Administration and faculty at the University of Northern British Columbia could finally take their cases to an arbitrator later this month.
A hearing before Arne Peltz is scheduled for July 23-24 and will come seven months after a job action by faculty came to an end and the sides agreed to take their differences on how much faculty should be paid to "final offer selection arbitration."
Under the process, the arbitrator to selects between the parties' best and final offers and without the ability to 'split the difference' between the two.
The sides had hoped to get a hearing much earlier in the year but the Labour Relations Board suspended hearings on all but the most important cases.
"Rather than having an in-person hearing, so far as I know, it's going to be written submissions and we've submitted a brief and the employer has submitted a brief and I think we're submitting a response now," UNBC FA president Stephen Rader said.
"Because it's a final-offer arbitration and the arbitrator just has to pick one of the two compensation proposals, it shouldn't require that much in the way of discussion or testimony.
"There might be a little bit of that but it's not like the previous arbitration where we had multiple days of presentations by the legal counsel, witness testimony and so on."
The same process was used to reach a settlement in 2015.
UNBC FA is also continuing to pursue its allegations of bad-faith bargaining against the employer but getting a hearing before the LRB remains difficult due to the pandemic.
