Several disciplines,one table.
NAPSDM sets the standard for ethical, evidence-informed, psychologically safe disability management in Canada. No single discipline can see the full landscape of a return to work. This page defines who sits at the table, the governance that guides us, and the mechanisms that enforce independence rather than rely on assurances.
Where the duty lives
Fourteen jurisdictions, fourteen answers to the same question
Whether an employer has to keep a job open, accommodate the work, or take someone back at all depends on where they work and on which of three separate bodies of law is doing the work. Most disability leave never touches the workers’ compensation system at all.
The duty to accommodate applies everywhere in Canada. In eight of fourteen jurisdictions it appears nowhere in the human rights statute a worker would think to read.
Accommodation appears in the statute, 6
- MBManitoba
- ONOntario
- YTYukon
- NTNorthwest Territories
- NUNunavut
- FEDFederally regulated employers
Select a jurisdiction to read its legislation
Not in the statute, 8
- BCBritish Columbia
- ABAlberta
- SKSaskatchewan
- QCQuebec
- NBNew Brunswick
- NSNova Scotia
- PEPrince Edward Island
- NLNewfoundland and Labrador
In these eight the duty to accommodate still applies with full force. It comes from the courts rather than the statute, which means a worker reading their own human rights Act will not find it there.
Source
Human rights and employment standards records are cited to the statutes themselves; each record carries the provision, the source and the consolidation date it was read at. The workers’ compensation records are from Association of Workers' Compensation Boards of Canada, Rehiring Worker / Obligation to re-employ and Duty to Accommodate, benchmark tables, 2024.
AWCBC states these tables are general information only, are not exhaustive, and that the individual boards and commissions should be contacted for specifics. Nothing here is legal advice.
Legislation changes. Every record shows the date the source was current to. Nothing here is legal advice.
To make disability management in Canada ethical, evidence-informed, and biopsychosocial, grounded in the finding that recovery and sustainable return to work depend on the interaction of health, workplace conditions, leadership, and disability management processes.
Psychological safety is a foundational condition for healing, resilience, and sustainable return to work, and the workplace, its leaders and supervisors, and the systems that support return to work all play decisive, and too often ignored, roles in recovery.
A Canada where return-to-work decisions weigh the workplace and its psychological safety alongside health, not a clinical checkbox alone, and where no one is harmed by the system meant to support them.
Eight values, held in public.
Biopsychosocial is not on this list on purpose. It is how we think, our operating framework, not something we hold.
It started inside the system, not outside it.
The Alliance grew from the founder's years inside Canadian disability operations, in progressive leadership roles spanning most of the country's major carriers, watching the gap between what the evidence says drives recovery and what the system actually assesses. And from living the claims process from the worker's seat as well.
The founding concept was written in May 2026 and the evidence base followed. Through June, three directors accepted alongside the founder, bringing carrier-side, clinical psychological-safety, and workers' compensation experience to the same table. The board held its first meeting on 3 July 2026 and amended the founding documents that day. The Alliance was incorporated on 10 July 2026, and a fifth founding director joined later that month, bringing human rights adjudication and patient advocacy. The board is still expanding.
“Nothing has changed, and nothing will change” is the answer a workplace typically gives when asked whether it is ready to receive a recovering worker.
Meagan has set down her own account of what she saw inside those operations, and why she started the Alliance.
The founding board, across the system.
The board spans disability management, workplace psychological safety, clinical practice, law and investigation, and lived experience, so the multi-stakeholder claim is real rather than asserted.
Mark is an award-winning workplace mental health and safety advocate and disability management leader with more than 35 years advancing psychologically safe, inclusive, and evidence-informed approaches to work disability prevention and recovery. He brings a national perspective shaped by clinical foundations in rehabilitation nursing, large-scale disability claims operations, mental health and recovery programming, and executive leadership in workers' compensation.
His work focuses on how organizations, disability systems, and claims pathways respond to early indicators of psychological injury and workplace harm. Having lived and worked across Canada, Mark contributes both research-informed insight and lived experience to a critical Canadian evidence gap: how workplace and disability systems can overlook patterns of harm affecting diverse workers, including people marginalized by disability, race, culture, gender, sexuality, and neurodivergence. His leadership is grounded in the belief that psychologically safe disability management is essential to preventing avoidable harm, supporting sustainable recovery, and retaining talent.
Directors are named on the public federal register under Corporation No. 1808118-2.
Independence is a rule here, not a claim.
Anyone can say they are independent. The question worth asking is what stops it from slipping.
Advise or assess, never both.
Our answer is a single rule, written into our conflict-of-interest policy: no one advises an organization and then assesses it. Advise or assess, never both. It applies per person and per engagement, so the Alliance as a whole can do both kinds of work over time while no individual ever does both for the same organization.
Every director has filed a conflict-of-interest declaration. Several of them work in this field, and those interests are declared and managed by recusal rather than hidden. That is the point. A board with no adjacent experience would have no conflicts and no expertise either.
Two more lines that do not move. The standard and our annual report are never sponsored. And money buys standing, never a voice in what the standard says.
We are a federal not-for-profit corporation. That is deliberate: it keeps our freedom to advocate, to name practices, and to push for reform. It also means we issue no tax receipts, and we would rather have the freedom.
If you need support right now, you do not have to wait for any of this.
If you are in immediate danger, call 911. To talk to someone now, call or text 9-8-8, Canada’s Suicide Crisis Helpline, any time, in English or French.
Provincial and territorial crisis lines, including Indigenous-specific lines, are on our crisis page.