First contract arbitration (FCA), the Canadian labor law that allows the union or the employer to apply to the provincial labo r board for assistance in settling an agreement in first contract situations, was originally created with four goals in mind: (1) to end first contract work stoppages, (2) to allow newly certified unions to obtain a first agreement, (3) to foster enduring bargaining relationships, and (4) to deter further misconduct. This study seeks to enter the debate concerning the latter two by examining the effect of FCA provisions on two scaled measures of decertification, which are used as proxies for measuring bargaining relationships. This is undertaken using Time-Series Cross-Sectional (TSCS) analysis with data from nine Canadian provinces over a four decade time period. It finds that the presence of an FCA provision correlates with 23 to 32 percent less decertifications, depending on the measure of decertification employed, in provinces with an FCA provision than in those without one. Furthermore, it examines the different types of FCA which shows that the automatic and fault forms of FCA correlate with 32 to 44 percent and 26-31 percent less decertifications respectively, depending on the measure, than in those provinces without a provision. Although this analysis cannot investigat e whether FCA fosters lengthy bargaining relationships, it represents a preliminary attempt to assess this goal by showing that less decertifications take place in the provinces that provide access to FCA than those that do not, which implies that there are more bargaining relationships on aggregate. Furthermore, this study represents the first to undertake an investigation of this goal of FCA using a multi-jurisdictional quantitative approach that incorporates the whole of the industrial relations arena of the provinces included, meaning both bargaining units who accessed the FCA system and those that did not. Thus, it is the first to incorporate both the direct and indirect (deterrent) effects of FCA in measuring this outcome.