I'm not sure what the benefit of encryption there is anyway. Governments have a very effective way of decrypting stuff like this: getting a court order to hold employees in prison until the data are decrypted.

Maybe they have no actual non-contractor employees in Québec? I'd be pretty pissed off if I was sitting in a Québec jail because someone in SF decided that during a raid was the appropriate time to implement encryption on my devices.

Are all servers and laptops currently encrypted at your work, or school, or home? I suspect that for most businesses the answer is NO. Same answer for most individuals.

But seeing as Uber is often skating at the edge of legality (or usually over the line IMO), perhaps they should have routinely been doing encryption?

If you use full-disk encryption on your phone or laptop, it's vulnerable after you've logged in and supplied your credentials. Rebooting ensures that those credentials must be supplied again in order to decrypt.

Well then you do understand why they tried to do it remotely - because the devices weren't encrypted in the first place.

Law enforcement agents raiding your facility don't tend to permit you to run around shutting down all the computers.