An Ontario tribunal has cancelled a Minor Injury Guideline ruling after finding an adjudicator wrongly treated psychological validity testing as mandatory, ordering a fresh rehearing.
Ontario's Licence Appeal Tribunal has granted a claimant's request for reconsideration of a decision that held him to the province's Minor Injury Guideline, or MIG, finding the original adjudicator had treated a competing psychological report's lack of validity testing as making it inherently unreliable.
The underlying dispute traces back to an accident on October 8, 2023. The applicant sought benefits under the Statutory Accident Benefits Schedule from Definity Insurance Company. In a decision released March 18, 2026, the Tribunal held the applicant to the MIG, found it unnecessary to assess the reasonableness of the disputed treatment plans, and dismissed his claims for an award and interest.
The applicant sought reconsideration on April 7, 2026, raising several alleged errors. The Tribunal focused its analysis on the ground concerning his psychological impairment evidence. Two competing reports were before the Tribunal: one from the applicant's own psychologist, and one from the insurer's assessor. The insurer's assessor found the applicant's self-report questionnaires produced an invalid, uninterpretable profile, and concluded he did not meet the diagnostic criteria for any accident-related psychological disorder. The original adjudicator preferred that report over the applicant's psychologist, citing invalid testing, a disconnect between the psychologist's reporting and diagnosis, and a lack of interpretation of the questionnaire-based measures.
Vice-Chair Craig Mazerolle found the original decision went further than simply preferring one expert's validity measures over another's. He noted the original decision had described validity testing as a standard requirement for self-report psychological testing, unsupported by any legal authority or professional college guidelines, and had gone further still by treating validity measures as "a necessity for a report involving self-report psychological testing" - a proposition for which he said there was no legal support.
Mazerolle also found the original decision failed to engage with corroborating evidence the applicant had pointed to, including records from his family doctor and a social worker, which were mentioned only in summarizing the applicant's position rather than weighed on their merits.
Mazerolle found this error was highly consequential to the psychological impairment ground, since the comparison between the two reports sat at the core of the Tribunal's denial, and that it met the standard for reconsideration under Rule 18.2(b) of the Licence Appeal Tribunal Rules, 2023. Because the applicant had also linked the psychological evidence to his separate chronic pain argument, Mazerolle ordered the new adjudicator to reassess the entire evidentiary record, not just the psychological ground.
The March 18, 2026 decision has been cancelled, and the matter will proceed to a rehearing before a new adjudicator. The rehearing will be based on the existing record - the evidence and submissions already exchanged during the original written hearing. Mazerolle will not remain seized of the matter going forward.
For insurers and claims professionals, the decision is a reminder that validity testing, while a legitimate factor in weighing competing psychological reports, cannot be treated as a threshold requirement without a supporting legal basis. MIG findings or benefit denials built primarily on the absence of validity testing, without engaging with a competing report's diagnostic substance, may be vulnerable to being reopened on reconsideration.
