Inside today’s long-term-disability battlegrounds
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Canadian workers are facing mounting economic and mental health pressures – and long-term-disability files are shifting accordingly. Brad Moscato and Joel Dick of Howie Sacks & Henry unpack today’s LTD trends, long COVID claims, and what it takes to see these cases succeed
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LONG-TERM-DISABILITY (LTD) CLAIMS are on the rise, and if you ask Brad Moscato, the reasons are clear. From macro-level global unrest to an increasingly unstable economy at home coupled with back-to-office mandates, Canadian workers are under growing strain.
“Heightened uncertainty – both globally and here at home – translates into real anxiety for employees, particularly as economic pressures and return-to-office demands intensify,” says Moscato, partner at Howie Sacks & Henry LLP. “In my practice, that’s reflected in a noticeable rise in long-term-disability claims.”
New pressures, new patterns in LTD claims Unlike typical personal injury files that fall under the tort regime, LTD claims are fundamentally about a contract between the insured and the insurer. While a client may have been disabled after a car accident or other traumatic event, these claims aren’t about litigating liability. Counsel goes to bat over whether a person meets the policy’s definition of disability and for how long that coverage should respond.
The advocacy skills they demand, however, are familiar. Success still turns on marshalling both medical and lay evidence to build a credible, human story that fits within the policy wording.
Since 2000, Howie, Sacks & Henry (HSH) has been dedicated to handling the most serious personal injury cases with professionalism, expertise, and compassion. HSH represents individual clients with serious injury claims, medical malpractice claims, long-term-disability denials, and slip-and-fall accidents. On a larger scale, in class action and mass tort lawsuits, HSH represents groups of people injured by dangerous products, medications, medical devices, and negligent organizations. HSH lawyers are consistently recognized and awarded for their legal work. They have held prominent leadership positions within the Ontario Trial Lawyers Association, the Ontario Bar Association, the Medico-Legal Society of Toronto, and brain injury associations across Ontario. HSH’s lawyers are supported by clerks, assistants, and staff who help obtain exceptional results for our clients. HSH works with an extensive network of top rehabilitation specialists and medical experts who support our clients in making the best possible recovery. Our team is known for providing caring and attentive service to our clients, and we take great pride in our strong reputation within both the legal and medical communities.
Canadians are still facing mental health challenges after the pandemic
Mental health is the leading reason for long-term-disability (LTD) claims and accounts for nearly 40% of all claims in 2024
“Heightened uncertainty – both globally and here at home – translates into real anxiety for employees, particularly as economic pressures and return-to-office demands intensify”
Brad Moscato,
Howie Sacks & Henry
“Where the litigation tends to happen, at least in my experience, is around chronic long-term disabilities and invisible injuries,” explains Joel Dick, partner at Howie Sacks & Henry. “How does a brain injury or fibromyalgia stop someone from working or change how much work can they do? It’s all about someone’s capacity to work, their efforts to mitigate their losses, and their engagement in treatment.”
One of the clearest patterns the firm sees on the ground is the dominance of mental health conditions. While it’s not a new category, an increasingly significant amount of claims now involve depression, anxiety, and related issues, with some outliers including more complex psychiatric diagnoses like bipolar disorder.
Insurers continue to push for objective proof of disability, but many of these conditions are defined by subjective symptoms such as overwhelm, stress, and cognitive slowing. That objective versus subjective tension underpins these cases, but what matters is whether the medical notes, assessments, and witness accounts support functional impairment, not just diagnosis and prognosis.
“It comes down to the credibility of the plaintiff and of their treating medical professionals, like in any litigation,” Moscato notes. “Just because there’s no MRI showing a broken bone doesn’t mean someone’s not disabled: that’s been quite consistently repeated in the jurisprudence.”
That dovetails with another trend: judges are increasingly willing to punish insurers for “selective reliance” on the evidence or for cutting off benefits without a genuine, good‑faith investigation. In cases like Baker v. Blue Cross, punitive damages were upheld where carriers repeatedly terminated benefits in the face of supportive medicals, signalling that bad‑faith handling carries real consequences.
Courts are also pushing back on “file review” opinions where an insurer-retained doctor has never actually examined the claimant, and on cherry-picked medical reports that ignore key parts of the record. Those kinds of opinions, Moscato notes, can seriously undermine an insurer’s case when tested in court, and judges are increasingly willing to say so.
While by design most LTD disputes never get in front of a judge – insurance companies don’t want the risk of a court scrutinizing their conduct and, in some cases, gross mishandling of a peace-of-mind contract – that exposure provides plaintiff counsel with leverage.
