at least everything is moving, which is already good!
What I seem with companies in general, returning to office and vaccine mandate are kind of linked. Companies only want fully vaccinated employees to return to work. May be returning to office is internal to the division and is happening on the side.
Guesses.....and predictions.....and a hope for a quicker processing.
Yes, the same is for my own employer as well; only vaccinated employees are allowed to work from the office should they choose to. This, to me, seems to be essentially 'Step 0' for a planned return to offices for federal employees.
The only real obstacles are the federal employee unions are no doubt already taking up issue with the mandate and will attempt to stonewall it under their terms. However, there's likely either going to be (or has been) some sort of backroom dealing with the union leaders
already regarding this issue (otherwise why else toss it in as a near easy win for the Liberals on their election platform last month?). In Toronto also, the cops union initially threw a fit about it before quickly backing down as well. What I do expect, however, is that while this bit of news ( and the subsequent move for more federal employees, including the IRCC) to work from the offices in the coming months may result in an overall uptick of activity regarding the number of oath invites being issued, the actual timelines of them will still be closer to 6 months out due to the sheer volume of the folks languishing in this step and the core bottleneck being the number of citizenship judges being available to administer the oath. I was joking with a friend last night that they should set up 'drive through' citizenship oath booths at the IRCC so they can move things along easier....maybe set up a Tim Hortons at the end for a celebratory coffee, too!
Vaccine mandates to drive a quick return to normalcy or risk a never-ending series of lockdowns as the virus continues to mutate is an inevitability at this point.
