Staying put to save the planet: How remote work might help Canada cut emissions

After a year of extreme weather events, it's becoming clear to more and more Canadians that the country can't afford to keep failing to deliver on promised emissions cuts.

While the federal government claims that the measures it has taken or will take will allow Canada to meet its Paris climate targets, those targets are not consistent with avoiding warming of over 1.5 degrees Celsius. Blowing past that 1.5 degree target would take the planet into a dangerous territory of unknown secondary consequences and frightening feedback loops.

But what if Canada could cut its emissions substantially merely by encouraging people to work from home — something millions of Canadians have gotten used to since the pandemic began?

Could remote work — even part-time — lock in the drops in transportation emissions seen during 2020 and help bridge the gap to a future of zero-emission vehicles by keeping today's polluting vehicles parked in the garage?

There is some evidence to suggest that Canada could see a significant reduction in emissions if everyone who could telecommute continued to do so.

René Morissette was one of three researchers at Statistics Canada who analyzed that proposition this year using the 2015-16 census as a starting point.

They concluded that 36 per cent of Canada's 2015 workforce were "potential teleworkers" — people who could have worked from home but didn't.

"This was really the first time anyone did these back-of-the-envelope calculations to see what the effect would be," Morissette told CBC News. Fifteen per cent of those potential teleworkers used public transit to get to work; most of the rest drove their own vehicles.

"In the maximum scenario, in which everyone who can work from home does so five days a week, you would see a reduction of 11 per cent of the emissions produced by households for transportation," he said.

That amounts to 6 per cent of Canada's total household emissions. Bonus: StatsCan's math also says the "maximum scenario" would save each commuter an average of nearly an hour a day in transit time, and reduce demands on public transit by 18 per cent.

In raw terms, the total emissions drop from this scenario adds up to 8.6 megatons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, Morissette said.

That's more than one per cent of Canada's total emissions in 2019, the most recent year for which data are available — 730 megatons equivalent.

The federal government says it's still considering letting more of its own employees stay at home at least some of the time to reduce emissions.

"There is no one-size-fits-all approach moving forward," Martin Potvin of the Treasury Board Secretariat told CBC News. "As the heads of their organizations, deputy heads are responsible for the safety and well-being of their employees and departmental leaders will set out the next steps in a phased way that includes sustained employee engagement.