'It's an awkward time': Will Moncton office workers ever return in full?

Office space isn't exactly at a premium in downtown Moncton right now.

Downtown Moncton Centre-ville Inc., a group that represents downtown Moncton businesses, estimated only 7,000 of the city's 22,000 downtown workers were in the office two years ago.

Some of those workers have returned to their desks -- but not all.

John Wishart, the CEO of the Chamber of Commerce for Greater Moncton, said it's been a relatively slow return to the office.

“Especially for some of the bigger employers that have large workforces with a lot of commercial real estate at stake,” said Wishart.

Moncton did not fare well in a recent survey by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce on a return-to-work trend in the country's 55 largest downtowns.

From January 2020 to September 2022, just 71.6 per cent of the downtown workforce in the hub city returned.

In Saint John, it was 82 per cent, while 90.5 per cent came back in Fredericton.

Halifax had the highest number of downtown workers return at 93 per cent.

City of Moncton employees have been back since June 2020, the first major downtown employer to have staff come back full-time.

City spokesperson Isabelle LeBlanc said they’ve incorporated more flexibility within the workplace.

“Employees do have more tools to work remotely [since the pandemic], but we usually see a day or two here and there from home, but employees have been on site,” said LeBlanc in an email.

There are approximately 1,400 Medavie and Medavie Blue Cross employees in Moncton.

In an email, a company spokesperson said they’ve embraced flexibility to give staff a greater choice in creating a workplace of the future.

Medavie currently has a mix of remote, hybrid and in-office arrangements at the downtown Moncton office.

Wishart says downtown is still seeing the effects of COVID-19 in a permanent trend of hybrid work where office workers split time between home and the office.

“It's an awkward time for a lot of businesses that rely on traffic, especially at lunchtime. So yeah, they're definitely suffering,” said Wishart.

Old Triangle General Manager Todd VanIderstine said the lunch break crowd has been hit-or-miss since the end of the pandemic.

“We're at an in-between moment where remote workers are kind of becoming a hybrid and we see some of them but there's still a lot of people missing from the downtown area,” said VanIderstine.

Wishart said, in general, Moncton is still a very attractive place for people.

"We're leading the nation in terms of the percentage increase in population. A lot of immigrants coming in,” he said.

Wishart believes there are a lot of investment dollars knocking on the door.

“We hear some big players, some local players,” he said. “So, you may see within five years, two or three 20-storey towers in downtown Moncton which would break new ground for us. So I think it's still a very attractive place for people to spend their money.”

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