A Bloomberg Businessweek story making the rounds this month—Taylor Nicole Rogers’s “More Workers Take Mental Health Leave, and Bosses Aren’t Happy”—has touched a nerve across corporate America and, increasingly, north of the border.
The reporting opens with Kendall McGill, a 32-year-old Baltimore project manager who took a six-week leave after being handed the workload of two people and finding herself doing breathing exercises before every meeting with her manager. Her experience is now a common one. According to an annual employer survey released in 2026 by employment law firm Littler, roughly 67% of U.S. employers reported an increase in mental-health-related leaves of absence and accommodation requests over the past year—a figure that climbs to 74% among large employers. Separate data from Spring Health’s 2026 Workplace Mental Health Report found that about one in six organizations saw such leaves spike by 25% or more in a single year.
The debate that has erupted online is less about whether the numbers are real—they are, and they trace to named, credible surveys—than about what they mean. One camp reads the surge as a burden: more absences straining already lean teams. The other reads it as a system working as intended. As Brett Wean of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention argued in a widely shared post, rising numbers may reflect reduced stigma and better access to care rather than a spike in underlying distress—much as increased calls to crisis lines have historically signalled more people getting help, not more people in crisis.
Both interpretations are defensible from the same evidence, and that ambiguity is precisely the challenge employers now face.
The Legal Backdrop: A Very Different Framework in Canada
Much of the U.S. conversation centres on the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which guarantees eligible employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave.
Canadian employers operate in a materially different environment, and the distinction matters when interpreting the trend.
There is no single Canadian equivalent to the FMLA. Instead, leave entitlements are set by a patchwork of provincial and territorial employment standards, plus the federal Canada Labour Code for federally regulated workplaces. Over the past two years that patchwork has expanded dramatically—and the milestone is recent. As of July 1, 2026, all ten provinces now offer job-protected leave for long-term illness or serious injury, with most set at up to 27 weeks. Ontario introduced its unpaid, job-protected “long-term illness leave” of up to 27 weeks effective June 19, 2025; Alberta followed effective January 1, 2026; and British Columbia adopted a comparable 27-week framework under Bill 30.
Shorter job-protected sick leave also exists in most jurisdictions—British Columbia, for instance, provides five paid and three unpaid days per year after 90 days of employment.
On the income-support side, the picture also differs. Rather than relying on an employer mandate, many Canadians on medical leave draw Employment Insurance sickness benefits, which provide up to 26 weeks of partial income replacement (about 55% of insurable earnings, to a 2026 maximum of $729 per week), with the corresponding federal medical leave extended to 27 weeks. Critically, mental health conditions are treated as legitimate grounds for all of these protections, and Canadian human rights law imposes a duty to accommodate disability—including mental illness—up to the point of undue hardship.
That duty has real teeth: according to the Mental Health Commission of Canada, mental illness accounts for roughly 30% of disability claims but about 70% of disability costs.
The Same Trend, With Canadian Characteristics
The upward trajectory is not unique to the United States. Canadian data mirrors it closely.
The Mental Health Research Canada 2025 workplace study found that over half of Canadian workers (52%) had experienced mental health challenges affecting their work, though only about a third disclosed this to their employer—a disclosure gap that itself signals lingering stigma. Disability insurers including Canada Life have publicly warned about the operational and financial cost of inaction on mental health claims.
The key structural difference is that Canadian employers generally cannot treat mental health leave as a discretionary perk to be dialled back. Where U.S. firms are, in some cases, rethinking the more generous benefit packages they rolled out during the pandemic, Canadian employers are bound by statutory leave floors and an enforceable duty to accommodate.
For Canadian organizations, then, the operative question is not whether to permit these leaves but how to manage them well—verifying legitimate accommodation needs, supporting genuine recovery, and structuring safe, sustainable returns to work.
This is precisely the terrain where Rapid Interactive Disability Management (RIDM) works.
Founded in 1986 and wholly Canadian-owned and operated, RIDM is a national, CARF-accredited provider of independent and objective disability management services to employers, insurers, and the legal community across Canada.
When a mental health leave or accommodation request raises questions—about the nature of the impairment, the appropriate duration of leave, or an employee’s readiness to return—RIDM provides defensible, arms-length answers through its national network of independent medical evaluation (IME) specialists spanning every relevant medical and psychological discipline, with coast-to-coast coverage and expedited appointments so cases don’t stall. Where the question is functional rather than diagnostic—what can this person actually do, and under what conditions—RIDM’s functional ability and functional capacity evaluations translate a medical picture into concrete workplace terms.
Beyond assessment, RIDM supports the full disability-management lifecycle in ways that are directly applicable to a rising mental-health caseload:
- proactive case management to keep files moving and coordinate the right care at the right time
- clinical treatment provision and coordination to connect employees with appropriate support rather than leaving them to navigate the system alone
- ergonomic and workplace evaluations that inform accommodation decisions
- absenteeism programs that help employers spot and address patterns early, before short absences escalate into long-term claims
- and vocational rehabilitation paired with realistic, evidence-based return-to-work planning that balances an employee’s recovery with operational needs
Delivered through a secure, largely paperless claims portal built for quick turnaround, these services are designed to reduce the very strain the Bloomberg piece describes—turning a rising volume of leaves from an operational headache into a managed, defensible process.
Where Things Are Trending
Every indicator points to continued growth in mental-health-related leaves on both sides of the border, driven by a durable combination of reduced stigma, broader awareness of entitlements, and genuinely rising workplace stress.
In Canada, the legislative direction is unmistakable: with all ten provinces now guaranteeing long-term illness leave, longer job-protected absences, more paid sick days, and stronger accommodation expectations have become the norm rather than the exception. For Canadian employers, the winning strategy is shifting from gatekeeping toward proactive, well-documented disability management—investing early in prevention and support, handling claims fairly and objectively, and building structured return-to-work pathways.
Organizations that treat rising mental health leave as a management discipline rather than a nuisance, and that lean on independent, defensible expertise to do it, will be the ones that protect both their people and their productivity as the trend accelerates.
