A legally blind cyclist's catastrophic impairment claim against Intact Insurance ran into a problem: his vision loss predated the crash by five years.

He was cycling on September 28, 2020, when metal poles jutting from the back of a parked pickup truck struck him in the face. He applied for statutory accident benefits, arguing the crash had made his eyesight worse and left him too isolated to carry on with life as before. Intact Insurance Company denied the claim, and the fight landed at Ontario's Licence Appeal Tribunal.

The applicant has oculocutaneous albinism, a congenital condition that already had him legally blind before the accident. He told the tribunal his double vision had gotten worse since the crash. Intact pushed back - the same double vision, it said, had already been written up in his medical file years earlier.

To reach catastrophic impairment status, the applicant needed his physical and psychological injuries combined to add up to 55 per cent of a whole body impairment score, blending two different medical rating scales into one number. That threshold, known as Criterion 7, is the bar Ontario sets for its most generous tier of accident benefits.

In a decision released September 15, 2026, Adjudicator Tami Cogan sided with Intact. A treating optometrist's chart from 2015, five years before the crash, already recorded the applicant's double vision, poor depth perception and involuntary eye movements. Cogan applied the "but for" test from Sabadash v. State Farm - would the impairments exist regardless of the accident - and found they would. Vision earned a zero per cent rating. Add 3 per cent for medication side effects and 5 per cent for a sleep disorder, and the physical score came to 8 per cent. A mental health rating of 5 per cent brought the total to 13 per cent, nowhere near the 55 per cent needed.

The non-earner benefit claim went the same way. Cogan weighed the applicant's life before and after the accident, per the test from Heath v. Economical Mutual Insurance Company, and found he had held onto much of his independence - weekly visits to his partner, a temporary contract with Elections Canada, and steady progress turning his master's thesis into a book. That was enough to sink his claim that the accident had made a normal life impossible.

Once catastrophic impairment was off the table, the disputed treatment plans went with it - the applicant had already used up the $65,000 funding limit available without that designation. Cogan also turned down a special award, finding no sign that Intact had unreasonably delayed or withheld payment.

In the end, a decade-old chart entry did more work than any of the competing medical reports filed once the lawyers got involved.