By Wendy Lee, Local 575, inSolidarity Committee
During the HPD Pre-Bargaining Conference in June 2026, HPD Sector Chair Sara Labelle provided a condensed historical context to attendees about the formation of the HPD Sector within OPSEU/SEFPO. The first HPD bargaining unit organized was in 1969, with the medical technologists at Peterborough Civic Hospital. Currently, HPD has 104 bargaining units that cover about 30,000 HPD members. The Hospital Labour Disputes Arbitration Act (HLDAA) is a crucial piece of labour legislation that governs collective bargaining for unionized workers in hospitals, long-term care homes, and other designated healthcare settings.
Enacted in 1965, Ontario’s Hospital Labour Disputes Arbitration Act (HLDAA) is a cornerstone piece of legislation that mandates compulsory, binding arbitration to settle collective agreements in the hospital and healthcare sector when there is a deadlock in negotiations. It strictly prohibits strikes and lockouts. The act applies to tens of thousands of hospital and healthcare employees, including nurses and health-care professionals.
The core mechanism of HLDAA is a strict trade-off: it strips healthcare workers of the right to strike and prohibits employers from locking them out. Instead, if the two sides reach an impasse during contract negotiations, the dispute is automatically sent to a neutral third-party panel for compulsory interest arbitration, which imposes a legally binding collective agreement.
Because HLDAA completely alters traditional collective bargaining leverage, it comes with a highly debated set of advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages of HLDAA
- Guaranteed Continuity of Care (Patient Safety): The primary advantage is the protection of vulnerable patients. Because healthcare is an essential service, a strike or lockout could immediately jeopardize patient lives. HLDAA ensures that hospital doors stay open, surgeries are not canceled due to labour disputes, and long-term care continues uninterrupted.
- Predictability and Stability: The legislation completely removes the volatile threat of a sudden work stoppage from the healthcare system. Hospital administrations can plan operations and budgets, and the public can rely on steady access to care without the anxiety of impending labour disruption.
- Certainty of a Resolution: Under traditional bargaining, a strike or lockout can drag on indefinitely with no clear end in sight. HLDAA guarantees that if negotiations break down, a legal resolution will be reached through the arbitration process, resulting in a finalized collective agreement.
- The “Replication Principle”: Arbitrators are legally tasked with trying to replicate the contract that the parties would have reasonably agreed to if they had been allowed to bargain freely in a normal strike/lockout environment. They evaluate specific legislated criteria, such as economic conditions, recruitment/retention needs, and comparisons to similar public and private sector jobs.
Disadvantages of HLDAA
- Loss of Fundamental Labour Rights: From a union perspective, the blanket ban on job action strips workers of their ultimate constitutional leverage. In fact, HLDAA is currently facing high-profile legal challenges—such as the constitutional challenge launched by the Ontario Nurses’ Association (ONA)—arguing that the complete ban on strikes violates the “freedom of association” guaranteed under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
- Chilling Effect on Meaningful Bargaining: Because both sides know that binding arbitration is the fallback, HLDAA can inadvertently discourage genuine compromise at the negotiating table. Employers or unions may “sidestep” hard discussions, refuse to budge on controversial items, and simply let an arbitrator make the tough decisions for them.
- Slow and Costly Legal Process: Resolving a contract dispute through a three-member arbitration board (comprising a union nominee, an employer nominee, and a neutral chair) can take months or even years. Healthcare workers frequently work under expired contracts for long stretches while waiting for a heavy, backlogged legal process to deliver an award.
- Frustration Over “Ability to Pay” and Market Realities:
- For Employers: Hospital managements often argue that arbitrators impose wage increases or benefit improvements that exceed tight provincial funding allocations, ignoring the hospital’s actual financial realities.
- For Workers: Unions argue that the system fails to adequately address systemic workplace crises—like severe burnout, understaffing, and deteriorating working conditions—because arbitrators tend to favor historical consistency and conservative benchmarks over bold, systemic changes.
- Demonstrated Need: HLDAA makes winning major contract change(s) an uphill battle. Arbitrators naturally play it safe and rarely agree to bold shifts unless the evidence is overwhelming. To win a major upgrade, our Union must meet a very strict two-step rule: first, we must prove beyond doubt that a real problem exists, and second, we must prove that our proposed change will actually fix it.
For further information, and a more in-depth historical overview of labour laws and how they have changed over the decades, please refer to this link:
https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/llt/2022-v89-llt07076/1090030ar.pdf
One of the most interesting pages within this report is page 11 where it summarizes the total number of Hospital Collective Agreements and how they were settled i.e. arbitration from the years 1966 through 1970. These early settlements became the foundation years to establish more recent procedures and processes for negotiations.
According to this report “until the Ontario Labour Management Arbitration Commission was established in 1970, there was no central state institution charged with the collection of arbitration reports, so there was no clear archive that could be drawn from in establishing precedent.” This meant that there was clearly a demonstrated need to create mechanisms to capture data in a centralized manner to help support decision making, and CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees) was the very first to spear head the way for other unions to follow.
In Ontario, central bargaining tables have the capacity to negotiate a single provincial agreement on behalf of multiple local units. Participation in central negotiations is completely voluntary, with OHA (Ontario Hospital Association) being the single employer. They are primarily used in sectors that rely heavily on provincial government funding. This structure ensures that major monetary issues (like wages and benefits) are standard across the province, while “local tables” handle region-specific workplace rules. The main unions that use central bargaining tables in Ontario are concentrated in Education, Healthcare, and the Public Service.
In 1974, Arbitrator Johnson recommended that Central Negotiation tables be created. Therefore, Central now has bargaining tables within ONA (Ontario Nursing Association), HPD (OPSEU/SEFPO Hospital Professionals Division), and CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees). Eventually central negotiations tables were extended to SEIU Healthcare (Service Employees International Union), Unifor and PARO (Professional Association of Residents of Ontario) as well.
Most recently, Ontario Nurses’ Association (ONA), argued that the decades-old ban on job action limits their fundamental bargaining power. ONA launched an historic constitutional challenge seeking to strike down the legislation, claiming it violates Section 2(d) (freedom of association) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As with any legal challenge such as the appeal of Bill 124; which was eventually overturned, it was a lengthy process. Bill 124 became law in 2019. Various labour unions in early 2020 filed to have it deemed unconstitutional. Bill 124 was finally struck down in 2022. Most labour activists anticipate another lengthy constitutional challenge by ONA.
Everyone covered under HLDAA will be anxiously watching out for the outcome. Many of us wonder what impact this court ruling will provide – after all, all hospital employees are deemed as “essential workers” which prevents us from striking as well.
All in all, negotiations are complex to navigate. Unfortunately, members of the health care sector have not bounced from the ravaging effects of SARs, MERs, flus from every animal species (bird, swine, etc), COVID, and what is next to come. If these health care professions’ wages never keep up with inflation, why would anyone go into these essential careers? Would you ask your children to enter any professions where they cannot sustain a family of their own some day? Simply having passion for health care without money does not create sustainable living.
It’s not just an unfair short-term cost when wages fall below standards of living. The long-term impact cannot be fixed by privatizing segments of the health care system. When you have no staff willing to take up the vast array of vacant positions, the only way to fix the problem is to have decent wages and quality benefits. Perhaps we all need to think about what this will cost all of us when there is nobody left in health care system to help heal us when we are sick.
There are ways to help the healthcare sector. Are you willing? Reach out to Hospital Professionals Division by clicking on this link – https://opseu.org/sectors/health-care/hpd/ and Ontario Health Coalition by clicking on this link – https://www.ontariohealthcoalition.ca.