Canadians generally don't engage with insurance until something forces the issue, according to Jeffrey Talor, managing director, life & sickness insurance, at CanWise. After 15 years as a broker, and as a second-generation insurance agent whose own father worked in the industry, Talor said the pattern holds regardless of income, education, or how much coverage someone actually has access to.
"When it comes to insurance, it's usually a triggering event," Talor said. "The word ‘triggering’ could mean a home, could be a baby, could be a family member they lost." He described clients calling him only after a friend's cancer diagnosis, suddenly afraid of being caught without coverage themselves. "There's no awareness for insurance. The education is lacking."
Read more: Gen Z is twice as likely to gut their insurance coverage when money gets tight
Economic pressure has added a newer version of the same pattern, Talor said, pointing to clients in their sixties who are only now grappling with the prospect of losing workplace benefits while still carrying a mortgage. But whether the trigger is a life event or a financial one, he said the underlying problem is the same: people don't think about insurance proactively.
The awareness gap starts with something simple, according to Talor: most employees never actually read their group benefits documentation.
"They don't read the booklet," Talor said. That gap, he said, is more about a structural failure in how group plans get introduced in the first place than it is about individual’s carelessness. An employee typically gets a booklet once, during onboarding, and then is left to assume what it covers until something goes wrong.
At smaller companies in particular, the process is often minimal: an employee signs up through whoever handles HR, receives a booklet, and is left to hope for the best from there, according to Talor. Most companies, in his experience, don't revisit coverage with employees at all after that initial sign-up, leaving workers to discover gaps only once they're already at the doctor's office being told something isn't covered.
Talor said the responsibility for that gap sits largely with employers, not employees. He argued group plans should include scheduled check-ins, ideally multiple times a year, to walk staff through what's actually included, particularly as insurers add newer benefits like mental health support or menopause-related coverage that many employees don't know exist.
"The lack of education is what drives people not to identify where the gaps are," Talor said.
How much that gap matters in practice depends heavily on the sector, according to Talor. Employees in fields like construction tend to have solid group coverage, he said, but rarely engage with it, since they're consistently in the field rather than in an office environment where benefits conversations happen more naturally. By contrast, employees at more white-collar or tech-oriented companies tend to read more closely and have a better sense of what they're actually covered for.
That unevenness shows up starkly in one specific statistic Talor pointed to: more than a quarter of people with group life insurance don't know how much coverage they actually have. Part of that, he said, comes down to employers doing the legal minimum rather than a meaningful amount, since Canadian rules only require a minimum of $10,000 in group life coverage per employee. Many workers assume their coverage is tied to their salary, he said, when in practice it may be far below that.
Even when employees do engage with their benefits, Talor said they tend to focus on the wrong parts of the plan. Dental and vision benefits get outsized attention, he said, because people use them regularly and notice small reimbursement caps immediately, while far more consequential coverage, like prescription drug maximums, goes largely ignored until it's needed.
Read more: Exhausted employees are costing companies business, Westland warns
"Most of the people lean in to dental. They care about that the most," Talor said. "But look at the medication. If the meds [covered] are only $5,000, God forbid you got cancer, we're stuck now." He said that same pattern shows up with physiotherapy and vision care, benefits used often enough to be top of mind, while someone might not realize their critical illness or disability coverage is thin or nonexistent until a serious diagnosis arrives.
Asked what would actually close the gap, Talor said the shift has to start with how employers themselves think about group benefits, not just how employees engage with them. Too often, he said, benefits get treated purely as an expense or a tax write-off, rather than something with a direct return.
"A happy employee is a productive employee," Talor said, describing the pitch he gives business owners directly. Employees under financial or health-related stress bring that stress into the workplace, he said, and giving them real, low-cost access to support, whether through mental health resources or a clearer understanding of their own coverage, pays off in retention and output over time.
"A healthy and productive employee will translate into more income for your business over time," Talor said.
