I count a disability or health claim from the member's first call, then build the sites, suppliers and staffing that keep that count honest in French and English.
01 / Chief Operating Officer
Premiums and premium equivalents
C$1.74B
2025, group and individual business
Plan members and dependants
580,000
About 6,100 employer plan sponsors
Median short-term disability first decision
6 days
Counted from first notice; eleven days in 2022
Colleagues in operations
1,520
Claims, contact centres, administration and suppliers
＋
Designed for consequence.
A member who calls us after a diagnosis has already begun waiting, whatever our file says. If our clock starts only when the paperwork is complete, operations looks faster than the member experiences it. I would rather report the slower, truer number and then change what makes it slow: the missing physician's form, the single telephone carrier, the supplier whose subcontractor we never saw.
An insurer's operations should be judged by how long a member waits for a decision, counted from her first contact and served in her own language, even when a building, a supplier or a generation of experienced staff is suddenly unavailable.
I am chief operating officer of Vireloux Mutual Life, a Quebec-chartered mutual insurer in Trois-Rivières owned by its participating policyholders. We provide group health, dental, disability and life benefits to about 6,100 employers in Quebec, Ontario and New Brunswick, covering some 580,000 plan members and dependants, and sell individual life and critical illness cover through independent advisers. Premiums and premium equivalents reached C$1.74 billion in 2025. I lead 1,520 colleagues in claims, contact centres, plan administration, document operations and supplier oversight. Pricing, reserves and investments sit with other executives.
I trained as an industrial engineer and spent five years timing trays of remittance slips at a Laval processing bureau. When I joined Vireloux in 1999 to replace paper file rooms with imaging, I learnt that the real problem was the gap between a document arriving and someone being able to act on it. I met the same gap from a supplier's desk in Toronto, then in disability claims, where a missing physician's statement could hold a member's income for weeks.
The three decisions on this site apply that view. We moved the start of the disability clock to first notice and accepted a temporary backlog in long-term files. We required a scanning supplier to return medical documents to staff in Canada. We kept two live service sites when consolidation would have saved C$3.2 million a year. Each choice cost money or time that colleagues reasonably wanted to spend elsewhere.
Disability decisions counted from first notice
Median first decisions on short-term disability claims fell from eleven business days to six by June 2023, measured from the member's first notice. Long-term transition reviews slowed for four months while experienced examiners staffed a new evidence desk.
Medical files handled by staff we can audit
A renewal revealed indexing by an undisclosed subcontractor outside Canada. We paid C$780,000 more each year to move medical documents to Canadian staff, and our register now lists 64 subcontractors behind 41 material contracts.
Either site can carry the French queue
After a 26-hour telephony fault in 2022, we cross-trained Sudbury instead of closing it. When an electrical fault shut headquarters in March 2025, 71 per cent of French calls were answered within three minutes.
Current focus
I am working on our claims workforce. Thirty-seven per cent of senior disability examiners and case managers can retire before 2031, so we pair each with a named successor through phased retirement and record the judgement our procedures never captured.
Conversations I welcome
I would consider a first independent seat with an organisation that does not compete with Vireloux, with about twenty-two days a year available, subject to my board's consent and a review of supplier, adviser and plan-sponsor relationships.
The leadership record
Trusted with consequential decisions.
In the boardroom
Coopérative BrivalineVolunteer director · 2019–present
Formation
Bachelor of engineering, industrial engineeringUniversité de Marchevois · 1994
Master of business administration (part-time)Université de Marchevois · 2003
I opposed moving twelve of my best examiners to the evidence desk, and I said so in front of the executive committee. Gabrielle put my objection and the backlog it predicted into her own report, then gave me the resources to clear it.
Martine GravenneauVice-president, disability claims, Vireloux Mutual LifeThe full record ↗
Contact
I would consider a first independent seat with an organisation that does not compete with Vireloux, with about twenty-two days a year available, subject to my board's consent and a review of supplier, adviser and plan-sponsor relationships.
