The Decibel - The reasons Canadians aren’t taking their paid vacation

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

A lot of Canadians struggle to take their allotted, paid vacation days, according to new research, meaning those days go unused. It’s not just internal pressures making people skip a holiday, it’s coming from higher up – from managers’ attitudes towards vacation all the way up to the state of the economy. Today, Globe reporter Zosia Bielski explains the reasons why Canadians aren’t taking their paid days off, and the deeper consequences – for our productivity and health – when we don’t. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Have you ever been on vacation and looked at an email you just got from work? Or couldn't resist checking your schedule to plan for when you're back? Maybe you're on vacation right now feeling like you can't totally unplug. Or maybe it felt like such an ordeal to take time off that you just didn't. This is incredibly common in Canada. of Canadian workers struggle to take their allotted, paid vacation days, meaning they often go and used. And that can have deeper consequences for the quality of our work and our health. Zosha Bielski has been looking into this. She's a reporter with the Globe who covers how we spend

our time. Today, she tells us the reasons Canadians aren't taking their vacation days and why it's so important that we do. I'm Susan Kristinski-Robertson, sitting in for Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the Decibel from the Globe and Mail. Zosha, great to have you on the decibel. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. So I love to travel. Love having time to recharge. Couldn't imagine leaving vacation days on the table. I was surprised to hear that people don't take them. What's going on here? So, you know, basically I've been scanning the research and I was dismayed and surprised to learn that 45% of Canadians across various studies weren't using up their full allotment of paid vacation days. And I sort of immediately assumed this was sort of self-imposed workaholism, this really particular North American trait of tying our self-worth to work, really having no identity beyond our work.

and I just thought, oh, how smug we are and we're really shooting ourselves in the foot here. But I was wrong. I mean, I began sort of digging into this problem and found the people who are sort of not taking their vacation days. This is often not a personal choice. This is often not smugness or workaholism. I really found people getting pushed into this situation for a number of reasons. People feeling so squeezed and pressured to deliver and working so much overtime before and after a break. that some just feel it's untenable to take their days off. And some people just don't see it as worth the headache. In all this data, who exactly are we talking about?

So we are talking about white-collar office workers with paid vacation policies. Those are either policies where you can sort of accrue holidays indefinitely or you have a use-it-or-lose-it policy where you've got to use up your days by the end of a fiscal year. what this current research isn't touching on is a whole sphere of frontline workers who really may not even have any form of schedule control. They don't know when their shifts are. They may be working multiple jobs where the question of allotted paid vacation days doesn't even enter into the sphere. And so what did the data say about who was most affected here? The numbers basically were hovering around 40 to 45% of Canadian workers, not taking their full slate of paid vacation days. Various studies sort of pointing to the same figure.

Across age groups, it was fairly consistent, although younger people did sort of report more anxiety about their job security and were sort of the most likely to forego their paid time off. They were sort of the most anxious about the status of their work, remaining employed, precarious gig work. what we did see was boomers 62 plus were the most likely to take more of their days. So these are people like on the cusp of retirement. Recruitment firm Robert Haft found that sort of those who are 62 plus, just about 25% weren't using up all their days. So that's kind of a stark difference from the rest of the cohort. Yeah, a lot less. And it makes sense, right?

You're older. You're more set up in your career. Whereas when you're younger, as you mentioned, you're not only anxious about holding on to your job, but you're also in that phase where you're trying to prove. yourself, you're trying to establish yourself, maybe less inclined to take time away. Exactly. Those are like the hustling years at the beginning of your career, whereas, you know, once you're nearing retirement, you may have even amassed vacation days that you're going to lose if you don't take them in the next year or two. And frankly, maybe you just aren't as concerned about the optics because you're sailing on out anyway. Right. So what were the main reasons that people said themselves

that they weren't taking their vacations? So across various pieces of research, a lot of people were squirling days away for a later absence, but one of the things that was sort of telling was they weren't necessarily squirreling the time off for a future vacation. They were foreseeing maybe a future family emergency and were squirreling their days away, which is kind of an interesting way to think about your time. Like it's very fear-based. A lot of people really worried about falling behind. They fear they couldn't take the time off, really worried about the backlog that would be

waiting for them. So 39% of people, a surveyed by Angus Reed, an employment hero, avoided taking all their days off because they were really worried about falling behind. More than a third kind of feared that their burnout would actually only worsen once they came back. That was research from Robert Haft. And 56% had like even anxiety tied to email specifically. The backlog of email that would be waiting for them. That was research from Expedia in 2024. for. So a real sentiment that the mountain of work that would amass just made it not worth it in some

