New Partnerships, New Possibilities
The JLP’s mandate has always been to improve labour-management relations through facilitated conversation. The Program has grown and changed throughout its existence, but always stayed true its commitment to collaboration and joint learning.
Sometimes, the standard solution doesn’t quite fit the need. When an agency reaches out, interested in bringing the JLP to its employees, or when a department in the core public service is looking to deliver JLP learning on a more ambitious scale, we work with the parties to find ways to make it happen.
Finding a flexible path forward that allows more public-service employees to benefit from the JLP learning approach and joint labour-management philosophy demands creativity and openness to new perspectives and ideas. In this article you’ll read about some of the ways we approach a partnership whose scope or concept needs a more tailored solution than organizing a standard JLP learning event.
If management and union within a department get together and identify a specific need to effect widespread change in their workplace, we may enter into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with that department and union counterpart at the local, regional or national level. An MOU gives the parties greater flexibility to determine the delivery schedule, coordinate logistics and build internal capacity by having their own facilitator employees.
One of the JLP’s long-standing success stories is the partnership in the Québec region with Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) and Canada Employment and Immigration Union (CEIU). This collaboration has been in place for the better part of the last twenty years, since the Program re-launched in 2007. In 2025 and 2026 alone, ESDC-CEIU hosted over 200 JLP in-person workshops and virtual discussions in Québec. Today, ESDC employees make up more than two thirds of all facilitators in the Québec region with Regional Field Coordinator Michaëlle Antoine estimating they facilitate approximately 90% of all ESDC learning activities.
In recent years, both Parks Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency recognized opportunities to expand labour-management learning within their organizations. Management and labour got together to choose specific workshops and discussions they wished to offer within the agency. Working jointly with the JLP, they established Strategic Partnerships that allowed them to identify priority learning, set objectives and timelines, and held orientation sessions for their employees. They then held JLP in-person workshops and virtual discussions facilitated by their own employees on the schedule that suited the organization.
This cost-recovery model provides organizations with greater flexibility over over logistics, facilitation and timing, while benefiting from the JLP’s proven learning, learning material, facilitation approach and ongoing support.
Over the years, the JLP has also partnered with organizations in response to unique circumstances.
In the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Yukon Government and Yukon Employee Union partnered with the JLP to launch a year-long pilot project that emerged from collective bargaining. JLP Program Officers facilitated a complete Facilitator Orientation Session, preparing facilitators to offer a tailored Understanding the Collective Agreement workshop to territorial public-service workers.
During that same period of uncertainty, Global Affairs Canada called on the JLP for help setting up an initiative involving its Locally Engaged Staff-Management Consultation Boards. The JLP helped designed a tailored half-day virtual session on meaningful consultation and effective communication, adapted from the JLP's Labour-Management Consultation workshop to meet the unique needs of this audience.
True partnership calls for generosity of spirit. Whether it’s through an MOU, a Strategic Partnership or another customized solution, the JLP is always trying to strengthen those essential relationships, so we can keep learning and growing together!