TorontoIn the spring of last year, a woman in her sixties placed a routine telephone request with the national insurance company that administers her registered retirement income fund. The request was for a ten-thousand-dollar withdrawal from her own account, on terms her contract permits, for purposes the contract does not require her to specify. The request was, in the operating vocabulary of the industry, an ordinary administrative event. The kind of request the company processes, on its own published service standard, within five to seven business days. The kind of request the company has been processing, in identical form, since the year the woman opened the account two decades ago.

The withdrawal was completed, in this file, seven months later. The completion was not the consequence of any change in the contract, the legislation, or the woman's circumstances. The completion was the consequence of her son, holding a registered Power of Attorney for Property, intervening on the file in November of last year and refusing to leave the matter alone until the withdrawal cleared. Between the request and the completion, the file accumulated eleven documented service failures. Each of them was, on its own, a small operational failure of a kind the company's own service-recovery procedures contemplate and budget for. Taken together, on the same client, on the same file, on the same simple withdrawal, they constitute the kind of pattern the country's regulator has, in this generation, declined to address.

The eleven failures, briefly

Four calls placed by the woman to the company's published toll-free number, in which the call was either disconnected after extended hold or routed to a representative who, on the call log, was unable to locate the file. Three written requests submitted through the company's secure-messaging portal, in which the request was either not actioned or actioned with the wrong amount. Two follow-up calls in which the representative asserted that the system was experiencing "connection issues," a phrase the file later established was the company's standard scripted response when no further action was contemplated on the call. One asserted document-receipt issue in which the company claimed not to have received a form the woman had submitted three times by three separate channels. One processing error in which the withdrawal was, briefly, recorded against the wrong product. The file is, in any honest accounting, a documentary record of a company that has, on this particular client, simply not delivered the service its contract requires.

The woman is sixty-eight. She is not, by any available measure of cognitive function, the kind of client whose comprehension or persistence the company should be hoping to defeat. She is a former public-sector employee with thirty-three years of administrative experience. She had, before this file, a working understanding of how an institutional service standard is supposed to operate. She kept, on her own initiative, a contemporaneous log of every call, every reference number, every representative's name. The log is sixteen pages. The log is the spine of the statement of claim.

The Power of Attorney

The withdrawal was completed because the woman's son, who holds a registered Power of Attorney for Property under the Substitute Decisions Act, applied a different kind of pressure on the file than the woman herself had been positioned to apply. The son is in his thirties. The son knows, on the available facts of his own working life, how to identify the right internal escalation channel at a national insurance company and how to make the channel produce. The son did so. The withdrawal cleared. The withdrawal cleared in seven months instead of seven business days because the son existed, was present in the country, was available to intervene, and was willing to spend the time the company should have spent on its own client without his involvement.

The withdrawal cleared in seven months instead of seven business days because the son existed, was present in the country, and was willing to spend the time the company should have spent on its own client.

The seniors without sons

This is the file's defining injustice. The woman's experience is, on the documented complaint volume to the Financial Services Regulatory Authority over the last three years, not unusual. It is the modal experience of senior clients whose registered accounts are administered by any of the country's five largest insurance companies. The clients who, like the woman, have a competent adult in their life prepared to intervene, eventually get their withdrawals processed. The clients who do not have such an adult, the seniors living alone, the seniors estranged from family, the seniors whose adult children are themselves overwhelmed, wait. They wait for weeks, then months. They run out of money in the period the withdrawal was supposed to bridge. They take on credit-card balances at interest rates the withdrawal would have made unnecessary. They borrow from friends. They eat less. They cancel appointments. They pay late fees on the bills the withdrawal was earmarked for. They are, by the company's own actuarial models, statistically less likely to file the complaint that would prompt the eventual completion. The company knows this. The company has, in its operational design, priced this in.

The claim, filed

The woman filed a statement of claim at the Ontario Small Claims Court in January at the small-claims maximum: fifty thousand dollars. The defendant is the national insurance company. The pleadings allege negligent administration, breach of contract, breach of the implied duty of good faith owed by an insurer to its policyholder, and, in a separate count, statutory damages under the Consumer Protection Act. A formal legal notice from counsel was served on the company on the first of April. The company has, at the time of going to press, not responded.

The company has, in the same period, continued to send the woman quarterly statements on her remaining holdings, marketing inserts for additional products, and the annual notice of administrative fees levied against her account. The fees were, on the most recent statement, paid as scheduled. The company is, in other words, perfectly capable of administering the account when the administration is profitable. The company is incapable of administering the account when the administration is owed to the client.

The country built this

The country built, between the 1950s and the 1990s, a retirement system in which the principal asset class for most middle-class citizens was the private registered account administered by an insurer, a bank, or a brokerage. The country sold the system to its citizens on the implicit promise that the institutions managing the accounts would manage them competently. The promise was not put in writing in the Income Tax Act because the promise was assumed. The country has, in the years since, watched the institutions managing the accounts decline, slowly, to honour the assumption. The country's regulator, the Financial Services Regulatory Authority, has the statutory authority to enforce service standards on the institutions. The Authority has, in this generation, declined to use the authority at meaningful scale. The institutions, in the absence of enforcement, have done what unenforced institutions always do.

The file in front of the Ontario Small Claims Court is small. The damages are capped. The defendant is one of the country's largest companies. The plaintiff is a sixty-eight-year-old retired clerk. The case will, in the ordinary course, settle, or be assessed at a number the company will write off as a rounding error. The pattern the file documents will, on the available trajectory, continue.

Seven months to move ten thousand dollars. Eleven failures, documented. One son holding a Power of Attorney. One regulator, not regulating. One country, on its own retirement promise, quietly defaulting.

Pay the woman. Fix the system. Or admit, in writing, that the system the country built for its retirees is now a system the country's retirees have to sue to use.