cases. Yeah. And so this is like about people feeling overworked in general. This is coming back to that sentiment. And we've talked a lot about people feeling the pinch right now, you know, worried about making ends meet. How does that spill over into people's willingness to take time off? Absolutely. The overwhelm. And a lot of people also talked about having no backfill for their role, like no support. it. Like the work was not going to get done if they weren't there. And they also really talked a lot about optics in this current moment. And this is the bit I found the most interesting. People really worried about how bosses and colleagues would perceive them, perceive their absence. And people really also feeling guilty about leaving their coworkers in the lurch, knowing there's no backfill for anyone and worried that the burden would fall on colleagues who are also overwhelmed. So a lot weighing on them as they really just contemplated like they're well-deserved. time off. And we're talking about people's internal feelings here, but this isn't only self-imposed pressure, right? So Shia, like, it's also about what's going on around the employee. How does a manager's approach to time off filter down to their workers? So basically, everything I heard from

the researchers I spoke with who studied burnout said everything the employer, the boss models, you know, the workers are picking up on. If your boss rarely takes holiday, you're going to note that. if they are on holiday but emailing or in touch, you're going to register that. If you've got accelerating demands in the workplace, quicker turnarounds on deadline, a lot of it tied to like emerging technologies like AI, you're going to be feeling that pressure. And especially now with job insecurity, people can feel like taking time away is a risk. They want to be visible. And are people right to feel that way, to be worried about how their managers will think about them taking time off?

Whether they're right or not, I'm not sure, but I had a lot of well-meaning advice from psychologists and therapists, but that doesn't sort of really negate the hierarchies that we all feel in our organizations and the structures around us that we sort of pick up on loud and clear. And, you know, it's all well and good to tell people to set boundaries and set out of office replies and take their holiday. But if the messaging that they're getting around them from colleagues and bosses is sort of guilt-loaded around this, none of it will work. you know, none of the well-meaning advice on boundary setting will work. It depends on your workplace culture. And there was a study that actually showed that, right, about how people were perceived when they took time off or set out-of-office notifications. Yeah, so this was another telling piece of research from last year. So even managers who were sort of outwardly touting the importance of detaching, unplugging, restorative time off, when they were asked to sort of scan two sets of

employees, employees who took all of their vacation days, maybe were vocal about taking those vacation days, and maybe also set even out-of-office notifications on weekends to delineate their boundaries, managers were definitely less likely to promote these people, despite what they were outwardly saying about the importance of disconnecting from work. So it can affect how you're perceived then. And, you know, we've on the flip side seen some companies offering unlimited time off, but Does that actually work in practice? So this is an interesting trend.

A number of years ago, like startups and tech firms started introducing this concept of unlimited time off. Take as many days as you want, when you want. I mean, it sounds like a dream, right? The reality turned out to be less rosy. Jennifer Moss, who writes about burnout and is a journalist, sort of compared this unlimited time-off concept to like the perks that tech bros often put in place in office spaces like ping pong tables. that end up, you know, getting dusty and unused. So these are high octane industries where realistically you probably won't have time to take seven or eight weeks of holiday. Moss also talked

about the issue of framing vacation like a perk rather than a workplace right. So this whole concept of unlimited time off, it really feels like a snazzy perk rather than than you're right as a worker. So what this research found in 2025 again was that many of the people working in firms with unlimited time off, the workers ended up taking less time off than colleagues, coworkers, and traditional firms. Part of the problem is it's a very new social norm. You have no idea, like, what is a normal amount of time to take off? What if you take five weeks off and find out your colleagues have taken two? Again, how does that perceive? What are the optics around the office? So people got very sheepish around like what is normal to do here. What is going to make me look bad? And they ended up

taking a conservative amount of time. Yeah, and that gets back to what your manager does too, right? Because if you're in a place with unlimited time off and your manager doesn't take time, you might not either. Precisely. Like it's part of a whole ecosystem. You're never doing it in isolation. So even if you do take your vacation, and you referred to this before a little bit, there can also be all of that work that goes into preparing to leave or, you know, doing extra when you get back. Can you tell me a little bit about that? So there's actually term for this phenomenon It's called the time off tax. And that refers to the number of overtime hours.

Employees are jamming in before and after a holiday just to get the thing off the ground. So this is typically kind of unpaid work that you're surreptitiously doing just so you can make that flight. But also all the catching up that you're doing when you get back, which can kind of bleed over into the following weekend. So in December, ADP found that Canadians are putting in about 17 hours or more than two work days just to take like a week-long holiday. which is ridiculous when you think about it. And for some people, it's just, it's just too much of a hassle to bother going through it. Yeah, well, if you end up paying for it that much, right? It's, it can be such a deterrent. Zosha, can you tell me about one of the people you interviewed for this story? I spoke with a woman named Monique, who is a health care manager in Alberta. And Monique had

given this a lot of thought. For years, she had been dragged back into work on holiday. You know, she's a manager in health care. So crises that only she could. could sort of detangle, deadlines that were imminently looming. And Monique really made a point of determining, okay, what absolutely has to get done and where am I kind of gatekeeping and what can I leave behind. But the issue became so pronounced that, you know, she's got a family cabin in the woods in Alberta, and she ended up setting up like an ergonomic desk, chair, dual monitors, like a professional grade headset, hide speed internet, all of this facing out a beautiful, large window overlooking pines and water.

