Yesterday was celebrated internationally as “Data Privacy Day“!

In this spirit, Canadian and Nova Scotian government bodies are currently trumpeting their committment to “privacy” protection, including through their own compliance with applicable privacy laws. The Nova Scotia Public Service LTD Trust Fund Board, the public body that unfairly closed my disability benefits claim and refused to give me an appeal hearing, engaged in repeated violations of my right to privacy in these processes. This public body is bound by both the Nova Scotia Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act and the Personal Information and Electronic Documents Act. Since this public body has no privacy breach policy or any proper process for handling my complaint that it breached my privacy, I am now asking Nova Scotia’s privacy officer to investigate how my “data” was (mis)handled by the “Trust Fund Board” and its agents, including Manulife.

“Fair information principles” are widely recognized by modern democracies, who place a great emphasis on protecting personal privacy, because this lies at the heart of individual democratic freedoms of association, autonomy and personal dignity. A typical example of modern governments’ level of committment to privacy protection is found in a Canadian “fact sheet” on “privacy impact assessments”:

“Ten fundamental privacy principles should guide how a PIA (privacy impact assessment) is conducted:

Accountability: Each government department must put someone in charge of making sure privacy policies and practices are followed.

Identifying purposes: Canadians must be told why their personal information is being collected at or before the time of collection.

Consent: Canadians must give their consent to the collection, use and disclosure of their personal information.

Limiting collection: Only information that is required should be collected.

Limiting use, disclosure and retention: Personal information can only be used or disclosed for the purpose for which it was collected. Further consent is required for any other purposes. Personal information should only be kept as long as necessary.

Accuracy: Government departments must make every effort to reduce the risk that incorrect personal information is used or disclosed.

Safeguards: Government departments must protect personal information from loss or theft. They must create safeguards to prevent unauthorized access, disclosure, copying, use or modification.

Openness: Government departments must make their privacy policies readily available to Canadians.

Individual access: Canadians have the right to ask to see any of their personal information held by government. They have the right to know who the information has been given to. They can challenge the accuracy of personal information and ask for corrections.

Challenging compliance: Canadians must be able to challenge a government department’s privacy practices.

These principles are usually referred to as the “fair information principles”, and are articulated in the Canadian Standards Association Model Code for the Protection of Personal Information. They are also included in the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), Canada’s private-sector privacy law.”

The first time I posed this question in writing to the College of Registered Nurses of Nova Scotia, my question was ignored. But recently, I’ve triggered the college’s professional conduct complaint process in search of an answer.

I actually thought the CRNNS would most likely respond to my complaint by declaring that the action forming the basis of my complaint falls outside of the “practice of nursing” and that “RN” should not be used by ”disability claims specialists” who work at terminating disability claims for insurers. To me, this fundamentally adversarial role against vulnerable disabled workers is entirely inconsistent with what “nursing” work is. “Nursing” work means ethical and competent ”caring” for and promoting the health and well-being of individuals. ”Nursing” work absolutely never involves attacking or harming persons in any way. Ethical “nursing” work could never include arbitrarily depriving a work disabled single mother of money she earned and needs, and then depriving her of the information she needs to challenge a disability insurer’s adverse ”claim decision” – i.e. ethical nursing work could never include what Manulife’s “RN” did to me. 

I figured the CRNNS might reprimand Manulife’s “disability claims specialist” for using RN after her name in her supposed performance of that role in my case, and that would be the end of it. But what has happened instead is that the CRNNS has retained a lawyer to investigate my complaint…so I guess we’ll see what comes of that eventually…

I and the rest of the general public need to know exactly what “RN” means in Nova Scotia. As a person who practiced nursing in Nova Scotia competently and ethically for many years as a public servant (as a hospital staff nurse and then a public health nurse), I am both fully aware of the high ethical standard that nurses must uphold to maintain the public’s trust in their profession, and I am particularly insulted to have been so abused and cheated by a person using “RN” after her name.

Had Manulife followed its usual claim termination notice format (which is to cite policy provisions and expert evidence relied on in making a decision to terminate benefits while advising claimants of their appeal process), then Manulife’s Nurse Townsend could only have written to me something along the lines of: 

“A group of medically incompetent non-professional people (the Nova Scotia Public Service LTD Board of Trustees) apparently believe in their own minds that they have “reviewed your disability claim.” Citing no medical or other expert evidence and citing no policy provisions, someone named “Chuck,” who apparently speaks for these ”Trustees,” has for reasons unknown to me asked Gary Perks to INSTRUCT ME as Manulife’s “disability claims specialist”, to terminate payment of your disability benefits. Therefore, I have taken that action. Gary and Chuck tell me you may not appeal this decision.” ….However, “nurse” Townsend actually never sent me any information. She merely “changed the status of my claim to terminated.”

