Labour Arbitration in Canada, by Morton Mitchnick and Brian Etherington, Toronto: Lancaster House, 2006, 426 pp., ISBN 0-920450-29-6

Grievance arbitration, a process for the binding settlement of disputes during the life of the collective agreement, has been entrenched in Canadian industrial relations for more than half a century. An important feature of our arbitration system is the near universal requirement that arbitrators file their decisions with the labour ministry (or some equivalent organization) of the jurisdiction in which the arbitration falls. These decisions are publicly available and represent an almost complete set of the thousands of arbitration awards decided in Canada in any given year. This accessible case law has spawned a variety of efforts to report, categorize, and analyze trends in arbitration. Labour Arbitration Cases, the oldest reporting service, chooses and publishes a small proportion of decisions, without commentary, that its editors believe raise new issues or deal with old issues in an innovative way. Lancaster House’s various on-line data bases provide in-depth commentary of a handful of cases each month that its editors deem significant. The “bible” of labour arbitration since its first publication in the 1970s has been Canadian Labour Arbitration, usually referred to simply as “Brown and Beatty” (the names of its authors). It provides a topic by topic analysis of the myriad arbitration issues, referenced to the cases through extensive footnotes. It is available both on-line and in a hard copy version that is too massive in size for easy portability. To this field has been added Labour Arbitration in Canada, a concise topical review of the procedural and substantive issues in grievance arbitration. Its authors are well regarded arbitration experts. Morton Mitchnick, for many years one of the country’s leading arbitrators, is now in full time practice with a Toronto law firm, acting on behalf of employers. Brian Etherington is a labour law professor at the University of Windsor and an experienced arbitrator. To the authors’ credit, cases are drawn from across Canada and the volume is not Ontario-centric. The book is divided into three parts of roughly equal size: 1) Evidence and Procedure; 2) Discharge and Discipline; and 3) Contract Interpretation. Each of these main parts is further divided into chapters by topic area, with a total of 25 chapters in all. The structure is a sensible one and closely mirrors, for example, the way I teach my own business school course on grievance arbitration. Each chapter is further broken down into sub-topics and these sub-topics are set out in the table of contents, greatly simplifying the task of finding needed information. The coverage is comprehensive, but succinct. The leading cases are cited and discussed and there is sufficient information on each topic to enlighten the reader. Additional sources are provided at the end of many of the sections, although these sources should be broadened to include those from all publishers, not just Lancaster House. The structure of the book replicates that of the publisher’s “Leading Cases On-Line” website, which itself is based on the book Leading Cases in Arbitration, also by Mitchnick and Etherington. In theory, this should provide valuable synergies, enabling readers who are also website subscribers to find updates of the various topics covered in Labour Arbitration in Canada. Perhaps it was too soon after publication to see these benefits, but when I checked the website on topics with which I was personally familiar, I was unable to find important cases issued in the past 18 months. I suspect this will be remedied in time. The first part of the book focuses on the process of arbitration. It contains nine chapters and includes discussions of jurisdiction, arbitrability, evidence, remedies, judicial review, and duty of …