Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development
Collective Bargaining Ontario: Public Access
About the Art
Rendered as fields of repeating, fading letterforms, this diptych visualizes the scale of Collective Bargaining Ontario’s public archive, a collection of over 75,000 collective agreements and arbitration awards, growing by roughly 5,000 filings each year. The acronyms CBO (Collective Bargaining Ontario) and MLITSD (the Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development) are broken into isolated characters and layered at varying opacity, evoking the depth of the archives. Some are fully visible in the foreground, others recede into the accumulated weight of the archive behind them. Diagonal lines and blocked geometric fields nod to the architecture of computational systems, the AI-driven extraction process that turns static legal text into structured, searchable data. The work becomes a portrait of information at scale: an institution’s language, filed and refiled over years, made newly legible through digital infrastructure.
Original artwork by Aedán Crooke of Surface Impression. No AI was used in generating this artwork.
A digital platform gives the public collective agreements, arbitration awards and AI-extracted analytics on wage trends and contract provisions
Collective Bargaining Ontario gives unions, employers, researchers and the public free access to filed agreements, arbitration awards and neutral analytics that make bargaining evidence easier to verify and compare.
Collective Bargaining Ontario gives unions, employers, researchers and the public one place to access neutral collective bargaining information and analytics from the Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development.
Collective Bargaining Ontario is believed to be Canada’s first fully digital platform for labour relations services. A key feature is public access to collective agreements and interest arbitration awards filed with the Minister through the Collective Agreements e-Library Portal. The site currently houses more than 75,000 collective agreements and awards, with an average of 5,000 filed documents added each year.
The platform also provides reports on collective bargaining trends and contract language. These reports are based on AI-extracted data from filed collective agreements. Users can explore wage trends by sector and industry, analyze average annual wage increases, and review contract language on wage-related provisions such as overtime, shift premiums and on-call clauses.
Provision reporting identifies collective agreements that contain specific contract language and links users directly to the relevant page. The ministry also publishes reporting on social collective bargaining provisions, including diversity, equity, inclusion and anti-racism clauses.
Before the platform, the public often relied on paper-based reports, physical visits or delayed quarterly publications. Moving this information online removed location and cost barriers and gave unions, employers and other users equal access to a neutral source of bargaining information.
Making the data searchable, downloadable and easier to analyze gives unions, employers and other users a shared, neutral information base. This can support more efficient research and better-informed negotiations.