I sent an inquiry to the College of Registered Nurses of Nova Scotia asking whether or not it considers an RN acting as a Manulife “disability claims specialist” to be engaged in performing ”professional nursing practice”, i.e. is this particular work role bound by the college’s “code of professional ethics” and is it also accepted by the college as “work experience” for the purpose of maintaining a professional licence? So far, the College of Registered Nurses of Nova Scotia has not responded to this question.

Gary Perks’ email above, addressed to three girls working beneath him, included strange remarks, including ”the original offer to her still stands”. Here is some background on “the offer” he may have been referring to: Manulife and Chuck had jointly “offered” to arbitrarily cut off my benefits in August, 2004, but I had firmly rejected that “offer”… although that  was an “offer” that had been accompanied by a threat that my benefits would be arbitrarily cut off if I did not immediately “agree” to have my benefits arbitrarily cut off. (How would you like to be put in that predicament?) So Perks was really saying that the original threat of arbitrary benefits termination issued to me “still stands.” Perks also made odd comments to “Victoria” suggesting that he expected to receive some type of “paid receipt” from me or perhaps an “invoice from the college.” Gary Perks actually received nothing from me except a written complaint that Manulife was treating me unfairly, and he later received an earful of loud verbal complaint from me over the phone after he’d sent me a nasty letter threatening me “without prejudice” that Manulife would take legal action against me if I DARED to publicize “in the media or on the internet” the details of how its employees were treating me. Was that one the “offer that still stands” that Mr. Perks was referring to? To this day, Manulife has never clarified any of this for me…

Since the Nova Scotia Public Service allowed it, some bad SHIT happened…to me…

In my “accidental” financial destruction at Manulife’s hands, which has been a horrendous personal ordeal and elicited a non-stop follow-up shitstorm directed at me by the “Trustees” of the LTD Plan, one of the “damaged/missing barricades” which should have prevented my being SMOTHERED IN SHIT was a “professional code of ethics” that was supposed to have been adhered to by Manulife’s “rehabilitation specialist.” Another “damaged/missing barricade” was the applicable claims administration guidelines that Manulife’s “adjudicator” was supposed to follow, but that he evidently chose to ignore. Compounding my predicament, I found that I was “blocked from exiting” the SHIT SMOTHERING INCIDENT when the LTD Plan so-called “Trustees” decided to REFUSE to let me exercise my “right to appeal” Manulife’s ludicrous “claim decision” against me.

Image courtesy of the Nova Scotia Department of Labour and Workforce Development, Occupational Health and Safety Division, which has issued a HAZARD ALERT!! regarding MANURE PITS!!

The letter above, sent to me by a “disability case manager administrator” at Maritime Life in 1999 (before Manulife took over) gives another glimpse into adversarial tactics disabled workers must cope with in order to collect disability benefits promised by employers.  After I’d been work-disabled by a severe bone disease for over 4 years, my RN licence would unavoidably soon become unrenewable without retraining. But before this ”vocational” complication could arise, it seems Maritime Life was grasping for a “non-medical” excuse to cut off my disability benefits, by trying to discover if I had “gained weight” which could then potentially form the basis of an argument that I had breached my obligations under the policy (and worsened my own disabling chronic hip pain) by failing to “follow medical advice” that I avoid gaining weight in this situation.  

This “weight gain” argument could then have been used by my case manager as a ”non-medical” ground for refusing to continue to pay my benefits despite my continuous disabled status under the policy…or perhaps as a way to try to bluff me into giving up my claim? In fact, under the policy and law, evidence about a disability claimant’s “compliance with medical advice” can only properly be obtained from physicians. Asking me for my “weight” was a dirty trick. However, I responded to this letter by naively disclosing my weight to Nadine Avery, although the request felt intrusive and inappropriate, because I was afraid not to comply with her demand considering her power over me. Luckily for me it seems, I had not gained any weight and I was not overweight, like many others who live with long term severe physical incapacity and chronic pain.

When I later requested a complete copy of my disability claim file under Nova Scotia’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, after Manulife had begun making extremely unreasonable demands of me in 2004, Manulife and the responsible Nova Scotia Public Service LTD Board of Trustees (a Provincial public body) somehow “lost” their copy of this letter, which they were supposed to have retained in my file.  Was that because they wanted to avoid transparency into their illegal tactics against me? Under the policy, contract, and applicable law, disability claimants like me are NOT REQUIRED to “STATE THEIR WEIGHT” for the benefit of insurers seeking to deny payment of benefits.

