A 'superstar' physiotherapist asked for leave. What his employer didn't do next changed everything
A health-care employer called one of its long-serving physiotherapists a "superstar" it needed to keep happy. Then it accepted his resignation without ever asking whether his mental health was behind it. An Alberta tribunal found that failure to ask amounted to discrimination.
On June 17, 2026, the Human Rights Tribunal of Alberta ordered Lifemark Health Corp. to pay former physiotherapist David Volpi $40,000 in general damages and $965,338.14 in lost wages, plus interest, after finding it discriminated against him on the ground of mental disability at its Village Square clinic. Tribunal member Dana L. Christianson set the award in a remedy decision that followed an earlier finding of liability.
A valued employee under pressure
Volpi had worked for the company for 16 years. The tribunal noted he earned a high income partly because he ran two schedules at once, letting him see roughly twice as many patients a day.
By 2015 and 2016, that arrangement was under review. Insurance companies had complained about the double-booking, so the company brought in a policy allowing only one insurance patient per time slot. The changes were a source of stress for him.
Volpi had alleged the workplace turned toxic and that the company was harassing him, but the tribunal did not accept those claims in its earlier merits ruling. The discrimination it did find centred on what came next: his request for time off in the summer of 2016.
Accommodation question not asked
The tribunal found the company discriminated by delaying Volpi's ability to take a leave tied to his mental disability, then by accepting his resignation that September without asking whether the two were connected, and without weighing whether it could accommodate him. It also did not rescind the resignation when he later tried to return.
Medical evidence accepted by the tribunal indicated that had Volpi received a meaningful response to his leave request and taken the time he needed, he would have kept his job. Instead his condition worsened, he was hospitalized in March 2017, then found work at Strive Physiotherapy around July 1, 2017.
The company argued it owed nothing beyond those first months out of work because Volpi had not proven a permanent medical restriction. The tribunal rejected that, writing that "An employer cannot end an employee's employment in breach of the Act and then be absolved from paying the employee any lost wages because the employee did not also prove, in addition to proving the discriminatory loss of their employment, that the respondent's conduct permanently disabled them from working to a certain level."
Counting the cost
Volpi had sought more than $4.5 million in lost income, projecting earnings to a planned retirement at 69. The company countered that he was owed $267,397.26 at most. The tribunal landed between them, awarding roughly ten years of lost wages to the end of 2025 and trimming his assumed future income from the company by 25 per cent.
The result was $965,338.14 in lost wages, made up of $267,397.26 for his initial period without work and $697,940.88 for the years that followed, with prejudgment interest running from October 1, 2016. The tribunal added $40,000 for injury to dignity and ordered the company to put an accommodation policy in place at the Village Square location.
The tribunal tied the episode to a supervisor who did not know what policy, if any, governed disability leave requests. As Christianson wrote, "if proper steps, in accordance with its human rights obligations, had been taken by the respondent in real time, this entire unfortunate series of events (including the loss of the complainant's employment and his subsequent hospitalization) could have been avoided."
