Thursday, February 1, 2024

Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied

With increasingly lengthy delays in arbitration hearing dates, CLAC’s collaborative model of labour relations is more important than ever in resolving disputes in a timely manner

By Peter Vlaar, Associate General Counsel, CLAC Legal Team

I represent members who have disputes with their employer. I often find these members in some of the most stressful periods of their lives.

Whether they have just been blindsided with a termination from their longstanding job or they are in the middle of recovering from a workplace injury and their employer has told them they cannot work until they are perfectly healthy, these members are often in crisis and in desperate need of urgent help. That is why one of the more difficult parts of my job is telling them that there is no quick solution to their problem and that they have to wait.

Waiting is hard. It’s especially hard when the difficult circumstances you find yourself in are through no fault of your own.

The reason I often have to tell members to wait is because most arbitrators in Ontario are not available for 8 to 24 months into the future! Compared to an average wait time of three to eight months only a couple of years ago, that is a significant difference.

Arbitrators are akin to judges, and they have the exclusive jurisdiction to rule on cases involving unionized workplaces. While nonunionized workplace disputes are handled in the Superior Court system in Ontario, before regular judges, unionized workplace disputes are handled in the labour arbitration system, which was established in 1944 to create an exclusive venue where workplace disputes could be resolved efficiently and effectively.

The delay that we now experience in setting down hearing dates reminds me of the adage justice delayed is justice denied. That rings true for so many of the vulnerable members I represent who are without income for months on end while we wait for a hearing.

This change in the length of time to get to a hearing has made it increasingly important to work diligently on resolving disputes as soon as possible. That means drawing on CLAC’s model of collaborative labour relations, which starts with identifying the member’s goals and seeing how they can align with the employer’s goals toward a settled outcome.

This gives the member a quick and effective solution while saving the employer the time and expense of long litigation. While there remain certain disputes that cannot be resolved in that way, this approach has yielded many successful outcomes for members that builds on our success as a union in fostering healthy, collaborative relationships with employers.

Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied

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