Where does employer mental health responsibility really end?

Canadian employers have poured money into richer mental health benefits since the pandemic. Psychology maximums have climbed and virtual care platforms have multiplied while EAP offerings have expanded.

Yet the gap between coverage and care persists, and the question of how far employer responsibility extends remains unresolved.

Mental health coverage doesn’t guarantee care

For Nadim Kara, executive vice president and head of people and culture at GreenShield, the conversation has focused primarily on increasing mental health coverage, but he emphasized how “coverage alone doesn’t guarantee the care,” he said.

“You're providing more coverage. You're not guaranteeing care. Where I think many employees still struggle is finding a provider and navigating all the frictions in the system,” Kara added.

Meanwhile, Leigh-Ann Ing, senior director and Canadian leader of well-being, equity and disability management at WTW, agrees that the dollars alone fall short.

"Coverage does not guarantee access, utilization, effective treatment, nor identification of causation alone," she said, adding that raising paramedical coverage matters, particularly for employees dealing with chronic or acute mental health conditions. But she also emphasized the healthcare system hasn’t kept up with post-pandemic demand, leaving a fundamental lag between the benefits on paper and the care employees can access.

Stigma continues to compound the problem, she suggests, as certain cultural communities don’t fully acknowledge the need for mental health support, while men continue to underutilize available services.

"There is a fundamental disconnect between what we are seeing employers state that they would like to focus on in terms of preventative solutions versus what employees are stating that they need support with," she said, adding that gap between employer priorities and employee needs, in her view, is a central reason richer coverage alone is not closing the divide.

Employers need to address root cause

While a mental health strategy reaches well beyond plan design into prevention, like the right to disconnect, mental health first aid, manager training, destigmatization efforts, and resilience programs, Ing flagged a blind spot that most employers miss: they have yet to identify what is actually driving stress and burnout within their own workplaces.

WTW's 2026 Wellbeing Diagnostic Survey found that for Canadian employers, "identifying stress and burnout to be one of the least actions employers have taken to improve employees' emotional well-being," she said. "There does need to be a focus in terms of what is causing burnout in the workforce, but also where the key stressors popping up within the workplace as well," she said.

Sahar Rahman, VP of insurance growth and health solutions of Ontario Teachers’ Insurance Plan (OTIP), sees the next evolution not as a bigger menu of services but as a better guided experience.

"It's not just about what the plan pays. It's really how can the member move through the system in a way that is simple, that's effective, that's clinically appropriate and connected to their broader needs," she said, adding that OTIP is exploring a digital intake and navigation tool to help members understand their circumstances and connect to the right care pathway - an acknowledgment that members often do not know where to start.

When plan sponsors shift mental health support elsewhere

But at what point does mental health support stop being a plan sponsor's problem - and shift to external measures? As John Glynn, vice president at Ascent Insurance notes, between spending accounts, benefit plan enhancements, EAPs, virtual care, and wellness programs, some employers have already stretched their budgets.

"I think some employers are doing all they can already. There's really not much more they can do," he said. “At the end of the day, that's not their primary focus, right? They have an actual business to run and they're doing the best they can, spending as much as they can to help their staff. But some of the responsibility probably falls onto the employee to get help in other areas because an employer can only do so much.”

Kara argued that the employer's role extends beyond funding benefits. It means ensuring employees reach the right support at the right time in ways that produce measurable health outcomes. He pointed to care navigation as a growing priority, noting that employers need to think about how they reduce friction across both workplace benefits and external services.

"Do you value human performance? If yes, then you have to ask yourself, how can you reduce frictions and access barriers and reduce stigma to people in your workforce who could access those supports and be more productive and more contributing to society, to their personal life, to their growth in terms of as individuals, and ultimately to the performance of the organization," he said.

The payoff, in his view, is retention, productivity, and stronger organizational impact but only if employers approach these programs with humility and a commitment to continuous improvement.

Why employers fill the gap and where they overspend

Alex Boucher, senior principal at Mercer explained, mental health falls to employers largely by default because the Canada Health Act doesn’t require provinces to cover mental health at the same level as physical health, which is why the private market has grown so large.

With employees spending 60 to 70 per cent of their waking hours at work, he suggests the cost of inaction is too high to ignore. But he argued that overspending becomes a risk when employers fail to understand what’s driving poor mental health among their workforce.

Boucher pointed to Mercer's Inside Employees' Minds survey, which found that job security, financial stability, workload, and covering monthly expenses rank as top employee concerns - all areas where employers have direct influence. Financial wellness programs, job redesign with a psychological safety lens, and workload transparency can reduce mental health impacts without adding another line item to the benefits plan.

“The key is to understand what drives the mental health of the employees the most and where the risks are, and then looking for programs to address that,” said Boucher. “In a world where there's so many economic pressures and we see the Googles and Amazons of the world downsizing and the strain in our Crown corporations and all sorts of things, employers need to provide some of that reassurance and tools that employers have within their wheelhouse as well as making sure that employees can access it easily.”