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Remote workers who’ve been ordered back to the office might suspect the directive is nothing more than a power trip by the boss, and research suggests they’re probably right.

Return-to-office (RTO) mandates are often a control tactic by managers and don’t boost company performance, according to a new research paper from the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh. What’s more, the mandates appear to make employees less happy with their jobs.

Article content Article content Researchers at the university examined how RTO mandates at 137 S&P 500 companies affected profitability, stock returns and employee job satisfaction. They discovered that companies with poor stock market performance were more likely to implement RTO policies. Managers at such companies were also likely to point the finger at employees for the company’s poor financial showing, seeing it as evidence that working from home lowers productivity. Companies pushing for more days in the office tended to be led by “male and powerful CEOs,” the researchers said, underlining a belief among workers that mandates were being used by leaders to reassert control.

“Our findings are consistent with employees’ concerns that managers use RTO for power grabbing and blaming employees for poor performance,” the authors said in their paper. “Also, our findings do not support the argument that managers impose mandates because they believe RTO increases firm values.”

Indeed, requiring more days in the office did nothing to improve profitability or boost stock prices, the researchers said. But it did seem to make employees miserable, and more likely to complain about the daily commute, loss of flexibility and erosion in work-life balance, according to reviews on Glassdoor. It also made them less trusting of their managers. “We find significant declines in employees’ overall ratings of overall job satisfaction, work-life balance, senior management and corporate culture after a firm announced an RTO mandate,” the researchers said.

It seems NDP MP Charlie Angus has hit a nerve.

Last week, heeding the call of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE), Angus tabled a private member’s bill in the House of Commons to prohibit fossil fuel advertising. As doctors and other health professionals across the country have been saying, “Fossil fuel ads make us sick.”

It’s long been my view that if you are looking for a shorthand heuristic to judge the strength and merit of a climate policy, look at the reaction of the fossil fuel companies. If a climate policy is announced and fossil fuel companies are on the stage claiming they can get behind the plan, then friends, you do not have a climate emergency plan. If on the other hand, the oil and gas companies are protesting loudly and you can see panic in their eyes, then you have a plan with real potential impact.

Canada is caught in a “population trap” for the first time in modern history and needs to limit immigration to escape it, say economists with the National Bank of Canada.

A population trap, according to Oxford dictionary, is when the population is growing so fast that all available savings are needed to maintain the existing capital–labour ratio, making any increase in living standards impossible.

Article content It’s historically been seen in emerging economies, and escape requires either an increase in savings, a cut in population growth, or both.

National Bank’s report joins the growing chorus of concern that the influx of newcomers over the past two years, many of whom are temporary workers or students, is too much for the economy to handle. Others caution there could be economic repercussions if Ottawa cuts off the flow too quickly.

Canada’s population grew by 1.2 million in 2023, a “staggering” amount when you consider that the next biggest surge was when Newfoundland joined the nation in 1949, says the report by National Bank economists Stéfane Marion and Alexandra Ducharme.

From a global perspective Canada’s population growth of 3.2 per cent last year was five times higher than the average of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development nations.

“We currently lack the infrastructure and capital stock in this country to adequately absorb current population growth and improve our standard of living,” said the economists.

No where is this strain more evident than in housing, they say.

National says the shortfall has reached a record of only one housing start for every 4.2 people entering the working-age population. The historical average is 1.8.

Government programs are underway to address this, but to meet demand and reduce housing inflation, Canada would need to double its housing construction capacity to about 700,000 starts a year, “an unattainable goal,” according to the economists.

“More worrisome is the fact that the decline is not simply due to a lack of housing infrastructure,” they said.

Excessive population growth is also impeding economic well-being, they argue. A fact they say is underscored by real gross domestic product growth per capita stagnating for six years in a row.

Capital stock, the physical and financial resources used to create value in an economy, has failed to keep up with population growth. Private non-residential capital stock has been falling for seven years, National says, and is now is at the same level as in 2012, while it is at a record high in the United States.

According to National calculations, capital stock per capita plummeted to about 1.5 per cent in 2023, compared with a high of almost 4.5 per cent in the 1960s.

Article content “This means that our population is growing so fast that we do not have enough savings to stabilize our capital-labour ratio and achieve an increase in GDP per capita,” the economists said. “Simply put, Canada is in a population trap for the first time in modern history.”

If Canada is to improve its productivity, policy makers must set population targets against the constraint of our capital stock, they argue.

“At this point, we believe that our country’s annual total population growth should not exceed 300,000 to 500,000 if we are to escape the population trap.”

Average asking rents in Canada hit a record high of $2,178 in December 2023, up 8.6 per cent from the year before. Over the past two years, rents have increased by 22 per cent or an average of $390 a month, said Urbanation in its January Rentals.ca report.

One-bedroom apartment rents increased the most, rising 12.7 per cent over the past year to reach an average of $1,932.

Article content Alberta saw the biggest hikes with rents shooting up 15.6 per cent to reach an average of $1,691. In 2022, rents in this western city rose almost 17 per cent.

But British Columbia kept the distinction of Canada’s most expensive market for apartments. The average rent here was $2,500 in December, even after slipping 1.4 per cent lower in 2023. The year before B.C. apartment rents soared 18.5 per cent.

