BC Courts Rules that Mental Stress Provisions Are Unconstitutional

The BC Court of Appeal recently issued a ruling that could open to floodgates to more mental stress claims in BC—and maybe even across Canada. In Plesner v. BC Hydro and Power Authority, [2009] BCCA 188 (CanLII), April 30, 2009, a worker at a power station witnessed a rupture in a natural gas pipe. He was afraid that the leak would cause an explosion. Two weeks later, stress drove him to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed the worker with post-traumatic stress disorder. He filed a workers’ comp claim, which was denied on the grounds that the incident wasn’t a “traumatic event” under the law. So he appealed. The court ruled that the requirement in the BC’s workers’ comp law that limited entitlement to benefits to stress from a sudden and unexpected traumatic event was constitutional. However, it concluded that the threshold set in the workers’ comp policy on mental stress claims for establishing a “traumatic” event violated the Charter’s equality provisions. Workers who suffered a physical injury only had to show that the injury was work-related to get benefits; workers who suffered psychological injuries had to get over the additional hurdle of meeting this very high “traumatic” threshold to qualify for benefits. In response to this decision, the WCB amended its mental stress policy to define “traumatic event” as “an emotionally shocking event” as opposed to “a severely emotionally disturbing event.” It also eliminated the examples of events that would be considered traumatic, which the court felt were extreme and unlikely to be faced by most workers. What does the Plesner decision mean for mental stress claims in BC and elsewhere? Employment lawyers are concerned that the lowering of the threshold for what constitutes a “traumatic event” will mean that more mental stress claims will be compensable under workers’ comp. And although the decision is only binding in BC, the laws across Canada on mental stress claims are so similar that it’s likely that courts in other jurisdictions will give some weight to this decision in ruling on mental stress claims.