And what she does is she gets up really early in the morning, blast through what she needs to blast through, and then hopes to join her family and sort of decompress. But she really described this double bind of knowing that her family was waiting for her and feeling sorry for her and seeing her agitation and knowing that if she didn't do this, she'd be coming back to a really big mess at work. And also feeling resentful that, you know, her bosses were, essentially looking the other way. They could see she was logging in during her off hours. And they

sort of just quietly looked the other way, whereas, you know, colleagues who were at her level or beneath her level were often very mindful of what she was doing and tried to help out in any way. But there were often things only she could tackle. So. Right. And so she's this perfect example of the problem you're talking about, you know, being away technically, but not really disconnecting. And, you know, even if you do take time off, you feel that pressure. Right. It just wasn't restorative at all, and she was just coming back to a backlog anyway. And again, on the resentment piece, she felt this sort of tacit sense from above that you're choosing to work on holiday. This is your choice. Something about your time management is a miss here where you're having to log on. And this is like a veteran with decades of experience in health care, like a notoriously understaffed field. So none of it is good. And what I loved about Monique is she's sort of a tech nerd. So she strapped herself in for like biometrics and really could definitely see what happens to her body when she really is on holiday and manages to unplug usually when she's out of province and can't take the work with her. So she profoundly understood what unplugging sort of does to her stress markers does for her sleep.

The question she was sort of deeply concerned about working in health care. We'll be right back. Okay, Zosha, so we're in the season of vacation right now as we're talking. Why is it so important that we all make sure to take time off? So the importance of taking time off as much as we poo-poo it in North America and sort of treat it like an add-on or a perk, you're basically resetting the nervous system. You're shutting down your stress response. And this is sort of really important both for your own sake and for your own health. But it's also important for returning to work.

The body needs a rest from stress. it needs to sort of properly brace for more stressful periods ahead. If you're never getting that break, if you're never resetting the nervous system and shutting down your stress response, it's a quick road to burnout, which we're seeing drastic numbers around. Yeah, and what do the numbers say, right? There's studies on just how bad burnout is right now. Is that something we can measure? Absolutely. So Mercer has a global trends report annually, and they found that 81% of workers now feel they are at risk of burnout. That's a jump from 63% pre-pandemic in 2019.

Robert Haft, the recruitment firm, also found burnout was now at 62% up from 48% previously. So massive spikes, massive spikes in burnout. And this is globally? Bursar is global, and Robert Haft was actually Canadian workers. That's really interesting. And, you know, we hear a lot, I think, about burnout. but it's not just a feeling, right? There's concrete impacts. So what are the health impacts of burnout on people, but also the productivity impacts for them when they actually do come back to work?

So, you know, researchers sort of talk about what chronic stress does to every system in the body, whether it's vascular, respiratory, muscular, gastrointestinal, reproductive, like chronic stress just wreaks havoc on every system in our body. And we feel this, right? We feel this through immense periods of stress in our lives. It just feels like the body's breaking down. You know, psychologists also talk about the social costs. Like when we're on holiday, when we have time off either away or here, we restore our personal relationships. So that's when we restore our personal ties. And those are the relationships that kind of help us stay resilient. So when we have to forego our time off or work through it, we're really thinning out another buffer for burnout, which is our social time. And in terms of the productivity point, every measure basically points to restorative rest sort of allows us to have better ideas, be more productive, really hone our focus and attention. It also makes us kinder to our colleagues and more supportive of our colleagues. So, you know, for the bosses who can't wrap their heads around this empathetically or from a human

perspective, there's also really a good business case for it. Absolutely. And so for people who are thinking about time off right now, this might be a useful thing to know. How long does it actually take to reset your nervous system? So those who study burnout say it actually takes two to three days for the nervous system to sort of regulate itself once you go on holiday, to shake off work. Obviously, if you've got like deeper burnout, you're going to need more time. So a weekend isn't enough. A weekend is not enough. Okay. I imagine that checking emails doesn't help you do that nervous system reset.

absolutely basically when you are checking back in poolside you're deferring the entire process of resetting your nervous system so if you've got two to three days for that process if you're checking back into work that process isn't beginning it's it's being postponed and maybe you never get there yeah so coming back to the assumption that you made at the beginning of this reporting about why people aren't taking their time off it sounds like this is not just a individual decision, right, Zosha, there's bigger things going on here that are leading to this. Absolutely. So I think the rut we get ourselves in is when we sort of blame individuals, the way that Monique felt blamed. You know, you're not managing your time well. You're not delegating enough.

