Chief Operating Officer / Canada
A disability clock, a subcontractor and a second site
- 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
Decisions & consequences
01Starting the disability clock at the member's first notice
In early 2022 our short-term disability report showed an average of five business days to a first decision. Members and employers described something else. The report started counting when a file was complete, and 34 per cent of new claims waited more than ten business days for the attending physician's statement, which most clinics still sent by fax. Measured from first notice, the median was eleven business days. For a member without salary continuance, that could mean an unpaid month.
Martine Gravenneau, our head of disability claims, proposed hiring fifteen temporary examiners. Our group sales vice-president wanted a five-day standard published to plan sponsors at once. I chose differently: count from first notice, and move twelve experienced examiners into a medical-evidence desk that would contact the clinic, the employer and the member on the first working day. Martine opposed taking her strongest people from long-term files, and she was right about the price. Reviews of members moving from short-term to long-term disability slowed, and that backlog rose from 180 to 410 files over four months. I also declined to publish the five-day standard until we had met it for two consecutive quarters.
We added secure upload for clinics and accepted physicians' information by telephone where our medical consultants considered it appropriate, at a cost of C$1.1 million. Weekly reports separated delays we caused from those at the clinic or employer.
By June 2023 the median from first notice was six business days, and files waiting more than ten days for medical evidence had fallen to 13 per cent. The long-term backlog returned to its usual level by October 2023. We published the standard in 2024, and sponsors now receive the measure counted from first notice rather than from a complete file.
What I would do differently: I would tell sponsors with large long-term caseloads about the slowdown before it happened, rather than explaining it after their employees' files had already waited.
Returning medical documents from an undisclosed subcontractor
Tessaroc Document Services had opened, scanned and indexed our claims mail since 2016 under a contract worth about C$5.6 million a year. During the 2023 renewal, our supplier-risk team asked for the staffing plan behind the indexing work. It showed that a subcontractor outside Canada indexed several document types, including physicians' statements and drug receipts, through remote access to Tessaroc's system. Our contract required notice of material subcontracting, and we had received none. No breach had been identified.
Procurement and our chief financial officer favoured renewing with stronger clauses and a privacy impact assessment, which Quebec's privacy law requires before personal information is communicated outside the province. That route was lawful if the assessment supported it, and it kept a price about 14 per cent below onshore alternatives. I argued that medical documents should be handled only by staff in Canada whom we could audit directly, while remittance forms and policy correspondence could stay under the assessed arrangement. Our chief executive accepted the split. We gave up about C$780,000 a year, and the planned automation of indexing slipped by five months while Tessaroc hired and trained.
We informed the risk committee and our privacy officer, asked Tessaroc to confirm in writing which files the subcontractor had accessed, and reviewed access logs with internal audit. Medical documents moved to Tessaroc staff in Montreal by March 2024. We then asked every material supplier to list its subcontractors. Two others had undisclosed ones, both minor and both remedied.
Our register now lists 64 subcontractors behind 41 material contracts, reviewed each year with every contract owner. A subcontractor list is now a condition of tender, not something we request at renewal.
What I would do differently: I would have taken the facts to the risk committee chair in the week we found them, instead of waiting until management had agreed a response. The committee was entitled to see the problem before the solution.
Keeping two live service sites instead of consolidating
In November 2022 a fault at our telephony carrier's switching facility cut inbound lines to Trois-Rivières, including routing to its home-based agents, for 26 hours. Sudbury's lines worked, but only eleven of its agents could serve in French. French callers waited an average of 38 minutes that day, and about 4,100 calls were abandoned, many from members asking about a disability payment. Our continuity plan had assumed that a regional failure would leave one building or its remote staff working. It had not considered a single carrier.
Six months later a cost review proposed closing Sudbury and consolidating 150 roles in Trois-Rivières, saving C$3.2 million a year. Our chief financial officer supported it, as did the chair of the audit committee, and their reasoning was sound: Sudbury was under-used outside peak periods. I recommended the opposite. We would keep Sudbury, contract a second carrier for both sites and route about a fifth of French calls to Sudbury every day so that its bilingual agents stayed practised. The board accepted the recommendation after a debate in which two directors recorded their preference for consolidation. We renewed the Sudbury lease for seven years and gave up the saving.
We hired 34 bilingual agents in Sudbury over two years and trained 40 Trois-Rivières agents to take English calls. Each site now runs a quarterly exercise in which it carries the other's full volume for two hours.
In March 2025 an electrical fault closed our Trois-Rivières building for two days. Sudbury and home-based agents answered 71 per cent of French calls within three minutes, and no disability payment was delayed. The arrangement still costs more than consolidation would have, and I report that cost to the board every year rather than treating the question as settled.
What I would do differently: I would have tested the carrier assumption before the outage. A tabletop exercise asking which single supplier could silence a building would have exposed it for almost nothing.