Well said.
1) OF COURSE this is not an essential service (as much as it pains me personally) - although here we have to underline this doesn't mean it isn't important to government, but not essential during a public health emergency. They'll get to it when they can. Important is not essential.
2) The infrastructure and process issues you refer to are not so easy to resolve, particularly when there are hundreds of other short-term priorities that need to be dealt with first - by which I mean the government has limited IT and related resources. Even if everyone could work from home (equipment) they'd also need to redesign and implement new processes and systems to support that. Scaling up the VPN network alone is a big job.
The government just announced and implemented a huge and complicated benefit package (both employment and income support) that something like three million Canadians (15% of the workforce I read) applied for in the space of three weeks. Surprisingly the infrastructure didn't collapse and even worked pretty well. There were people behind that and that was the priority, not PR claims.