Recovering From a Work Injury in Quebec: The Complete Guide

Quebec grants injured workers the strongest right to return to work in Canada, along with the shortest deadlines to protect it. Depending on the size of your employer, this right lasts one or two years. To keep it alive, you sometimes have only ten days to challenge certain decisions and thirty days for most others.

What to do first after a workplace injury in Quebec?

Report the incident to your employer as soon as possible, consult a healthcare professional for a diagnosis, provide your employer with the medical certificate from this professional, and then file your own claim with the CNESST. These four steps, in this order.

Your employer then produces their own form. It's worth knowing that this form allows them to state their objections to the eligibility of your injury. What you wrote in your claim is your version of the facts.

What is the deadline for filing a claim with the CNESST?

As a general rule, six months. For an occupational disease, the deadline starts from the moment you knew the disease was work-related rather than from a specific event.

Longer deadlines exist in certain situations, particularly when a complaint for psychological harassment first goes through the Administrative Labour Tribunal. If you are beyond six months, ask the question rather than assuming.

Do I have the right to get my job back in Quebec?

Yes. This right is provided for in section 240 of the Act respecting industrial accidents and occupational diseases. Its duration depends on the size of your workplace.

Employer size Duration of right
Twenty workers or less 1 year
More than twenty workers 2 years

When your doctor consolidates your injury, a CNESST agent determines the terms of your return to work. This includes your ability to resume your job, how your functional limitations are accommodated by the tasks of that position, and the need for training or adaptation of a workstation.

Quebec also protects you against penalties related to exercising these rights. The complaint provided for in section 32 of the Act is the recourse if your employer dismisses, suspends, transfers, or penalizes you because you suffered an injury or because you filed a claim. It follows its own process rather than the usual challenge pathway.

What is the deadline to challenge a CNESST decision?

These deadlines changed on 6 avril 2023, and many documents still online show the old figures. Here is the current situation.

Recourse Deadline
Assignment to other duties, right to refuse, preventive withdrawal, or inspector's decision, to the Tribunal 10 days
Request for administrative review to the CNESST 30 days from notification
Challenge to the Administrative Labour Tribunal 60 days from notification
Go to the Tribunal because the CNESST has not responded to your review after 90 days

For many decisions, you now have a real choice rather than an imposed sequence. You can request an administrative review within thirty days or go directly to the Tribunal within sixty days. This choice applies particularly to decisions concerning a notice from the Bureau d'évaluation médicale as well as certain decisions from occupational disease and imputation committees.

A trap that costs cases. If you have already requested an administrative review from the CNESST and then decide to go to the Tribunal instead, you must first send your withdrawal to the CNESST. Without this withdrawal, the Tribunal simply defers your case to the CNESST, and time passes while nothing progresses.

The thirty-day deadline is imperative. A request filed late can permanently end your right to challenge. Your employer also has thirty days to request a review, which means that a decision in your favor can be questioned.

Dates and complete forms can be found on our page CNESST claim deadlines in Quebec.

What is the Bureau d'évaluation médicale (Medical Assessment Board)?

It is a unique mechanism in Canada and it matters because it can reshape everything that follows. When a medical opinion in your file is challenged, the question is submitted to a doctor from the Bureau d'évaluation médicale, and the CNESST is then bound by this opinion on the medical matters it covers.

These issues include your diagnosis, the consolidation of your injury, the required treatments, the existence of a permanent impairment, and your functional limitations. Almost everything affecting your compensation stems from these answers.

If you disagree with the conclusions, they can be challenged before the Tribunal. An expert medical report is usually necessary to do this properly.

What should I document?

Three things. The first is more urgent in Quebec than elsewhere.

  • Your functional limitations in your professional's words and how your actual job conflicts with them. This is the basis for determining your return to work, and this is what a notice from the Bureau d'évaluation médicale will be compared against.
  • The date each decision reached you. With deadlines of ten, thirty, and sixty days running from notification, the date on the envelope matters as much as the decision inside.
  • Anything that looks like a penalty because you filed a claim. A schedule change, a transfer, a sudden concern about your performance. This is the raw material for a complaint under section 32.

Our free Resource Hub offers fillable notebooks for symptoms, appointments, correspondence, and return to work, in English only.

Who can help me?

The CNESST publishes the worker's claim form and its own policy on reviews and challenges. The Administrative Labour Tribunal specifies deadlines and appeal procedures and publishes its decisions.

Quebec does not have a government office for worker advisors like Ontario and Manitoba do. Unionized individuals should contact their union. Non-unionized individuals most often turn to community groups that advocate for injured workers or to a lawyer who practices in this field, often on a contingency basis.

The Quebec Companion Guide

Our CNESST Companion Guide for Workplace Injury in Quebec brings together the province's specific deadlines, forms, organizations, and recourses, with fillable space for the file you are building in parallel.

Pair it with the National Recovery Guide, in English only. The national guide keeps a daily record of your symptoms, appointments, calls, and expenses, the one on which a claim is ultimately judged. The provincial guide keeps Quebec's deadlines, forms, organizations, and appeal routes. People who only have one of the two often end up with a well-maintained file intended for the wrong process, or with the correct dates and nothing to present.

Injured elsewhere in Canada? Start with the guides by province and territory.

This page is also available in English.

Last checked in July 2026 with the CNESST and the Administrative Labour Tribunal. We re-verify these pages quarterly. If you find an error here, please write to Recovery@hurtsquare.ca and we will correct it publicly.

This page provides general information for individuals in Quebec. It does not constitute legal or medical advice. Validate any specific situation with a lawyer, your union, or the CNESST.