Ottawa is home to the bulk of the federal public service, which means the office space crunch inside Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) lands hardest here. According to PSPC, the department has not added any net new office space to its portfolio since February 5, 2026.
What PSPC says
PSPC says it is considering acquiring additional office space in the coming months so that it can fit all federal organizations and their employees into an assigned workstation environment. That's a direct response to a gap the department has already acknowledged: the current federal office portfolio cannot accommodate about 10 per cent of public servants in the office four days a week under the RTO-4 policy.
Why it matters for Ottawa
RTO-4 requires four in-office days a week for most public servants as of July 2026, and five days a week for executives as of May 2026. With so much of the federal workforce based in Ottawa and Gatineau, a shortage of desks in the National Capital Region means real people here showing up to buildings that don't have room for them. It's the same shortage that has already forced PSPC to shuffle its own footprint: the department is re-allocating five co-working sites across the National Capital Region, even as it says no net new space has been added since February.
What's next
PSPC expects to accommodate 95 per cent of public servants under the current policy by March 31, 2027. That leaves roughly a year and a half where a meaningful share of the workforce, including many in Ottawa, may still be working under a policy the government's own property manager admits it can't fully support with desks.
Earlier this month
This isn't the first sign of the squeeze. Ottawa's federal co-working sites are set to close entirely on September 30, with those desks reassigned to departments that still can't fit everyone in four days a week, as ottown's earlier report detailed. And earlier in September, ottown reported that Ottawa remained the epicentre of a stalled four-day return-to-office push, with roughly 10 per cent of unionized public servants unable to hit the mandated schedule because there simply wasn't room for them.
Taken together, the picture for federal workers in Ottawa is one of a policy running ahead of the physical space needed to support it, with PSPC now pointing to next year as the point where supply is expected to catch up with the mandate.
Sources: Ottawa Citizen (via Yahoo News Canada republication)
