TORONTO INJURY LAWYER BLOG

Not too long ago, the Toronto Injury Lawyer Blog focused on limitation periods in the context of Long Term Disability Claims, and how insurers will delay, delay, delay such that enough time has passed that they could ask the Court to dismiss your claim. Delay is the enemy of a Plaintiff and the friend of an insurer.

The longer a denied claim goes without litigation, the greater the chance that the delay argument will swing in the favour of the LTD insurer. It’s clear that time is NOT on the claimant’s side when it comes to filing an LTD claim, and then litigating it at Court.

One of the larger LTD Insurers, RBC Life Insurance Company recently brought their delay argument to the Ontario Court of Appeal in the hopes of having a claimant’s case dismissed completely.

The case is Dube v. RBC Life Insurance Company and the initial decision at the Superior Court level can be found in the above noted link.

In this case Mr. Dube was a full time employee of the Windsor Essex Housing Corporation. He began working there in around November 2008. He was entitled to benefits under a group disability policy with RBC. One of those benefits was Long Term Disability Benefits. These benefits were supposed to pay for a percentage of Mr. Dube’s salary, in the event of serious injury, illness and/or disability. Basically, if you’re too hurt to work, RBC will pay you a portion of your salary to help make ends meet. In theory, this sounds like a great thing. Almost too good to be true…

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Generally speaking, adults have 2 years from the date of a car accident, or slip and fall to sue. If you wait until after two years from the date of the accident, you’re likely out of time to sue. This is called a “limitation period“. These limitations, are set out by statue. The best place to look when it comes to limitation periods is Ontario’s Limitations Act, 2002, SO 2002, c. 24. or the applicable act for the subject matter you’re dealing with. You’ll likely need a lawyer to help sort these things out, so have a good one to call if you have any questions about this sort of thing. But this isn’t the purpose to today’s instalment of the Toronto Injury Lawyer Blog.

Sometimes, large insurers try to contacts OUT of the limitation periods which are set for in the Limitations Act,  2002, or other statues. Personal injury lawyers often see this in the context of long term disability litigation.

Long Term Disability claims are unique, because unlike a car accident or slip and fall case where the applicable law is generally tort law from our common law system along with other statutes such as the Negligence Act, Occupier’s Liability Act, or Insurance Act; Long Term Disability Claims (LTD) are entirely contractual claims. The insurer and their underwriters draft the contract. The claimant is suing for benefits which are supposed to be provided for under that contract. If the contract doesn’t exist, then there’s no LTD claim. If the benefits don’t exist under the contract, then they won’t exist in your claim.

A trend which Plaintiff side lawyers have been seeing more and more in the context of LTD litigation are instance whereby large LTD insurers, such as Manulife, Great West Life, Sun Life, SSQ, Desjardins, RBC, Equitable Life, Industrial Alliance and others are trying to contract OUT of statutory limitation periods to reduce them. They do this by virtue of tucking in clauses to those lengthy and complicated LTD insurance contracts.

An LTD claimant, or lawyer may assume that they have two years from the date of denial to sue. This would seem entirely reasonable. BUT, the insurer is relying on one of these limitation clauses to have the claim dismissed from Court, so that they don’t have to pay out any benefits on the claim.

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