policy, after similar moves from other investment banks such as J.P. Morgan and the boutique New York firm Moelis & Co.
But whether these more demanding return-to-office mandates spread widely in white-collar industries remains to be seen. And ultimately, those corporate decisions will determine whether downtowns see a full rebound in their 9-to-5 activity.
As of April, 2025, foot traffic in Toronto's downtown core is about 43 per cent less than what it was in January, 2020, according to Environics data. That number hovers at approximately 50 per cent for both Montreal and Vancouver.
The data from Environics measures movement based on cellphones (stripped of personally identifying information) and estimates the number of office workers entering the central business districts of cities. It does not include residential and retail foot traffic.
Foot traffic data often fluctuate by month. Downtown cores tend to be emptier in December and the summer months, when more workers are on vacation.
Across Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal and Ottawa, the data appear to point to a gradual increase in the number of office workers in cities since mid-2022, but little change over the past year.
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'It's a long-term process for the downtown cores of cities to diversify away from office traffic. But my hunch is that the recent return-to-office mandates will push cities to get back to how they used to be before,' said Karen Chapple, director of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto.
Prof. Chapple runs the Downtown Recovery Project at the University of Toronto, a research initiative that measures the vitality of various downtown cores after lockdowns were lifted across the country.
Her own data, which captures all foot traffic, including retail and residential, show an increase in the number of visits to cities over the past year. Compared with February, 2024, downtown Toronto has seen a 10-per-cent increase in the amount of foot traffic. That percentage change is similar for Vancouver. Montreal saw a 15-per-cent increase in foot traffic and Ottawa saw a 19-per-cent increase. The jump in Ottawa is presumably related to the federal government's three-day-in-office mandate for civil servants that took effect in September, 2024.
The downtown cores of major cities have yet to return to the bustle of prepandemic times, primarily because a broad swath of the white-collar work force still works in a hybrid fashion, with two to three days in the office, and the rest at home.
A March survey from the financial-services company Mercer shows that out of 286 major white-collar employers in Canada, 65 per cent had their staff in office two or three times a week, while just 7 per cent had them on site four days a week.
In the same survey, 33 per cent of employers said they had issued a firm return-to-office mandate and expected employees to comply. The rest had no definitive mandate but a broad expectation that employees should come into the office at least a few days a week.
But that could quickly change. Beyond the move from three of the Big Five banks to increase in-office days, there are signs that the macroeconomic landscape is shifting in favour of employers.
While job vacancies rose dramatically during the pandemic, peaking at almost one million jobs in the second quarter of 2022, they have fallen substantially since. In the first quarter of 2025, there were 524,300 vacancies, a number comparable with the prepandemic average between 2017 and 2019.
'If employees wanted to leave their jobs during the pandemic, they simply had more choice,' said Catherine Connelly, professor of human resources and management at McMaster University's DeGroote School of Business.
'Part of this recent pushback to this office has been driven by the job market. The balance of power has shifted back in favour of the employer because unemployment rates in cities have been trending upwards. Companies can demand that employees come back into the office, and employees will comply,' she added.
Allison Griffiths, a partner at Mercer's human-resources consulting division, said that her research suggests employers are still concerned about employee engagement. 'They find that the most engaged employees are the ones in the office 100 per cent and that could be why some employers are moving away from a hybrid policy.'
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According to the job-search website Indeed, the share of job postings that explicitly mention terms related to hybrid, flexible and remote work in Canada started declining in January, 2025, after reaching a peak in January, 2022.
Still, Canada's transition away from remote and hybrid work is much slower compared with that of the United States and many countries in Asia and Europe. A February study from Stanford University's Institute of Economic Policy Research found that Canadians worked an average of 1.9 days a week from home, the highest level of 40 countries. Americans worked 1.6 days a week from home.
Indeed, some major Canadian employers have doubled down in their approach to flexible work. At Sun Life Financial, which employs 12,000 people across Canada, there is no required number of days that all employees need to come into the office.
'From the perspective of poaching talent, we actually see these return-to-office announcements as a bonus to us,' said Helena Pagano, the chief people and culture officer at Sun Life. The insurance company has a concept called 'common days,' in which some departments mandate that their employees come in a certain day of the week, but the company's approach to work is premised upon the flexibility to 'work where it makes sense.'
Ms. Pagano says that Sun Life intends to stick to its current workplace strategy because it has led to greater employee retention. 'We are certainly not losing people to the companies who have the four- or five-day in-office mandate.'