“Where the litigation tends to happen is around chronic long-term disabilities and invisible injuries. It’s all about someone’s capacity to work, their efforts to mitigate their losses, and their engagement in treatment”
Joel Dick,
Howie Sacks & Henry
stresses again that plaintiff-side counsel should scrutinize the denial letter against the actual policy wording and medical timeline.
“Just because a claim was denied on that basis doesn’t mean they’ve got it all right,” he says. “This is where we can make a real difference for clients: we must prepare, prepare, prepare.”
Long COVID: the next frontier in chronic LTD claims For Dick, long COVID is the latest example of the chronic, “invisible” disabilities that so often drive LTD litigation. These files are only now starting to flow into the pipeline: many claimants first went through short‑term-disability and internal appeals and are coming to counsel a year or more after their initial denial.
On the surface they resemble other chronic conditions in that someone was working, then gradually couldn’t, without a neat, single “accident date” to point to. With these cases, there’s “no one specific drop in the bucket that caused it to overflow,” Dick notes, adding that insurers don’t usually dispute that someone is suffering from long COVID; the fight is over what that means for the person’s capacity to work.
Could modifications or different treatment keep them on the job? Dick sees the lawyer’s role as bridging that gap.
Published May 11, 2026
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The share of mental health claims continues to rise compared to other types of claims (accident, cancer, circulatory, musculoskeletal)
Diagnoses of depression and anxiety-related disorders are up 33% and 50%, respectively, since pre-2020
2 out of 5 of Canadians report having received a mental-health-disorder diagnosis in their lifetime
Sources: 2025 Designed For Health Report; Mental Health Research Canada, Feb. 2025
19% of Canadians reported long-term-COVID symptoms by the end of 2023
Long COVID in Canada
source: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2023001/article/00015-eng.htm
Over 2 million adults (6.8% of the adult population) still struggle with long COVID
Top lingering symptoms: fatigue, brain fog, shortness of breath
Higher risk for those with pre-existing chronic conditions
“Insurers like to get to the table and appropriately deal with the case, resolving it before trial,” Moscato says, adding that files routinely run in the thousands of pages but are worth a deep dive: buried in the notes are internal discussions between case handlers and supervisors that can be “extraordinarily helpful” to the plaintiff’s side.
A third live issue in many of Howie Sacks & Henry’s current files is the use, and misuse, of pre‑existing condition clauses. In some instances, the denial doesn’t hinge on whether the client meets the disability test at all but on a “look-back window”: if the person saw a doctor or was treated for similar symptoms in the 60–90 days before coverage took effect, the insurer may deny benefits.
But these denials shouldn’t be taken at face value. Moscato
“Even more than staying abreast of the science – which we do, supported by our experts – our job is to fill in the human piece,” he says. “We’re tasked with explaining what this diagnosis means in a specific workplace.”
Although the science is in its infancy, there’s growing understanding of the markers that go along with long COVID, such as inflammation, and even testing – albeit expensive testing – to confirm it. But there’s still an unexplained disparity as to why some people can continue working with it while others cannot.
A complicating factor is that many policies pay benefits for the first two years if someone is disabled from doing their current job, but after two years, it shifts to covering only those unable to do any job.
“We’re encountering pushback now that those with specialized training could go get less stressful jobs to replace some of their
income,” Dick explains. “It’s a legally interesting argument, and I can see it becoming more of a point of contention in these cases.”
What strong LTD files have in common Across personal injury practice, gathering evidence early is critical. With LTD cases, it’s especially so because many people don’t reach out to a lawyer until they’ve been denied and the internal appeal has concluded. Ideally, counsel should move quickly to secure statements from co workers, supervisors, neighbours, and friends so the change in the claimant’s role at work and at home is captured while memories are still fresh.
“Preserve those snapshots; it’s shocking how quickly the new normal takes over – and then that evidence is lost,” Dick warns.
The best evidence in these cases, however, is a claimant’s family doctor. While a rheumatologist or neurologist might be the one to label a condition or opine on rehabilitation, decisions rarely come down to a single specialist report.
“A person’s GP who has been seeing them regularly, and can show that decline over time, makes or breaks cases,” Dick says.
Dick and Moscato both return to the same core message: there is policy coverage available when someone needs it, and these cases can be litigated successfully. Turning that promise into results is what Howie Sacks & Henry was built to deliver.
“Number one, we have expertise and resources; insurers know we take on meritorious cases and will take them to trial, if necessary,” Moscato says. “We listen to our clients and take that stress away so they can focus on their treatment and health – we deal with the rest.”
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