Heeding calls from unions and employees, the Treasury Board on Saturday issued a new directive to department and agency heads aimed at clarifying which public servants still need to show up to work amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

The directive, which was also sent to presidents of regional federal councils and heads of human resources, reiterates that managers can only consider mandating staff to show up on site if their “work meets the definition of critical service and working remotely to support it is not feasible.”

READ MORE: Shared Services to enhance ‘network readiness;’ ESDC hiring more staff amid outbreak

According to the department, which acts as the employer of the public service, a critical service is defined as one that, if disrupted, would “result in a high or very high degree of injury to the health, safety, security or economic well-being of Canadians, or to the effective functioning of the Government of Canada.”

All departments and agencies must identify their own critical services and any resources that support that work.

The Public Service Alliance of Canada, the largest federal public service union, warned last week that government employers were sending conflicting messages to staff about what qualified as a critical service. Further confusion stemmed from their use of the term ‘essential,’ which has a different meaning in labour parlance.

As the union noted, that term is meant to describe the group of employees that must continue working in the event of a strike or other labour disruptions.

In the new directive, the Treasury Board reiterates that ‘essential’ and ‘critical’ are not interchangeable terms, specifying that “essential service agreements are agreed to with the bargaining agents” and that “no current essential service agreements exist for the vast majority of public service organizations.”

The directive also states that managers must ask employees working remotely that are “not supporting critical operations, service and program delivery” to limit their use of secured government networks. And, in cases where a manager has determined that remote work is “not at all possible,” non-critical employees will be eligible for leave with pay, according to the Treasury Board.

Students, casuals and employees with terms of less than three months, who are not providing critical services, are also eligible for this paid leave.

This new guidance from the Treasury Board will remain in force until April 10, though the department said this will be “reassessed closer to the date based on how the situation is evolving.”

The Treasury Board stated that determining appropriate use of government networks to “maximize availability for priority users” is ultimately at the discretion of each deputy minister, but also stressed that any such decision should made in “consultation” with the departmental chief information officer and chief security officer.

These members are to be kept abreast of the latest network capacity updates from Shared Services Canada, and the Treasury Board’s Chief Information Officer.

READ MORE: Some federal departments not listening to TB advice on working remotely: PIPSC

As iPolitics reported on Friday, Shared Services, the federal agency responsible for the federal bureaucracy’s IT services, has activated a “heightened awareness window” that will allow technical teams to “respond quickly in the event of any incident effecting mission-critical services.”

While Shared Services maintains that its “current capacity is sufficient to support essential services and employees” across the government, the agency said it’s currently working to further enhance “network readiness.” It’s doing so, in part, by asking employees to work at different times or on rotational shifts, and reducing their access to “non-essential activities and blocking non-essential social media sites.”