Deserted downtown
Business owner worried over lack of government workers downtown
SYDNEY — Entrepreneur Craig Boudreau is looking at the trend of employees working from home and he doesn’t like what he sees.
Hundreds of employees, both in the private and public sectors, have been working outside their office spaces in downtown Sydney and elsewhere for months now, a direct result of health protocols put in place to combat the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In doing so, it takes people out of downtowns and puts other people’s livelihoods at stake, Boudreau said.
His worry goes well beyond the permanent closure of a solitary Tim Hortons store on Charlotte Street — a victim to the lack of foot traffic caused by the pandemic.
He is a co-owner of a Freshii franchise on Charlotte Street and owns a New York Fries outlet in the Mayflower Mall. In order to make money, instead of breaking even at best, Boudreau said government offices must reopen when it’s safe to do so with a full complement of staff.
“We need Tim Hortons, we need Freshii, we need Flavor (restaurant). We need everybody else on the street that’s selling food and retail in order for us to reach the goals of bringing this downtown where it should be,” he said.
“I have no doubt that the government is going to realize this, but I haven't seen or heard anything of any substance where they've stated that we will get our government workers back, that we do understand the value, we do understand the potential losses, and when health allows, we will not encourage people to work from home.”
EXPANDED REINTEGRATION
Of the approximately 135 employees at the Canada Revenue Agency's Nova Scotia tax services office in Sydney, 85 per cent are working remotely, according to a CRA spokesperson.
The case processing centre for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has 707 employees with “most” working remotely. Department spokesperson Lauren Sankey said the “number of employees who are working remotely and in the office will fluctuate daily” but it's too early to provide specific dates on a safe back-to-work plan.
“We are working on a reintegration plan to safely return employees to offices across the country in a gradual, phased approach,” Sankey said.
“Our reintegration plan will be guided by advice from public health authorities, including Canada's Chief Public Health Officer, and the direction of provinces and territories.”
On July 6 and 8, IRCC started piloting the gradual return to work for some employees who support backoffice paper processing for key lines of business, she said.
The department says it further expanded the reintegration of employees back into offices throughout the summer, and this included resuming some in-person client services by appointment in some locations.
WAY OF THE FUTURE
Boudreau said the federal government offering tax incentives for people to claim on their income tax in situations where employees work from home, even over a short period, is essentially “rewarding both the employees and the companies that employ them for not moving out of the house.”
However, it could very well be the new way of doing business in the future, according to George Karaphillis, the dean of the Shannon School of Business at Cape Breton University.
“I honestly believe the long-term trend is going to be to work from home for the bigger organizations like for the government and for corporate Canada. It's going to be something, I will say, that they're going to have one-third or half of the workforce permanently working from home,” he said.
The pros outweigh the cons, Karaphillis noted, with little real change in the efficiency of the workforce while conducting business off-site.
“People are just equally busy when they are at home or in the office, so they haven't noticed overall a marked decrease in productivity.”
Several CBU alumni have gone on to establish shops and restaurants in downtown Sydney, and Karaphillis sympathizes with them because some will have to switch up their business models, whether it be a larger online presence or a more robust home delivery service.
And there should be a greater degree of focus on building up residential accommodations in the downtown that could take the place of foot traffic once dominated by office workers, he said.
URGING PATIENCE
The Cape Breton Regional Chamber of Commerce is urging patience as the country endures the second wave of the coronavirus.
“If this is something we're looking at post-pandemic and we're not seeing those people come back into the offices safely and reinvigorate our downtown core in terms of traffic, then yes, I would say that would be a concern at that point,” chamber CEO Kathleen Yurchesyn said.
“It's important to recognize that the entire country is living through a second wave right now. We have the luxury to have very little of the virus in our own communities right now (and) that's such a privilege and such a blessing. I think right now we have to just be grateful for that while recognizing that the rest of the country is still very much living with this awful, awful virus.”
There are a few commercial projects slated to begin over the next several months including a revamped Smart Shop Place on Charlotte Street and other multi-use developments planned for Dorchester and Dodd streets.
The driving force for those developments has been the new Nova Scotia Community College waterfront campus currently in its initial stages of construction on the Esplanade.
Boudreau said the goal of bringing the community college to downtown Sydney was to increase pedestrian traffic by as many as 1,500 people daily. But if most government employees fail to return to work in the downtown, he wants to know what has really been accomplished.
“We're calling (the new NSCC campus) a gamechanger. Everybody is excited about it. ...But if we wind up taking out (of the downtown) 1,000 bodies or whatever that number is between Citizenship, Revenue Canada and the private sector, what have we really gained?”