Grievance Software for Ontario Workplaces

Built around Ontario practice

Ontario is the largest labour relations jurisdiction in Canada. The Ontario Labour Relations Act governs certification, bargaining, and unfair labour practice complaints, and the OLRB hears a steady volume of grievance-adjacent matters alongside the arbitrators who resolve most collective agreement disputes. Any software serving Ontario workplaces has to reflect that reality: a strict grievance procedure, firm arbitration timelines, and a body of arbitration case law that arbitrators and counsel actively cite.

Sertus is built by the co-author of Canadian Labour Arbitration(Brown & Beatty) — the reference text Canadian arbitrators cite — so the platform understands the Ontario practice at a structural level. Step timelines reference the agreement itself. Grievance types map to the categories Ontario arbitrators recognise. Deadline alerts fire before the clock runs out on an arbitration referral.

For employer-side teams, Sertus centralises labour relations work across multiple bargaining units and collective agreements. For union locals, Sertus replaces the scattered spreadsheets, email threads, and Word documents that most grievance files still live in with a single searchable workspace that follows a case from intake to settlement or award.

Ontario also runs on a deep body of arbitration jurisprudence. Most collective agreement disputes in the province are resolved by a single arbitrator drawn from an experienced private bar, with awards issued in writing and circulated through the arbitration community. Counsel on both sides cite those awards back at the next hearing, so a grievance file that cannot easily pull prior awards on the same clause or the same conduct is a file at a disadvantage. Sertus keeps every grievance linked to the agreement article it arises under and lets counsel search across the internal decision library in natural language — the same way they would ask a junior associate to look something up.

The Ontario public sector also shapes how the platform is used. Hospital, long-term care, school board, and municipal employers often run several bargaining units at once — nursing, support staff, paramedics, inside and outside workers — each with its own agreement and its own grievance procedure. Sertus treats each bargaining unit as a first-class object, so a labour relations team managing multiple agreements at one employer can see grievance volume, resolution rates, and arbitration load broken out by unit without leaving the platform. The Employment Standards Act overlay — hours, overtime, public holidays, and termination — sits alongside each agreement article so the statutory floor is visible when counsel is drafting a position.

Related reading

See how Sertus fits into the broader Canadian labour relations toolkit: labour relations software for Canada, grievance management, and the best grievance management software comparison.

Last updated: April 2026