However, vulnerable long term disabled employees are routinely forced into psychologically unsafe relationships with “disability case managers” like this, who are empowered by public policy to freely abuse their power over disabled employees with absolute impunity. Did my compliance with this unwarranted invasion of my privacy by Nadine Avery later embolden Manulife to send a “rehabilitation specialist” to invade my home and question me about my social and economic situation? And did my naive compliance with that unfair interrogation, plus the information Manulife thereby discovered about my economic vulnerability as a single mother…is that what emboldened them to push me further as they tried to do, through Manulife’s 2004 and onward efforts to bully me into “voluntarily” committing financial suicide for my insurer’s benefit?

Advice to others: all I can suggest is that disabled employees who have had experiences like mine, or who find themselves currently on the receiving end of treatement like this, publicly disclose the details and circumstances of these sorts of manipulative communications from disability insurers, as a way  to warn future disabled employees who will travel these roads after us, and as a way to show why governments must create and implement healthy public policy in this area to protect the mental and physical health, and the income security of disabled workers and their dependants.

How would you have responded to this letter, if you were an ex-nurse and single mother with a seriously disabling incurable bone disease, who had invested the previous 30 years of your adult life in working and planning for your retirement security through the Nova Scotia Public Service Pension Plan?

When I responded to this by challenging the basis of Manulife’s “decision” as communicated to me in this letter that I was “not disabled,” and I refusing to “agree” to “proceed” to authorize Manulife to cut off my disability benefits in either 3 or 6 months, I was advised by Charles Bruce’s assistant, Pat Brace, that I had no right to appeal Manulife’s decision (which was not true). In a letter to me, Mr. Brace elaborated further on “the options” Manulife and Charles Bruce had “presented” to me: “whether or not you can achieve re-certification in 6 months, 12 months, or more, is not relevant to the offer that was made.”  

One extremely relevant fact is that we all knew I might not still have the use of my legs in 3 months, 6 months, or whatever, and that there is no way this so-called “offer” could return my earning power in any event. So, in this situation, what WAS “relevant to the offer that was made?”  Did Manulife and Charles Bruce think I would naively consider their useless-to-me “offer” THAT WAS ACCOMPANIED BY AN ADVERSE DECISION AGAINST ME WITH NO APPEAL PROCESS PLUS A THREAT OF IMMEDIATE ECONOMIC HARM IF “FAILED” TO “ACCEPT” ALL OF THESE CONDITIONS AS THE FULL TERMS OF THE “OFFER”….did they think I was a completely defenceless idiot…?  What determines when a disability insurer has gone too far in asking a claimant to act against her own interests and actively helping a monster like Manulife defeat her valid claim?

Under the terms of the policy, contract and law, I was not oblied to entertain “offers” from any party, however the LTD Board of Trustees promptly punished me by cutting off my disability benefits for not “complying” with the “opportunity” it “offered” to me to PERSONALLY sign away my valuable right to financial security and peace of mind, and to PERSONALLY authorize the Board to arbitrarily cut off my disability benefits and to “voluntarily settle” ( i.e. to abandon) my valid disability claim (including my earned right to my retirment pension) in order to benefit the Board’s financial bottom line.

What would you do in this situation? Would you “sign the waier” for them? When I refused to “sign a waiver” for the Trustees, they responded by sending me a torrent of manipulative and threatening abuse from their lawyers.

Manulife demanded that I permit a “rehabilitation specialist” to enter my home to speak to me for the stated purpose of “gathering information about my medical condition and my employment history,” which information was supposedly going to be used to “develop a rehabilitation plan aimed at returning me to full time employment.” Although I told Manulife’s “case manager” there was no need for a home visit for this purpose, he insisted on it, and I naively complied with his demand, thinking that this could not create a problem for me since I had nothing to hide.

Problems/red flags:

1. “Information about my medical condition” was not available at my home, nor could it be provided by me, since I am not a qualified medical expert, which is the only source from which this sort of information can be gathered. In this game, nothing I say can be considered “evidence” for or against my disability claim, as that falls within the realm of “experts” only.

2. Full “information about my employment history” was already contained in the file that Manulife had on my disability claim. This information was accurate and complete and had been obtained years earlier through written statements obtained from me and my employer.

It seems Manulife was really after other information, which was to be used for an improper purpose.

According to its job ads, Manulife recruits people with “the ability to influence others” to work as “rehabilitation specialists.” In my case, Manulife used its rehabilitation specialist to play the role of trojan horse, i.e. to get inside my home to discover my personal vulnerabilities and then use that information to attack me. “Rehabilitation specialist” Victoria Martin was very friendly and chatty when she entered my home and proceeded to ask me a load of personal questions having nothing whatsoever to do with “information about my medical condition and my employment history.” Miss Vicky causally asked me many detailed personal questions about my social and financial circumstances, through which Manulife was then able to “gather information” about me revealing that I was an isolated single mother with financial stress on top of my physically vulnerable situation caused by my incurable bone disease.

