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Sherbrooke, early January. A general manager opens the envelope containing his group disability insurance renewal. The premiums have shifted again, but what stops him cold is a clause he doesn’t remember signing the year before: the insurer now requires an attestation of a documented process for identifying psychosocial risks as defined under Law 27 (Quebec’s workplace psychological health legislation). He pushes his coffee aside, dials his broker, and asks the only question that matters that morning: does my EAP cover that?
The answer, in almost every case, is no. Not because the EAP is useless — it rarely is — but because it answers a different question.
What ten years of utilization reports don’t contain
An employee assistance programme generates consumption data: number of calls, average wait time, reported reasons for contact, post-session satisfaction scores. That data is useful for assessing how accessible the service is. It says nothing about what drove the employee to pick up the phone in the first place. Excessive workload, unclear roles, lack of recognition, the breakdown of social support among colleagues — none of these risk factors appear in an EAP report. They live in the work environment, not in the individual complaint.
Law 27, which has been phased in since 2021 and whose prevention obligations for employers with 20 to 299 workers have been fully in force since 2024, requires precisely that: identify the risk factors in how work is organized, document them, and demonstrate that prevention measures were taken before distress appears. Article 9 of the LSST (Quebec’s Act Respecting Occupational Health and Safety), as amended, does not ask how many employees used the EAP. It asks which factors in your work environment were assessed, by whom, and using what method.
On the insurance side, that distinction is becoming increasingly operational. Some Quebec insurers have started to differentiate, in their underwriting frameworks, between organizations that document primary prevention and those that limit themselves to funding tertiary intervention. An EAP is a tertiary intervention: it supports someone whose health is already affected. Primary prevention acts further upstream, on working conditions themselves. That is not a value judgment — it is a difference in the level of intervention, one that public health has recognized for decades.
What should be on hand when an inspector shows up or a claim is disputed
A compliant prevention process produces specific evidence: a portrait of the psychosocial risk factors specific to your organization — quantitative overload in the production team, low decision-making autonomy among project coordinators, role conflicts for team leaders who manage both deliverables and people. That evidence is time-stamped, signed, and tied to planned corrective measures. It is what an administrative labour tribunal or an insurer would call proof of due diligence.
The most common objection — and the most honest one — goes like this: “We are a sixty-person SME. We don’t have the resources of a large corporation to build a psychosocial prevention programme.” It is true that Law 27 does not ask the same thing of an SME as it does of a five-hundred-employee firm. But it does ask something of every employer with twenty or more workers: a process, not necessarily a department. A structured assessment carried out once every five years, updated when significant organizational changes occur, is enough to constitute a documented approach — provided it uses a recognized method and produces traceable recommendations.
What the Sherbrooke general manager had been funding for ten years was a safety net for individuals in difficulty. What his insurance clause was now asking for was proof that he had tried to understand why those individuals were falling — and what he had changed in the environment so that the next ones would fall less often. Both have their place. Only one of them answers the question that January morning raised.
A psychosocial risk assessment produces exactly that proof — the kind the EAP cannot generate, because it was never designed to. The question worth asking before your next renewal: if your insurer or the CNESST (Quebec’s workplace health and safety authority) asked you tomorrow for your primary prevention documents, what would you pull out of the filing cabinet?
What gets measured gets prevented. What gets proven remains.