This article was written by Steven Muller, Vice President Litigation at Share Lawyers.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have the latest casualty from fake disability insurance in Canada.

HBC employees who are on self-insured disability insurance plans are now at risk of losing their ongoing benefit payments. These are folks, like your sister or my brother, whose employer decided to cover their employees for long term disability benefits not by way of a true insurance policy, but out of company cash that is not protected from bankruptcy. Sadly, this is not a new story in Canada. Nortel disabled employees suffered a similar fate years ago, prompting a bandage response from the federal government with an amendment to the Canada Labour Code to require federally regulated private-sector employers to insure disability plans. Our provinces, since the Nortel disaster, have been dragging their feet on implementing necessary provincial changes.

This is no minor problem. There is a plethora of self-insured disability plans in Canada. Here are some numbers. As of 2022, self-insured plans provided disability income to 970,000 disabled Canadians.

Fake insurance provides no peace of mind for disability claimants or the public. Legislative protections are hardly a big ask!