The question that failed before the traveller did

In the winter of 1999 I read a claim file from a retired teacher from Trois-Rivières who had been admitted to a Florida hospital with chest pain. Her application had asked whether her medication had changed in the ninety days before departure. Her doctor had lowered a blood-pressure dose, and she had read the question as asking about new medicines. The clause was clear to the underwriters who wrote it, and the decline was correct under the policy. I was twenty-three, a junior examiner, and I remember thinking that the question had failed before she did.

I had joined Pellanquay Travel Assurance in Mississauga in June 1998, two months after completing a translation degree at Aubrevale University. The company needed examiners who could read French hospital records and speak with Quebec travellers and their families. For four and a half years I adjudicated emergency medical claims and learnt how an insurer's assumptions look from a hospital corridor in another country.

In 2003 I moved into the product team as an analyst. My first serious project was the medical questionnaire for travellers over sixty. We tested every question with retirees in Mississauga and Laval, split the stability questions into separate items for new medicines, changed doses and new symptoms, and published a short guide to what counted as a change. Underwriting kept every right to decline; we only made the questions answerable. I became product manager in 2005 and completed a part-time graduate certificate in plain-language communication at Corvenne College the following year.

Brisemont Mutual Life recruited me to Quebec City in 2008 to manage individual health, dental and critical illness plans. Many buyers had just left an employer plan through retirement, self-employment or redundancy and had a short window to convert their cover. I learnt to work in French as my daily language, to respect Quebec's consumer and language expectations, and to write a product in two languages without treating either as a copy. I also learnt how slowly an insurer can change a wording once thousands of contracts depend on it.

I came to Lacmorin Life in Ottawa in 2012 as director of group health and dental products. Group benefits added a second customer: the plan sponsor, usually an owner or office manager, who chooses and administers the plan but uses little of it. Many of my decisions since then have been about serving both without confusing them. An administrator wants enrolment to be quick; a member wants to know what physiotherapy is covered after a knee operation. Independent advisers who sell our plans form a third audience, and they notice every inconsistency before we do.

In 2017 I took over disability and member products. Disability changed how I think about service, because a claimant is often unwell, worried about income and dealing with a physician, an employer and us at once. We launched online short-term disability claims late in 2020, and that design was mine. It worked for confident users and failed many others, which is why the first case on this site begins with my own product.

I became chief product officer in April 2021. My team owns product strategy, plan design proposals, wordings, the member app and portal, plan-administrator tools, and our research and accessibility practice. I share decisions with the chief actuary on pricing, the chief underwriter on evidence requirements, the vice-president of disability claims on adjudication and the general counsel on wordings. I prefer to settle disagreements with members' evidence, gathered in both official languages and with people who use assistive technology, rather than with seniority.

Outside Lacmorin, I have been a volunteer director of the Vallonée Adult Literacy Network since 2019 and sit on its finance and audit committee. That board showed me what an independent director contributes, and how much an executive's instinct to fix things must give way to questions.

I am now preparing for an independent board seat. I would bring a working understanding of how insurance products meet people, how provincial regulators expect fair treatment to be demonstrated rather than asserted, and how a member-owned organisation weighs service costs against premiums. I would need to learn the capital and investment side of a board's work in more depth than my executive role has required, and I would rather say so than discover it in a first committee meeting.

Open to Board appointments

Languages / English · French