This is how these issues are often framed. We blame the people who are working through their holidays. But this goes far beyond the individual. It goes to your middle manager. It goes to the leadership above your middle manager, it all trickles down. This is organizational. So what are some of the ways that you've seen companies or managers tackle this issue? One of the examples that keeps coming up is Deloitte in the States who actually hired a chief well-being officer really interested in these questions. And so what they did at some point was institute collective disconnect days.

So everyone could sort of unplug at the same time without guilt. You didn't have to feel you were burdening colleagues. No one was going to be blasting through your out of office. reply wall because everybody was off together. It's much like that period between Christmas and New Year's where most people are off, at least in the office space, in those workplaces. So everyone's sort of off together and there's more of a collective like dropping of shoulders. So that's one thing I heard about. Another writer who I spoke to, Cassie Holmes, teaches the stuff at UCLA, the rest, leisure, burnout. And she talked about certain companies incentivizing managers to force

their people to take all their days off. So if a leader looked back and saw they've got a manager with lots of staffers holding back their holidays, that manager sort of would be put on notice and get a talking to. So you're sort of incentivizing managers to get their people to take all their time off. That's a really interesting approach too. And, you know, on a smaller scale, rethink, a Vancouver creative agency instituted no meeting Mondays. And that was a policy that sort of came to grips with the fact that when you schedule a meeting on a Monday, people are working through their weekends to prep. So that's not necessarily a holiday policy,

but it's a small-scale way of thinking about delineating those boundaries between on and off time. That's a really interesting idea. Is this kind of solution, the collective time off, for example, is that always practical, though? I mean, it feels like there are a lot of professions that you can't just say, no, we won't be working, right? Hospitals have to open their ERs. Subways have to run power grids have to stay online. Yeah, I mean, this is all still very much a white collar office conversation, and we haven't even scratched the surface on frontline workers and people hustling and juggling three jobs. So we're talking about, you know, office workers who can do this together. And even they aren't very good at it. So there's a lot to be considered and worked on in the sphere. So, Zosha, this is probably a good moment for a little bit of disclosure.

We are not just co-workers. We're also buddies and have taken vacations together, something I really treasure. And, you know, we talk a lot about being able to unplug, but we can relate to this too, right? The pressure to be on, you know, as journalists, I think we've all had the experience of being on vacation and getting a call from a source. Just last year, we were sitting at a campsite while you watched me on my phone, finishing edits on a big story I was trying to get out the door. While a massive storm was rolling in. Yes, absolutely. And I really should have been helping with prep for that. So, I mean, I want to ask you about this. How do you relate to this issue?

How do you approach your vacation time? Yeah, and I think these are questions that sort of led me to start this time you speak. When, especially speaking with other women, we, a lot of us find ourselves growing very protective of our time because we feel so much encroaching on it, whether it's work or family demands. I often call myself like the family butler in my family, you know, just juggling all the logistics of work and you're off time. So I've, I have become quite fiercely protective of my off hours. I try to do everything I can, create my own backfill, leave those handover notes. I really love the process of crafting that out of office. I don't have an obnoxious out of office the way some people do or you're sort of schooling the world on this issue.

I do relish setting that thing on. Then once I'm there, I really consider the impact of like taking that phone and looking at it for no reason and seeing pitches for pieces or somebody who doesn't know you're off at work, you know, emailing you and understanding the immediate cost of that to that restorative time off. We can immediately feel ourselves sort of pulled out of that experience. So I really try to sort of manage my own gatekeeping around, oh, I should be checking in or maybe I should blast through some email quickly, so I have a few hundred less notes to sift through when I come back. So I think for me, the importance of holiday has sort of been reiterated by all the leisure scholars I've talked to, psychologists who are looking at rest, and they really stress the importance of time where you're unscheduled, you're able to ruminate, daydream, all that stuff we used to do as kids, and just how profoundly important that is for your brain. So all these things. sort of instincts that I've felt myself developing. I've been very interested to see that the researchers I'm speaking to really have evidence to back up the importance of this stuff.

Okay, you've convinced me I'm putting my phone down and you and I are off to Kill Bear. Let's do it. Zosha, thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me. That was Zosha Bielski, who covers how we spend our time for the globe. That's it for today. I'm Susan Krishinsky-Robertson, sitting in for Cheryl Sutherland. Our producers are Medline White, Rachel Levy McLaughlin and Michalstein. Our editor is David Crosby, Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thank you for listening.