Will the fall of 2025 look like the fall of 2019 in downtown Ottawa?

Maybe, say some observers, but return-to-office is only part of the equation

September 2, 2025

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Well-known Ottawa restaurateur Stephen Beckta believes this fall will be a “tipping point” for downtown Ottawa. “It’s going to be a really strong fall with people in the office more and just going out more socially, especially for work events,” Beckta said. “The greater downtown foot traffic is going to impact our lunch business in a very positive way.” During the pandemic, the owner of Beckta Dining & Wine, Play Food & Wine and Gezellig lost his after-work and lunch crowds. But as many workplaces return to in-office work models over the next few months, he’s anticipating more people downtown and an uptick in reservations. During the summer, many of Canada’s big banks said they intend to bring employees back to work in-office at least four days a week. Earlier this month, the province announced that employees will start working in-office four times a week this fall and full-time starting Jan. 1. Ottawa’s city manager Wendy Stephanson said last week that all city employees would be required to work in the office five days a week starting in the new year. On the surface, it seems like things might look a lot like they did in 2019. But will it truly be a return to normal?

Return-to-office one ingredient of downtown vibrancy

Beyond being good for his own business, Beckta said an increase in foot traffic in the city’s core will benefit other businesses and add vibrancy to the area. “I just see some positive opportunities. I love it when downtown is busier. It creates a more vibrant atmosphere. The busier it is, the more people want to be downtown. I’m really looking forward to it,” he said. Sueling Ching, CEO and president of the Ottawa Board of Trade, said that, simply put, more people will increase downtown vibrancy. “People are what makes the vibrancy happen and attract other people, investors and entrepreneurs to look at the city core and all of Ottawa as a desirable place to open a business, work, come to go to school,” she said. Ching told OBJ that while a return-to-office mandate for those who work downtown is good, things shouldn’t just go back to how they were before. “We don’t want to go back to a nine-to-five office-only (structure). We have an opportunity to redeploy many of the physical assets that could make the downtown more vibrant than it’s ever been,” she said, adding that increased economic activity in the city’s core would help build Ottawa’s profile in the international marketplace as “a symbol of prosperity for the entire country.” “What we feel is that, even with the return-to-office and the various workforce strategies of the private and public sector, we need to use this time as an opportunity to re-envision what the downtown core could look like, to be more resilient, vibrant and diverse than before,” Ching said. The pandemic provided an opportunity to challenge the status quo, Ching said. “We don’t want to be fully reliant on the office worker as we were pre-pandemic. We want to start to diversify so that we are more resilient.” According to Ching, the federal government needs to have a workforce strategy, downtown Ottawa needs to increase its mixed-use and residential building space, and the city needs to review its transit system.

Transit a key issue to the success of return-to-office

Ching said transit represents “a barrier for people thinking about going back to work.” Recent numbers from Statistics Canada show that more people have started commuting to work in Ottawa-Gatineau but the city still lags other municipalities as it relates to return-to-office. The report also indicated that most Canadian commuters are still choosing to drive over using public transit. In May 2025, 11.9 per cent of workers used public transit to get to work compared to 80.9 per cent that chose to drive. In a report for a Sept. 2 city finance and corporate services committee meeting, OC Transpo projected a $46.6-million deficit by the end of 2025 due to low ridership and no additional funding from the provincial and federal governments. Shawn Hamilton, a principal at Proveras Commercial Realty, said Ottawa’s transit system needs to step up in order to service the growing number of people commuting downtown. “There’s going to be some growing pains as we learn how to establish commuting patterns back to the office. We have an LRT and transit system that needs to re-establish function and trust. That is going to be a big X-factor in the success of back to the office,” Hamilton said. He added that the city centre wasn’t built to support a large number of cars. “I don’t think it’s realistic to expect everybody to come back to the office in a car-centric manner. The city wasn’t built that way. We don’t have the infrastructure for it downtown. Transit is really going to have to step up, both bus and LRT, to be able to shepherd people to and from the office in a way that isn’t soul-destroying,” Hamilton said.

