By Karen Clarke, Race and Disability Canada, Partnerships & Consulting
One employee takes leave. Then another. Each case was handled by the book, so nobody connects them. But they are connected, and the link is trust.
One in three disability claims in Canada is now related to mental health, and those claims make up 70% of total disability costs. That finding comes from 2025 research by the Canadian Standards Association (CSA Group), the national body that wrote Canada’s standard for psychological health and safety at work. Behind each of those claims is a person who needed support, often long before they felt safe enough to ask for it.
So how do most organizations respond? Update the policy. Add a line to the benefits package. Send the EAP reminder for the third time this year. None of that is wrong, but it treats accommodation as a paperwork problem.
It’s also a trust problem, and trust has to run both ways. Employees need to trust that disclosing a mental health need won’t quietly cost them. Managers need to trust that what they’re hearing is real. A good process only works when both are in place. Mental health isn’t a problem that belongs to a few people. It’s part of being human, and it shows up at work whether we plan for it or not.
Accommodation isn’t optional. The law is clear on that, and most organizations have a process. But every process runs through people, and people make judgment calls at every step: how much documentation to ask for, how quickly to respond, whether a request is treated as routine or as something to question. Those calls don’t land the same way for everyone. For racialized employees with disabilities, the doubt often arrives before they’ve said a word. Add a non-visible disability, like most mental health conditions, and that doubt compounds.
Here’s what that looks like in practice. An employee who expects to be doubted doesn’t ask for support early. They push through for as long as they can. When they can’t anymore, you don’t get the early conversation. You get the leave, or the resignation, often with no clear reason why. Without the reason, you can’t fix it, so the same thing happens with the next person. And when support isn’t there, the risk of a human rights complaint goes up too.
Most HR teams and leaders are genuinely trying. But good intentions rarely turn into good policy on their own. Standard policy treats race and disability as two separate boxes. In real life they compound, deepening the isolation and exclusion people already feel at work. When trust is missing, people don’t use the supports that exist, small issues turn into conflict, and good people leave. A policy that treats race and disability separately isn’t neutral. It misses the people who need it most.
We know this because we live it. Race and Disability Canada is led by people with disabilities, and most of our team has lived experience of disability, including mental health. We’ve had to build our own workplace around flexibility, real support, and high standards, all at the same time. Our resources (toolkits and workbooks), training programs, and consulting services are designed and led by racialized people with disabilities, and every engagement pays the community-led consultants whose expertise shaped it. We’re not outsiders parachuting in with a generic template. Talk with us about how we’ve built accessibility into our own team. We’ll share what’s worked and what we had to learn the hard way.
Organizations that understand how race and disability connect build trust that gets used instead of eroded, and end up with fewer people needing to ask for accommodation at all. They keep people, because those people were believed the first time they asked. That’s what happens when the gap actually closes. Book a free 30-minute consultation, or get ready for Code of Silence, our workbook built for exactly this problem, launching this November.
