When millions of Canadian workers packed up their monitors and dragged their ergonomic chairs into spare bedrooms in the spring of 2020, the thinking was that it would be temporary. Flatten the curve. Wait it out. Be back by summer, probably.
Five years later, a provincial agency in Ontario is fighting a labour grievance over whether it owes a joint health and safety committee member a few dollars in parking and mileage — because she had to drive to an office that, on most days, sits largely empty.
Welcome to the unintended consequences of remote work. There are more of them than anyone counted on.
The office that wasn’t really the office anymore
It is, on its face, a small case about a small amount of money. Skilled Trades Ontario — the agency that oversees apprenticeship and trades certification in the province — shifted to remote work during the pandemic like many other organizations. Its staff of roughly 110 union-represented employees largely stopped commuting. The agency eventually relocated to a smaller space in Mississauga, Ont.
But the Occupational Health and Safety Act doesn’t care about your remote work policy. It requires monthly physical inspections of the workplace. Someone has to show up and walk the floor, check the equipment, file the report. That someone is a JHSC worker representative. And when your workforce is at home, that someone is making a special trip.
The Ontario College of Trades — the predecessor agency that was restructured into Skilled Trades Ontario in 2021 — recognized this and started reimbursing JHSC members for their travel costs when the pandemic first hit. Mileage. Parking. Small amounts, probably. The gesture acknowledged something real: you are coming in specifically for this, not because it’s your Tuesday.
Skilled Trades Ontario continued that practice after taking over, carrying it across three office locations over four years. Then, in April 2024, it declared its Mississauga office the official headquarters — and stopped reimbursing the trips. Travel to headquarters, the employer said, is a commute. Commutes aren’t reimbursable. End of story.
A worker rep submitted her expense claim anyway. It was denied. Grievances were filed.
The law got in the way
Here’s where it gets instructive, because the arbitrator’s ruling is actually quite measured. The employer’s position wasn’t wrong, exactly. The arbitrator found that treating the trip to Mississauga as a regular commute was “not unreasonable.” The collective agreement language about “no loss of pay” for JHSC duties was never intended to cover expenses — pay and expenses are, as the ruling notes, “qualitatively different and distinct.”
In ordinary circumstances, the employer might have won this cleanly.
But the collective agreement had expired at the end of 2022. The parties were grinding through a long, contentious round of bargaining that wouldn’t conclude until November 2024. And under Ontario’s Labour Relations Act, an employer cannot unilaterally change the terms and conditions of employment while bargaining is underway. That provision exists for a reason: it creates a stable platform from which both sides can negotiate, rather than allowing one party to quietly reshape the ground beneath the other’s feet.
The employer cut off reimbursements in April 2024. The denial happened in July 2024. Bargaining didn’t wrap up until November 2024.
The timing was the problem. The employer made a unilateral call during the freeze, and the arbitrator called it out.
The fairness question
So is this fair?
Depends on which side of the desk you’re sitting on — and maybe which side of 2020 you’re thinking from.
From the employer’s perspective, there’s a reasonable grievance here too. The office didn’t become a foreign country just because staff stopped commuting to it. It’s still the workplace. The OHSA inspections exist because the workplace exists. Asking an employer to indefinitely subsidize travel to a location it pays rent on — simply because it allowed remote work — creates a strange incentive structure. It almost punishes flexibility.
And yet. The arbitrator’s observation cuts through the argument neatly: the reimbursement “inherently recognized the additional cost associated with the participation of those worker representatives in attending at the work site in circumstances where their work would not otherwise require them to do so.” In plain terms — you asked these people to come in specifically for this. That’s different from asking them to show up for a regular workday.
Remote work didn’t just change where people work. It changed the meaning of the word “commute.” It changed the implicit contract between employer and employee about who bears the cost of showing up. Those changes compounded quietly for years, and now they’re showing up in arbitration decisions.
JHSC work is not optional
There’s something else worth sitting with here. Joint health and safety committees are not a formality. They are the front line of workplace safety in this country — a statutory requirement that exists because workers have died when no one was paying attention. The people who serve on them are volunteers from the workforce, taking on a legal responsibility that benefits everyone.
Nickle-and-diming them over a parking receipt is not a great look for any organization, regardless of what the law technically allows.
The smarter play — then and now — is a clear, written policy that answers the question before it becomes a grievance: when remote workers are required to attend the workplace for JHSC duties, here is how we handle it.
The office is still there. The work still needs doing. The question of who pays for getting there probably deserves a better answer than silence.
More coverage available in our sister publication HR Law Canada here: https://hrlawcanada.com/2026/02/skilled-trades-ontario-ordered-to-reimburse-worker-for-travel-costs-denied-during-bargaining-freeze/
