Introduction
On April 21, 2026, Collective Bargaining Ontario (CBO) launched its new redesigned Reports resource, an interactive database of wage trends and other information relating to collective agreements in the province. While there are still some apparent flaws that need to be ironed out, overall the new CBO Reports could be a helpful resource for labour lawyers who assist clients with collective bargaining and interest arbitration, and potentially also legal research for disputes about interpretation of collective agreement provisions.
I attended a training session on May 27 during which a CBO representative walked participants through the new CBO Reports interface. While the new version is not perfect (more on that below), it is greatly improved from the previous version of the resource, which users found difficult to navigate in both web browsers and on mobile devices. The CBO has made significant changes to make the interface more user-friendly and included more information than was previously available.
The CBO Reports are available at the following link: https://www.ontario.ca/page/collective-bargaining-ontario-interactive-reports. While there is far too much information in the Reports to summarize in an article of this length, below I highlight some of the information that I think would be most helpful to labour lawyers in the province. The Reports contain explanatory notes that provide additional information on the terms and metrics used and on other things that may be unclear at first glance.
Wage Trends Reports
The most useful part of this resource is likely the Wage Trends Reports, which provide data on wage increases in collective agreements in Ontario, broken down by categories like sector, industry, and location. The industry category can also be broken down into sub-industry for additional specificity.
Each Report in this section provides information on “Low Rate” increase (the average wage increase for the lowest paid classification in each collective agreement), “High Rate” increase (the same but for the highest paid classification), and “Median” and “Mean” rate increases (which are self-explanatory). There are explanatory notes throughout the Reports that provide more information on what the various metrics and terms used mean. The Mean wage increase is probably the most helpful, but the other metrics could also be of use depending on what the resource is being used for.
On each Report in this section, the user can select a year, and the Report shows statistics for all collective agreements ratified in that year. The percentages shown are the average of all wage increases over the terms of collective agreements ratified in a given year, not the wage increases for the year itself.
Much of the information in the Wage Trends Reports could be very useful during collective bargaining and/or interest arbitrations. For example, if a lawyer is representing an employer or union in the Utilities industry during bargaining, they could use the Industry Analysis section of the Wage Trends Reports to find out the average wage increases in collective agreements ratified in that industry in recent years. This information can also be broken down into the Utilities subindustries, Electrical, Natural Gas, and Water. There is also an Agreements Listing section where users can search for all collective agreements ratified in a given year by industry, sub-industry, and/or sector, which would be an efficient way to find relevant comparator collective agreements, and to verify the average wage increase data described above.
As another example, if a public sector organization and union are going to interest arbitration, and one party is arguing for a 4% annual wage increase, they could use the Sectoral Analysis section of the Wage Trends Report to see the percentage of all wage increases in public sector collective agreements ratified in recent years that were above and/or below 4%.
One section of the Wage Trends Report which could be useful in the future, but currently needs additional work, is the Wage Provision section. Here, users can search for different types of wage-related provisions in collective agreements by ratification, sector, industry, and sub-industry. If parties to a collective agreement are in a dispute about how a provision in their agreement should be interpreted, they could use this section to find other collective agreements with similar provisions and see how those provisions have been interpreted by arbitrators in the past. However, as discussed below, this section suffers from issues likely related to the CBO’s use of artificial intelligence (AI) in generating the Reports, which currently renders the section of limited value.
Notable Issues with Reports
As noted above, while the Reports are a helpful resource for bargaining and researching interpretation of specific collective agreement provisions, there are some fairly significant flaws with the resource. Most importantly, in order to generate the Reports, CBO relies heavily on AI to pull wage grids and provision language from collective agreements uploaded to the provincial collective agreements portal. While an individual apparently reviews everything that the AI has generated before it is published in the Reports, there remain errors and inconsistencies in the Reports that suggest additional human involvement would be beneficial.
Certain sections of the Reports are more affected by the CBO’s reliance on AI than others. For example, the Wage Provision section of the Wage Trends Report is meant to provide users with specific language used in collective agreement provisions on various wage-related issues, like Shift Premiums. However, it appears that this section was generated by using AI to extract any provisions from collective agreements with the term “Shift Premium” and then compiling those provisions without substantive review by a human. As a result, many of the “provisions” included in this section are simply provision headings which do not include the language in the provision itself. The CBO representative leading the training session suggested that this function is being worked on and will hopefully be more helpful in the future.
Some of the information in the Reports, such as interactive maps and scrollable charts and tables, are difficult to navigate. There is an option to download spreadsheets of the data, which can be easier to use than some of the online functions. However, this option requires some more work to improve the usability of the Reports resource.
Conclusion
Lawyers and students who work on bargaining or collective agreement disputes or are interested in keeping up with collective bargaining trends in Ontario are encouraged to spend some time playing around with the Reports and familiarizing themselves with the functions and available information. Overall, the Reports are a helpful resource for these purposes.
About the author
Joe Koshan is a labour and employment lawyer who lives in Toronto. Joe has been a Member-at-Large of the OBA Labour and Employment Law Section Executive since Fall 2024.
Any article or other information or content expressed or made available in this Section is that of the respective author(s) and not of the OBA.