National Post newsroom staff in Toronto and Ottawa who cast their ballots in a union vote in September will have to wait until well into the new year for a labour board decision that will determine whether they will unionize.

CWA Canada – the media bargaining agent which helped organize the union drive at Postmedia’s flagship national newspaper – said in early October that 31 out of 59 staff voted in favour of unionizing.

But that slim majority is not yet definitive because of six contested ballots – two of which bear the names of two well-known national columnists – that the union did not factor into its count. CWA Canada does not want those ballots counted because it believes the six employees to whom they belong are not part of the bargaining unit.

The issue is now before the Ontario Labour Relations Board, which held its first two hearings on whether the ballots should be counted on Monday and Tuesday this week. Martin O’Hanlon, president of CWA Canada, and Sean FitzPatrick, the union’s lawyer, said it’s likely four or five more days of hearings will need to be scheduled and the next one probably will not take place until the new year.

“We’re talking months now,” O’Hanlon said earlier this week. “Even when the hearings wrap, (the labour board) takes time to make their decision and that could take weeks.”

CWA is arguing before the labour board that five of the six employees linked to the contested ballots work for Postmedia – the corporation which owns the National Post – and not for paper itself. Fitzpatrick said these employees are columnists or in production roles.

Well-known national columnist Andrew Coyne is one of them. Coyne – who has not yet responded to a request for comment – testified before the labour board on Tuesday, O’Hanlon and FitzPatrick said.

The sixth ballot the union is challenging belongs to National Post columnist and Ottawa bureau chief John Ivison. The union is asserting that Ivison is in a managerial position and therefore should not be in the bargaining unit.

Ivison said he didn’t want comment on whether his ballot should be counted because he has not yet testified before the labour board.

Postmedia included the contested names on the voters’ list ahead of the union vote, which was conducted by the labour board. O’Hanlon said the union and Postmedia have no control over the ballots and have not seen them.

“The six contested ballots were set aside before they were counted,” O’Hanlon said. “The (labour board) will count them only if they are ruled to be in the bargaining unit.”

The union was originally contesting seven of the votes – but O’Hanlon told iPolitics CWA has dropped their case against one of them.

FitzPatrick noted that disputes over who is or isn’t in a bargaining unit when a group of employees vote to unionize for the first time are quite common – and that hearings before the labour board, while lengthy, are a “routine process.”

O’Hanlon said Gerry Nott, Postmedia’s senior vice-president of content and the National Post, also testified during the first two days of hearings.

Sources at the Post told Global News in September that representatives from CWA Canada – the country’s oldest media union – began reaching out to newsroom staff in the spring, after Postmedia made significant cuts to non-unionized employees’ benefits.

For years now, Postmedia has been struggling to stay afloat in a perfect storm of massive debt payments, declining print subscriptions and circulation, and plummeting ad revenue. The corporation has been cutting full-time jobs more and more aggressively since 2010.

Despite this, Postmedia’s five senior executives received a combined $2.3 million in “retention bonuses” last fall. Three of those execs have since left the company.

Until now, the National Post – which launched in 1998 and is known for its more conservative editorial stance – has remained the only major non-unionized newsroom in the country. Union organizers acknowledged that, given its history, the Post’s move to unionize might be considered a “hell-freezes-over-moment.”

“We’re unionizing because we love this newspaper,” the National Post union committee wrote when it announced its union drive. “We want the Post and its newsroom staff to have long, bright futures.”

A spokesperson for Postmedia said in an email Friday the company is not going to comment on the union drive or the contested ballots “while the matter is before the Labour Board.”