Return-to-office needed for workplace evolution

Transit woes aside, Hamilton said that there will be “pains of adaptation” as employees transition back to in-person work. In 2019, Hamilton said, “work was just the thing that people did and there wasn’t this external pressure forcing a behaviour like we saw in the pandemic … it was work in its natural form.” Remote work during the pandemic was “an emergency response, not a natural evolution in the workplace,” he added. With hybrid work defining the past few years downtown, Hamilton said Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays have seen near pre-pandemic foot traffic but the next few months will bring “the final push” that Ottawa needs to get back on track. “We (need) to get back onto that train of workplace evolution and we’ll see where it takes us,” he said. “I think the idea of exploring an ever-evolving workplace with the office being the default centre of it makes sense, but now we know the risks of putting all of our eggs in one basket with being a monoculture.” While a return of in-office work is needed for people and businesses to thrive, Hamilton warns that blindly reverting to how things were in 2019 without a plan for the future is a mistake, adding that more focus should be added on making downtown Ottawa more diverse beyond office workers. “I think we can bring people back to the office and start to strengthen our weaknesses by developing places for people to live and thrive in a non-work place … If we can now target sensible conversion opportunities that the federal government may want to divest of we (can) have buildings that can be turned into housing.” With private-sector businesses as well as municipal and provincial governments urging their employees back to the office, Hamilton said a clear directive from the federal government will set the tone for Ottawa. “This is an opportunity like never before for the federal government to come up with a meaningful workplace strategy to engage and enrich their people … I think the federal government needs to do a better job and be more proactive in the role that they can play in helping us bring residential development, affordable and otherwise, so that we can create a diverse culture in downtown Ottawa,” he said.

Making downtown Ottawa more than a nine-to-five area

The pandemic drove thousands of employees out of downtown Ottawa office buildings, pushing the city’s office vacancy rate to an all-time high and leaving many of those buildings empty. This prompted some to ask how the spaces could be better utilized. Since then, some office buildings have been converted into residential properties, and about half a dozen other conversion projects are now under way or in the approval process. In a bid to encourage developers to take on conversion projects, the City of Ottawa approved a plan to streamline office-to-residential conversion projects by reducing certain development fees in late 2023. CLV Group really got the trend rolling when it converted a vacant 11-storey office building at 473 Albert St. into rental apartments. The firm is now turning another 11-storey former government office at 360 Laurier Ave. W. into a multi-residential rental building. In April 2024, District Realty revealed its plans to redevelop an 11-storey building at 200 Elgin St., into a multi-residential complex. The property management company had completed a similar project in 2015 with the top five floors of 169 Lisgar St. More recently, in July, KTS Properties filed an application to turn an office building at 265 Carling Ave. into a 70-unit rental complex with ground-floor retail space. KTS is currently in the midst of turning an office highrise on Slater Street into a 204-unit apartment complex. And that’s just the tip of the conversion iceberg. Andrew Penny, founder and president of Kingsford Consulting, said the rate at which conversions are being done wouldn’t have been possible without the pandemic. “By doing that we have marginally increased the energy level in the (downtown) core, which is good,” Penny said, adding that we are now in an age where people can work from anywhere, so the focus should be on making Ottawa an attractive place to live, rather than work. “Rather than building a city where it’s great for businesses – which is old-style thinking – we have to build a city where people want to live because that’s the only real thing that can influence,” he said. Similar to Ching and Hamilton, Penny pointed out that transit in Ottawa is an issue for those returning to the office. That’s why he said Ottawa workplaces may start to see employees “quiet quitting” in droves, enticed by remote-first workplaces. “When you can get to your office in 30 seconds, no matter how good the transit is, why would you do it? People want a workspace provided by an employer that’s a benefit for them. For an awful lot of people, that commute is just going to be another reason to look for other work, and if you’ve got the skills and connections, you won’t have a lot of trouble finding another job,” Penny said. It will be difficult to change employees’ attitudes towards full-time in-office work after nearly five years of working remotely or in a hybrid model, he added. “The cat’s out of the bag. Businesses have to rethink how they operate and the city has to rethink how it operates because it’s not the same city anymore. We can’t build around businesses. We have to build it around the best place in the world to live,” he said. From a business perspective, Penny said leaders should focus on attracting the best talent, regardless of where it is located. “As an employer, strategically, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to build an office? Or are you trying to build a company? As an employer, I would want the best possible people in the world and if they happen to be elsewhere, that’s fine.” Businesses that switched to in-person work out of a worry that remote work would limit opportunities for growth should rethink that decision, he suggested. “I’m working with quite a number of new startups. They started remote and they’re innovative and collaborative. They manage output and they’re growing like crazy,” he said, adding that those startups are still finding ways to innovate in the absence of water cooler conversations. As for the downtown businesses that may suffer if workers don’t return to the core for work, Penny said it is up to them to adapt. “If all they were doing was providing convenience to downtown workers, they have a challenge. This isn’t unlike other shifts that happen in cities. There aren’t that many saddle-makers, wheelwrights or blacksmiths in Ottawa anymore. Things change,” he said, adding that businesses will also have to adapt to a downtown that caters to residents over employees. Flexibility in the way businesses work is what will “bring the buzz back downtown,” Penny said, as well as efforts being made by the National Capital Commission and other entities. “The NCC has done a great job. I mean, we’ve got swimming at Dow’s Lake, we’ve got all the pop-up bars and restaurants along the (Rideau) Canal. There’s a lot of good things happening. All of it has been stimulated by the pandemic. Rather than rolling it back, we have to lean into it and make Ottawa an attractive place to hang out,” he said.