This came up for someone who was outside Canada for 6 months (partly business travel, partly family reasons in India) while continuing to work full-time and remotely for their Canadian employer, on payroll and paying Canadian taxes the whole time.
The consensus view from the group: Canadian work experience for CEC purposes generally requires that you be physically present and working inside Canada. Time spent outside the country — even while remaining employed by a Canadian company, on payroll, and paying taxes — typically does not count toward the Canadian work experience requirement.
A dissenting view in the thread suggested that because the applicant remained employed and kept paying Canadian taxes throughout, the remote period "should" count. This is not the safer assumption to build an application around — the physical presence requirement is the standard IRCC has historically applied, and relying on the more generous interpretation risks having that experience excluded (or your application flagged) after the fact.
What to do: If you have periods of remote work from outside Canada, don't count those months toward your qualifying CEC experience when self-assessing eligibility. If the amount of experience is borderline, get advice from a licensed immigration consultant or lawyer before submitting, since this is exactly the kind of edge case where a wrong assumption can jeopardize an application.