Large sections of British Columbia’s workforce could perform their duties from home, a new study has found.
Statistics Canada found that the province was aligned with Canada as a whole, where 38.9% of employees were found to be able to “plausibly” work from home on a permanent basis.
According to StatCan, by March of this year 39.1% of workers were operating from home due to the COVID-19 crisis.
Ontario was the province where most people could work from home (over 40%), while Quebec and BC came in second and third.
The province with the lowest numbers of workers who could perform their duties from home was Newfoundland and Labrador (just over 30%), followed by Prince Edward Island and Saskatchewan.
StatCan’s study also highlighted particular sectors’ capacity for remote working.
Finance and insurance, educational services and professional, scientific and technical services came on top.
In each of those sectors, close to 90% of workers could operate from home.
A series of more physical jobs – including agriculture, construction and serving – were at the bottom of the list.
Fewer than 15% of workers in those sectors could work from home, the study found.
“Financially vulnerable workers appear to have the lowest telework capacities, including those who are under the age of 25 (21%) and who have a high school diploma (25%) or less than a high school diploma (13%),” StatCan explained.
“Since these characteristics are often associated with minimum-wage and low-income workers, the pandemic might be reducing work hours to a greater extent among them than among other workers.”
The study also highlighted that, despite the large numbers of workers who could operate from home, few actually do.
“The percentage of employees usually doing any scheduled hours from home changed very little from 2000 to 2018: it varied from 10% to 11% from 2000 to 2008 (Turcotte 2010) and stood at about 13% in 2018,” the study explained.
“These findings suggest that there was unused capacity in the economy for telework before the pandemic began.”
