Slovenia Will Let You Work From a Lake. Canada Will Make You Fight Your Bank For a Desk.

🇸🇮 Slovenia · 🇨🇦 Canada

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Picture two employees negotiating the same ask — more days at home — in two different countries. In Slovenia, the number of people legally registered as home workers has grown more than a hundredfold since before the pandemic, and the law requires your employer to pay you for the privilege. In Canada, three of the country's biggest banks just told everyone to come back four days a week, and cited "relationships" as the reason you don't get a say. Same request, wildly different leverage.

Do's & Don'ts

🇸🇮 Slovenia

🇨🇦 Canada

Slovenia's remote-work story is really a story about the state catching up to behavior that had already changed. Labour Inspectorate figures show 217,428 people registered as working from home in the past year — more than a hundred times the pre-pandemic number — and a 2021-era legal reform effort (via the Employment Relationship Act's Article 68) tried to formalize what had become common practice: remote work must be set out in a proper employment agreement, employers must compensate workers for personal equipment used at home, and a right to disconnect, discouraging after-hours contact, was slated to be written into national law. A survey of 708 users on the job platform Mojedelo found roughly two-thirds favored a hybrid arrangement, 22% wanted to go fully remote, and just 11% preferred the traditional office model outright — with younger workers consistently the most enthusiastic about staying home.

Canada tells almost the opposite story, and the swing happened fast. Stanford's Institute for Economic Policy Research found Canadians average 1.9 work-from-home days a week — the highest of 40 countries surveyed — which sounds like a remote-work paradise until you check where the trend is heading. KPMG's 2024 CEO survey found 83% of Canadian business leaders expect their workforce back full-time in-office within three years, up sharply from 55% just a year earlier. That expectation has already landed: RBC, Scotiabank, and BMO moved to require at least four in-office days starting that September, with RBC describing itself as "relationship-driven" and needing in-person connection, while Canaccord Genuity reportedly pushed for five days a week outright. An Angus Reid poll found almost 20% of Canadians said they'd quit immediately rather than return full-time, with the appetite to resist concentrated among workers under 35 and men.

What makes the Canadian case distinctive isn't the mandate itself — plenty of countries are tightening — it's the speed of the reversal in a country that, statistically, had been the most remote-friendly workforce in the world only a couple of years earlier. Slovenia's shift has moved the other direction: toward formalizing and protecting an arrangement regulators were initially slow to catch up with, rather than clawing one back.

The Reckoning

The irony sits right at the center of both stories: Slovenia is building legal infrastructure — compensation rules, disconnect rights, hour-tracking requirements — around a practice that's already won culturally. Canada built almost none of that infrastructure during its remote-work peak, which left the arrangement entirely at employer discretion once leadership decided it wanted people back. A Slovenian remote worker has a contract clause. A Canadian remote worker, in a lot of sectors, had a norm — and norms don't hold up well against a bank's September memo.

There's a second, quieter divergence: Slovenia's remote-work debate is mostly about where work happens. Canada's is increasingly about whether staying remote-friendly is even a retention strategy anymore, given how many large employers are betting that the labor market has shifted enough to make a hard mandate survivable. Both countries are negotiating the same tension — flexibility versus cohesion — but Slovenia is negotiating it through legislation, and Canada is negotiating it through attrition.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Hacker News (via a mirrored thread) — A Canada-based commenter looking for remote roles found the market stacked against them even with strong qualifications, noting that "most US companies only hire people who live in the US," and recalling a remote offer from a Toronto employer that came in "about 50% below my current salary" — a specific, discouraging data point on how little leverage Canadian remote-seekers sometimes have, even in a supposedly remote-friendly country.

Workfrom.co (digital-nomad community profile) — A remote worker who settled in the Slovenian capital after years of gradually shifting from office to hybrid to fully remote described the appeal simply: "Ljubljana is an awesome place to work and Slovenia is an awesome country to live in," attributing the full-remote decision originally to needing fewer distractions rather than any grand lifestyle plan.

Reddit, r/workingmoms (via mirror) — One poster, three months postpartum, asked fellow parents whether it would be "absolutely insane to quit my job over a return to office mandate before I have another job lined up," after her request for a hybrid arrangement was refused outright for the new year — a question with no easy answer in the current Canadian market.

Reddit, r/workingmoms (same thread) — A reply from another parent offered a rare good-news case: her own employer's RTO threat collapsed after enough staff quit or threatened to leave, and the policy was shelved once a new, remote-friendly CEO took over — proof the mandates aren't always irreversible, just rarely reversed by polite pushback alone.

Blind (teamblind.com) — On a thread comparing tech-company RTO policies, one commenter dismissed the back-to-office push in blunt terms: "To me, going back to office is a waste of time, money and energy," while another pointed out that not every mandate is arbitrary — some, they argued, reflect real constraints like client data security rather than pure nostalgia for cubicles.

Conclusion

If remote flexibility is the deciding factor in your move, look past this year's headline and ask which direction the local policy is trending, not just where it sits today. Slovenia is legislating remote work into permanence. Canada, despite leading the world in average work-from-home days, is watching some of its largest employers yank the privilege back hardest and fastest, precisely because so much of it was never written down.

Here's what I'd tell a friend: in Slovenia, get the clause in your contract — the state has your back if you do. In Canada, get the clause in your contract anyway, because right now, the state very much does not, and neither, increasingly, does your bank.