Everybody knows that a lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth has even got its boots on.

And the ongoing turmoil over Canada’s parliament recognizing former SS trooper Yaroslav Hunka highlights one of the most important reasons why.

Something that’s untrue but simple is far more persuasive than a complicated, nuanced truth — a major problem for Western democracies trying to fight disinformation and propaganda by countering it with the truth, and one reason why fact-checking and debunking are only of limited use for doing so.

In the case of Hunka, the mass outrage stems from his enlistment with one of the foreign legions of the Waffen-SS, fighting Soviet forces on Germany’s eastern front. And it’s a demonstration of how when history is complicated, it can be a gift to propagandists who exploit the appeal of simplicity.

This history is complicated because fighting against the USSR at the time didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi, just someone who had an excruciating choice over which of these two terror regimes to resist. However, the idea that foreign volunteers and conscripts were being allocated to the Waffen-SS rather than the Wehrmacht on administrative rather than ideological grounds is a hard sell for audiences conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide. And simple narratives like “everybody in the SS was guilty of war crimes” are more pervasive because they’re much simpler to grasp.

Canada’s enemies have thus latched on to these simple narratives, alongside concerned citizens in Canada itself, with the misstep over Hunka being used by Russia and its backers to attack Ukraine, Canada and each country’s association with the other.

According to Russia’s ambassador in Canada, Hunka’s unit “committed multiple war crimes, including mass murder, against the Russian people, ethnic Russians. This is a proven fact.” But whenever a Russian official calls something a “proven fact,” it should set off alarms. And sure enough, here too the facts were invented out of thin air. Repeated exhaustive investigations — including by not only the Nuremberg trials but also the British, Canadian and even Soviet authorities — led to the conclusion that no war crimes or atrocities had been committed by this particular unit.

But this is just the latest twist in a long-running campaign by the Russian Embassy in Ottawa, dating back even to Soviet times, when the USSR would leverage accusations of Nazi collaboration for political purposes as part of its “active measures” operations.

And given Moscow’s own history of aggression and atrocities during World War II and its aftermath, there’s a special cynicism underlying the Russian accusations. Russia feels comfortable shouting about “Nazis,” real or imaginary, in Ukraine or elsewhere, because unlike Nazi Germany, leaders and soldiers of the Soviet Union were never put on trial for their war crimes. Russia clings to the Nuremberg trials as a benchmark of legitimacy because as a victorious power, it was never subjected to the same reckoning. And yet, both before and after their collaborative effort to carve up eastern Europe between them, the Soviets and the Nazis had so much in common that it’s now illegal to point these similarities out in Russia.

Yet, it’s not just enemies of democracy that are subscribing to the seductively simple. Jewish advocacy groups in Canada have been understandably loud in their condemnation of Hunka’s recognition. But here, too, accusations risk being influenced more by misconception and supposition than history and evidence.

The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center registered its outrage, noting that Hunka’s unit’s “crimes against humanity during the Holocaust are well-documented” — a statement that doesn’t seem to have any more substance than the accusation by Russia.

In fact, during previous investigations of the same group carried out by a Canadian Commission of Inquiry, Simon Wiesenthal himself was found to have made broad accusations that were found to be “nearly totally useless” and “put the Canadian government to a considerable amount of purposeless work.”

The result of all this is that otherwise intelligent people are now trying to outdo each other in a chorus of evidence-free condemnation.

In Parliament itself, Canadian Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman called Hunka “a monster.” Meanwhile, Poland’s education minister appears to have decided to first seek Hunka’s extradition to Poland, then try to determine whether he has actually committed any crime afterward. And the ostracism is now extending to members of Hunka’s family, born long after any possible crime could have been committed during World War II.

The episode shows that dealing with complex truths is hard but essential. Unfortunately, though, a debunking or fact-checking approach to countering disinformation relies on an audience willing to put in the time and effort to read the accurate version of events, and be interested in discovering it in the first place. This means debunking mainly works for very specific audiences, like government officials, analysts, academics and (some) journalists.

But most of the rest of us, especially when just scrolling through social media, are instead likely to have a superficial and fleeting interest, which means a lengthy exposition of why a given piece of information is wrong will be far less likely to reach us and have an impact.

In the Hunka case, commentary taking a more balanced view of the complex history does exist, but it’s rare, and when it does occur, it is by unfortunate necessity very long — a direct contrast to most propaganda narratives that are successfully spread by Russia and its agents. Sadly, an idea simple enough to fit on a T-shirt is vastly more powerful than a rebuttal that has to start with “well, actually . . .”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has now issued an apology in his own name over Hunka’s ovation too. However, any further discussion of the error has to be carefully phrased, as any suggestion that Canada is showing contrition for “honoring a Nazi” would acquiesce to the rewriting of history by Russia and its backers, and concede to allegations of Hunka’s guilt that have no basis in evidence.

It’s true that Hunka should never have been invited into Canada’s House of Commons. But that’s not because he himself might be guilty of any crime. Rightly or wrongly, on an issue so toxic, it was inevitable the invitation would provide a golden opportunity for Russian propaganda.

It seems this drama isn't over after all.