Until the pandemic, everybody working at headquarters was working from 30 Victoria Street in Gatineau. There was the possibility on an individual basis of asking for telework arrangements, but these were quite exceptional. To be quite frank, they were not in the culture of this organization much more than in any organization.
What we realized during the pandemic, after some initial adjustments, was that in fact the telework mode functions quite well for us. Over 90% of our workforce wished to continue to work remotely. Some have since moved during the pandemic to other locations, and are fully engaged in the work of the agency. We were able to deliver this election working pretty much entirely remotely. There were a handful of people at headquarters during the election. The rest were working remotely. It works quite well to engage remotely, whether you're in, for example, call centres or a task force.
That creates a lot of flexibility for recruitment. We are in a tight labour market. Young Canadians want that flexibility. We believe we can offer a very dynamic workplace with the hybrid model. We are fully embracing that.
Madam Chair, the additional point I would make is that in every election cycle, we spend a fair amount of time, effort and money—because we ramp up the workforce—finding space and setting up cubicles, desks, chairs and computers and then securing the lines. We talked about the security of those. We do that about a year before the election and carry it afterward, because closing an election takes about a year. For almost three years, we're in a ramped-up mode. Then we go down. Then we start searching again for space. It's expensive and it's not efficient.
We're not going to do that anymore. We can save quite a bit of money by having everybody work from home during the election, as we did in this election.