The part that decides recovery is yours.
Whether someone recovers is decided by your supervisors, under your policies, in your workplace. No one currently assesses any of it. This page sets out what that gap costs, what committing to the charter would ask of you, and what changes when the workplace is assessed rather than assumed.
Four questions about your own workplace.
Canada's disability system decides whether a person is fit to return through a medical lens: diagnosis, functional capacity, clinical checkboxes. It asks what a worker can do. It never asks what they are being sent back into. Nobody outside your organization can answer these four. You can.
When someone goes off, who makes the first call, and how soon?
If the answer is nobody, or a form letter in week six, that is the gap.
Are your modified duties real work, or a piece of paper?
Ask someone who has been on them. Their answer is the audit.
Could a returning worker say it is not working, and to whom?
If you cannot name that person, neither can they.
Do you know whether your own process did harm?
Nobody is measuring that unless you are.
Every one of these sits inside your organization, and every one of them is something you can change without waiting for anyone.
The cost of getting this wrong is already on your books.
It does not appear as a line item. It arrives as claims that run long, returns that fail and repeat, and people who leave rather than come back.
$180B
The annual cost of poor mental health in Canada.
Up from an inflation-adjusted $67B in 2011.
$110B
Carried by employers.
Disability claims, wage replacement, benefits, overtime, accommodations, turnover and compliance.
$600B
Projected annual cost by 2050 if nothing changes.
Close to a fifth of the country's projected economy.
Morawczynski, Dobson and Howatt, The Economic Cost of Mental Health in Canada, CSA Public Policy Centre, 2026.CSA Group on the study (opens in a new tab)
A name is not enough.
Your organization does not join by adding a logo. The charter asks for something your workforce can actually notice, and the bar is deliberately higher for an organization than for a person.
This is not a campaign against employers or the carriers who serve them. The posture is pro-standard. Organizations already moving toward better practice are who this is built with, not what it is built against.
Three commitments.
Make a public statement adopting the charter principles.
Name an internal sponsor accountable for it.
Assess the workplace and its psychological safety as part of return-to-work decisions, and report on that in good faith.
Charter signing is not open yet. When it opens, the terms for organizations will be published in full before anyone is asked to commit.
What a standard changes.
Right now you decide how to handle a return using policy, precedent and instinct, with no public benchmark to measure any of it against. That is what a standard is for. It is being written, it does not exist yet, and this page will not pretend otherwise.
What does exist is the evidence underneath it, organized by claim with the sources attached, so you can check the reasoning rather than take it on trust. Independence is not a promise here either. It runs on a conflict-of-interest firewall published as a page of its own, under which a person affiliated with your organization does not both advise you and assess you.
Read it before you commit to it.
The charter is public, the evidence behind it is public, and so is the policy that keeps this independent of the organizations it assesses. Nothing here asks you for a decision today.
This page is one of five