Manulife’s ”rehabilitation specialist,” Victoria Martin, then joined with “case manager/adjudicator” Doug Low and Nova Scotia Public Service LTD Plan CEO Charles Bruce in an effort to coerce and trick me into signing a waiver giving up my right to ongoing disability benefits. Martin and Low jointly signed a letter to me telling me the “rehabilitation specialist” had gathered information to discredit my disability claim (despite the impossibility of this under the terms of the contract) while threatening to cut off my income in 30 days if I “failed” to immediately personally “agree” with Manulife’s resulting “decision” that I was no longer eligible to collect benefits under the contract. When I refused to “agree”, I tried to exercise my “right to appeal” instead, and I complained that I was being treated unfairly, all hell broke loose and my benefits were promptly cut off by the Nova Scotia Public Service LTD Board of Trustees as punishment for my “non-compliance” with its own “white collar” crminal extortion attempt to elicit a “claim waiver” from me. The LTD Board has had its lawyers, my former employer, and my former union torturing me ever since, trying to spin this story - which is the true story of an inexcusable unfair government-sponsored “corporate” attack on a decent, vulnerable family - into something else, while demanding my silence about it.

When I first complained that I was being treated unfairly, Manulife’s immediate response was to deny it in a nasty registered letter “WITHOUT PREJUDICE” that also threatened direct legal action against me by Manulife if I publicized “in the media or on the internet” how its employees had treated me. 

One moral of this story is NEVER allow a Manulife employee into your home to “gather information” about you under any circumstances. Demand that all of Manulife’s information gatherers, including their “rehabilitation” or “return to work coordinators” or whatever else they may choose to call themselves, STAY AWAY from you, your person, your home and your family, and calmly insist instead that all of Manulife’s requests for information from you be put in writing. If you are ever required under your contract to undergo any sort of “skills assessment” by Manulife’s “rehabilitation” staff, for any reason*, then all I can suggest is that you comply with such a request at a neutral location and take with you a witness and a videocamera to record everything that is said and done. If Manulife’s “assessment” of you blows up into a shitstorm of lies later, you can at least post the truth on the internet.

Another moral of this story is don’t be afraid to stand up to bullies.

* It is possible that such an assessment might be required for “return to work planning” or as part of a “claim review.” These are two radically different processes, as Manulife is well aware, however from my experience Manulife cannot be trusted to tell you the real reason when it makes this sort of information request.

The author of this book, Karen Huffer, seems to understand EXACTLY how it feels to be chewed up by a flawed “legal system” as I have been, and it is a real relief to read her take on the problem, in which she identifies “legal abuse” as a “public health menace.” As a former public health professional and a victim of legal abuse myself, I completely agree with this assessment.

Huffer’s clear, logical advice on how to survive, i.e. how not be totally destroyed by the experience, I expect will be most helpful to me and to many others. Hint: “overcoming the devastation of legal abuse syndrome” does not mean or require abandoning your legal rights…it just means assessing the causative incident and the legal system in a different light, and then cutting to the chase and finding a way to enforce your rights and hold accountable parties who’ve harmed you.

“Legal Abuse Syndrome” should be required reading for lawyers, judges, bureaucrats and all others whose work affects the legal rights of individuals. People in these occupations are not generally trained in assessing health, and they might therefore be genuinely unaware of the extreme mental pain and suffering that their actions can cause to the souls whose rights are at stake in “fights for justice” hosted by various “courts”.

Huffer’s book is subtitled: “WARNING: Protracted litigation can be hazardous to your health.” You can also learn quite a bit about Karen Huffer and her work by googling on “legal abuse syndrome.”

http://www.lvaallc.com/order_legal_abuse_syndrome.htm

Overcoming The Devastation of Legal Abuse Syndrome by Karin Huffer, M.S., M.F.T.

Karin Huffer describes how many victims of white-collar crime, court abuse, and bureaucratic bungling have come to suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder as a result of having brushed up against various phases of our legal system. – Alan M. Dershowitz, Professor, Harvard Law School

Karin Huffer’s groundbreaking book, Overcoming the Devastation of Legal Abuse Syndrome, provides the means for prevention of and recovery from the public health menace of Legal Abuse Syndrome (LAS).  

Written in an easy-to-understand style and using vignettes to clarify examples of Legal Abuse Syndrome, this valuable self-help and textbook teaches litigants the steps towards recovery from Legal Abuse Syndrome.