Grievance Software for Quebec Workplaces

Quebec runs on its own civil-law tradition and its own labour statute, the Code du travail. Certification, bargaining, and unfair labour practice complaints are administered by the Tribunal administratif du travail, while binding grievance arbitration under the Labour Code resolves most collective agreement disputes. Quebec has a strong arbitration tradition, with arbitrators drawn from the rosters maintained in cooperation with the Barreau du Québec, and a body of Quebec-specific arbitration jurisprudence that 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 structural shape of Quebec labour relations. Step timelines reference the collective agreement itself. Grievance types map to the categories Quebec arbitrators recognise. Deadline alerts fire before the clock runs out on an arbitration referral.

Quebec collective agreements are often bilingual, and the workplace language obligations of the Charter of the French Language (Bill 101) shape how grievances are documented. Sertus parses and indexes collective agreements in both French and English, so a bargaining unit with a French-language agreement and English-language supporting documents can search and cite across the full record without switching tools.

Quebec's civil-law tradition also distinguishes its labour practice from the common-law provinces. The Tribunal administratif du travail, established in 2016 to consolidate several predecessor bodies, now handles certification, unfair labour practice complaints, and psychological harassment claims, while binding grievance arbitration under the Code du travail continues to resolve the day-to-day collective agreement disputes. Arbitrators in Quebec produce written awards in French or English depending on the parties and the agreement, and counsel regularly cite Quebec-specific precedents that reflect the civil-law interpretive tradition. Sertus is built to hold that jurisprudence as a searchable internal library rather than as a folder of PDFs.

The Quebec public sector is also one of the most heavily unionised in Canada. The FTQ, CSN, and CSQ represent major shares of the workforce across health, education, and the public service, with the Fédération interprofessionnelle de la santé du Québec (FIQ) covering a concentrated nursing and health-professional population. Multi-employer and sectoral bargaining structures in health and education produce master agreements covering many sites at once, and Sertus treats each bargaining unit and each employer as a distinct object so grievance volume, resolution rates, and arbitration load break out by unit without losing the sectoral context.