Rush hour traffic crawling along the 401 during evening rush, seen from the Don Mills Road overpass, are photographed on Oct 15 2024.(Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail)Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Interested in more careers-related content? Check out our new weekly Work Life newsletter. Sent every Monday afternoon.
More Canadian employers are asking their staff to spend more days in the office, but the commute workers face today is longer than the one they had before the pandemic.
According to a recent Statistics Canada study, more Canadians are commuting more often, and it’s taking them longer to get to and from work, especially in major cities.
Canadians spent an average of 26.7 minutes commuting each way in May, up from a low of 23.9 minutes in May, 2021. Torontonians had the longest commute at 35 minutes, followed by Barrie at 31.5 and Vancouver at just over 31.
All three cities experienced an increase in commuting times in the past year, with Toronto seeing the largest jump of over a minute and a half added since 2024.
Over all, 82.6 per cent of Canadian workers commute to work more often than not, up 1.3 per cent from last year and up from a low of 75.7 per cent in May, 2021.
With most of Canada’s major banks, Ontario’s provincial government and major employers such as Rogers now mandating a full return to the office, commuting times in Canada are expected to worsen.
“It’s a completely different commute for a few reasons,” says Toronto’s former chief city planner Jennifer Keesmaat, who now serves as a member of the National Housing Council and chief executive officer of Collecdev-Markee Developments. “A lot of people changed jobs or moved farther away from where they work on the premise that they could continue to work remotely.”
Many left major urban centres in pursuit of more space and more affordable housing, assuming the daily commute was a thing of the past, Ms. Keesmaat says.
“The other piece of it is that we have not regained our transit service levels, nor our confidence in public transit since the pandemic,” she says. “Every time someone chooses to get in their car in the morning instead of getting on public transit, it adds to what has become a completely insufferable congestion problem in Canadian cities.”
According to the 2024 TomTom Traffic Index, it takes the average driver in Toronto more than 25 minutes to travel 10 kilometres. Halifax, Winnipeg and Montreal are between 22 and 24 minutes.
Adding to commute times is the lack of affordable housing in major urban centres, where most employers are based.
“The data shows that commutes have gotten longer as housing prices have gotten higher,” Ms. Keesmaat says. “The shorter the commute, the higher the home price.”
The effects of remote work on housing decisions have been showing up in real estate data since the pandemic.
“We saw a migration from the urban centres to not only the suburban centres, but right out to the rural centres,” says Don Kottick, president of REMAX Canada. “It was so dramatic that we started to see inventory decline in those areas and prices go up.”
Now that employees are back to commuting more regularly, Mr. Kottick predicts home prices will rise most dramatically in suburban areas with strong access to public transit.
“It’s becoming quite clear in the data that housing costs are starting to affect whether people can afford to live in certain cities,” says Aled ab Iorwerth, deputy chief economist of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). “Some people may have chosen to move to a location further out because they need the living space, because they’re tired of high housing costs and so by definition their commute has gotten worse.”
He believes the most obvious solution to rising home prices and commuting times in Canadian cities is more housing stock closer to where people work, but that’s much easier said than done. In the meantime, Mr. ab Iorwerth says employees who are being forced to return to the office after relocating farther from work will have to make some difficult choices.
“You may need to tolerate a longer commute just to lower your housing costs but, at some point, you may just give up on it and say, ‘I’m not taking that job at the other end of town because the commuting costs are too high,’” he says. “If career opportunities are much more prevalent in highly urban areas, but the housing costs are very high, some people, unfortunately, may have to turn down those career opportunities.”