Foreign service officers posted abroad depend entirely on their employer’s health plan. There’s no back-up option, no provincial coverage to fall back on when the paperwork stalls. So when Ottawa switched health plan administrators in 2023 and the new arrangement fell apart, roughly 1,100 employees working outside Canada were left exposed.
What followed, according to Federal Court Justice Negar Azmudeh’s decision this month, was close to two years of dysfunction: claims lost after submission, reimbursements delayed for months, approved claims that went unpaid and landed employees in collections, a portal that couldn’t reliably record a login or a bank account number.
Global Affairs Canada, which employs most of these workers, started loaning them money to cover the gap and then had to extend the repayment terms because the claims still weren’t processed. A petition to the House of Commons, signed by 3,000 plan members, told MPs the situation was having a “significant adverse impact” on their physical and mental health.
Memo from union: Fix it
The Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers asked Treasury Board to fix it. Repeatedly. Letters in November 2023, April 2024, July 2024, August 2024, October 2024. When that didn’t work, PAFSO went to Federal Court and asked for mandamus, an order compelling the government to actually perform its statutory duty rather than simply promise to.
The legal test for mandamus has eight parts, and Justice Azmudeh worked through them with the patience of someone assembling furniture with the instructions in hand. Does Treasury Board owe a public legal duty to provide the plan? Yes. Is that duty owed to PAFSO’s members specifically? Yes. Was the delay unreasonable? Also yes, and not by a small margin: the transition to a new administrator was projected to take six months. It took roughly 22, which the judge noted was about 3.66 times the estimate, and Treasury Board couldn’t offer a satisfactory explanation for the gap. Is the duty discretionary, something the government can simply decline to do? No. It’s mandatory.
Four consecutive findings against the government. At that point, a reasonable person might assume they know how this ends.
Surprise ending
It doesn’t end that way. Mandamus, it turns out, is a strictly prospective remedy. A court can find that a government body behaved unreasonably for the better part of two years and still refuse to order anything, because the relevant question isn’t what happened, it’s what’s happening now. And by the time the case reached the hearing, Treasury Board had evidence that the backlog had been cleared by August 2024 and that fewer than 50 claims remained stuck in escalation as of January 2025. However unreasonable the past behaviour, the court found no ongoing breach to compel a remedy for.
That finding rested heavily on how PAFSO’s evidence held up in cross-examination. Its lead affiant, Andy Myre, testified that members still had claims outstanding from 2023 and that one employee had racked up $70,000 in out-of-pocket costs. Pressed for names, he declined, citing privacy. Pressed on whether he’d asked members if he could name them in the affidavit, he said he hadn’t.
The judge was sympathetic to the privacy instinct but unmoved by the result: a mandamus application needs direct, admissible evidence that the breach is live, not secondhand accounts filtered through a union president, however credible he seemed. Nobody filed even a single anonymized affidavit from a plan member describing an unresolved claim in real time. The government’s numbers, however self-reported and however skeptically the union regarded them, were the only concrete figures in the room.
The lesson?
When an organization is slow to fix something, and then fixes it just enough, right around the time someone’s about to hold it accountable, the fix often works. Not because the underlying problem was ever taken seriously on its own terms, but because the remedy people reach for, whether it’s a court, a regulator or a board, usually asks “is this still broken” rather than “was this handled badly.”
Treasury Board’s own witness described joint workshops with the plan administrator in Calgary, a cyber incident that further delayed claims, and an “improvement to the action plan” requested after the first action plan didn’t work. None of that reads like an organization moving with urgency. It reads like an organization moving exactly as fast as it needed to, once litigation made the timeline count.
Justice Azmudeh’s ruling doesn’t excuse Treasury Board. It documents, in careful and largely uncontested detail, a 22-month failure to deliver a benefit its own employees couldn’t function without. What it declines to do is act on that finding, because by the time anyone was in a position to force the issue, the immediate emergency had passed. The union proved its case on the facts that mattered most and lost on the one that mattered legally.
Treasury Board’s real advantage was never the strength of its arguments. It was the length of the process.
