This is not legal advice! What you are getting here is just general legal information. It is not a substitute for advice from an actual lawyer about your specific situation. If you need legal advice, we urge you to find a lawyer who can help you.
The CNESST is an agency of the Travail, de l’Emploi et de la Solidarité sociale ministry. It gives benefits and supports to people who’ve been injured at work. These can include replacement of lost wages, health care (including rehabilitation, counselling, and medications), and, in certain situations, retraining.
Facts about the CNESST Occupational Health and Safety division
- The CNESST functions like an insurance provider. Employers pay premiums to CNESST for the people who work for them. As a result, those people are entitled to benefits if they suffer a workplace injury.
- About 3.8 million Quebec workers are covered by the CNESST. That represents 92% of the workforce.
- Roughly 95,000 workers receive wage-replacement benefits for “occupational injuries” each year.
- However, most successful claims are for physical injuries. When it comes to psychological injuries resulting from trauma or harassment, the vast majority of claims are rejected because it’s hard to prove they are occupational injuries.
- Claims for psychological injuries total less than 5% of the CNESST compensation budget.
- If your claim is rejected, you can appeal, but the process is complicated and takes a long time. About half of appeals about psychological injuries are successful.
- Sources: CNESST Statistiques annuelle 2023; “Workers’ Compensation for Work-Related Mental Health Problems: An Overview of Quebec Law,” Jennifer Hava and Jason Stober, in Psychosocial Risks in Labour and Social Security Law; Compensation Guide for Quebec Workers
If you’ve been harmed by sexual harassment at work, you might think the CNESST will help you. For instance:
- Maybe after you were harassed, you took time off work and so lost income.
- Maybe the harassment damaged your mental health, and you ended up needing to spend money on medication for anxiety or depression.
- Maybe the harassment had such an effect on you that you had to leave a male-dominated industry and ended up needing to retrain for a new type of work in a different field.
Those are the kinds of expenses—replacement of lost wages, medication costs, retraining costs—that the CNESST normally does reimburse.
And so it might sound like a good idea to file a claim with the CNESST.
But we need to warn you: The CNESST is very unlikely to assist you.
The CNESST gives you benefits and supports if you have suffered a physical injury at work (rare in cases of sexual harassment) or psychological injury (less rare in sexual harassment cases, but hard to prove). It will only help you if the harm you’ve suffered fits into one of those two categories.
Historically, the CNESST has mostly handled claims related to physical injuries suffered by workers in male-dominated industries like construction and manufacturing, and in uniform occupations like policing and firefighting. If you slip at work and break your ankle, or are struck by a falling object, or are injured in a fire or explosion: that is the kind of situation the CNESST was designed for and has a lot of experience handling.
The CNESST has less experience with mental health harms.
Realistically, it’s likely that if you make a claim as a result of sexual harassment, you’ll be turned down. If you want to pursue the claim after being denied, you’ll need to be prepared to go through an appeal process. Appealing can take a long time, and of the few appeals that are heard, many are denied.
There might be other forums—for example, the Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse or civil court—where you could have a better chance of success.
