What Alberta Employers Are Paying For Without Knowing It
“On any given week in Canada, approximately 500,000 people cannot go to work because of mental illness.”
I was sitting across from a business owner in Central Alberta a while back. Mid-sized company, good culture by most measures, low turnover compared to his industry. He was proud of that, and he had reason to be.
Then he told me about his foreman.
Twelve years with the company. One of the best he'd ever had. Showed up early, stayed late, knew the operation better than anyone. Then his marriage started falling apart. Over about eight months, the early arrivals became late arrivals. The staying late disappeared. There were a couple of close calls on the floor that got documented. By the time the business owner realized something was seriously wrong, the foreman had already mentally left. His body showed up for another three months before the resignation letter did.
"I just didn't know what to do," the owner told me. "I didn't know what was going on with him until it was basically over."
I've heard some version of that story more times than I can count. The details change. It might be a dispatcher, an office manager, a lead hand. But the shape of it stays the same. A person who was once the backbone of a team quietly comes apart, and the people around them either don't see it coming or don't know what to do when they do.
The number that should stop us in our tracks
On any given week in Canada, approximately 500,000 people cannot go to work because of mental health stresses and concerns.
Not a bad quarter. Not a hard stretch. Every single week.
The annual cost in lost productivity across the country sits at $20 billion. Mental health-related absenteeism and presenteeism (that second word meaning people who show up to work while mentally unwell) costs the Canadian economy a further $6.3 billion every year on top of that.
Here in Alberta, 42% of residents reported concerns about their mental health during the pandemic, with many experiencing moderate to severe anxiety. That number didn't evaporate when restrictions lifted. The habits of anxiety don't unwind on a schedule. And the people carrying that weight went back to their jobs and their worksites and their desks, carrying it with them.
If current trends continue without meaningful change in how we address this, the cumulative cost to Canada is projected to exceed $2.5 trillion by 2041.
I don't know what to do with that number except to say: it doesn't start at the national level. It starts in one person, on one team, in one Alberta company, in one week when nobody asked how they were doing.
The part that gets left off the balance sheet
Most of us understand sick days. They're visible. They show up in payroll. There's a record.
What doesn't get recorded is the version of the same problem that stays in the building.
An employee managing unaddressed anxiety isn't necessarily calling in sick. They're often the ones still showing up. But they're making more errors. Processing information more slowly. Withdrawing from the team without announcing why. Taking longer to complete tasks they used to handle without thinking. Snapping at a colleague in a meeting and then spending the next two days managing the fallout.
That's presenteeism. And unlike absenteeism, it's nearly impossible to cost out on a spreadsheet because it hides inside what looks like a normal workday.
Non-unionized workers in Alberta are entitled to up to 16 weeks of job-protected leave for stress and mental health issues. That's a full quarter of a year that a key person can be absent and needs to be absent, while the business keeps running around the hole they've left. The costs associated with that aren't just the wages of someone not working. It's redistribution of workload onto people who are already stretched. It's the slower decisions and the missed details and the manager who now has one more thing to carry.
And it ends, more often than not, in turnover. Recruitment costs for replacing a lost employee run approximately 30% higher when mental health has been the underlying driver of departure, according to Canadian workplace mental health data. The employee who finally resigns after eight months of struggle isn't replaced quickly. They take institutional knowledge with them that can't be onboarded.
What I've watched happen when someone is medicated but not supported
I want to be precise here, because this part gets missed.
Employees managing anxiety or depression with medication are often doing the most responsible thing available to them within the system as it exists. I have nothing but respect for that. But medication is one part of a very complex picture.
The side effects of anxiety medication can impair concentration, slow reaction time, and dull the kind of sharp thinking that high-performance roles require. An employee who is technically present and technically medicated and technically managing may still be operating at a fraction of their capacity, not because they're not trying, but because the support they have access to only addresses part of what they're carrying.
Doctor's notes authorize time off. They don't provide a person to talk to on Tuesday afternoon when everything feels like too much. They don't check in on week three to see how someone is actually doing. The medical system does what it can. The gap between "authorized to rest" and "actually recovering" is where a lot of people quietly get lost.
That gap isn't a failure of individuals. It's a failure of design.
The stigma we don't talk about enough
I grew up in a culture that treated struggle as something you handled privately. You worked through it, kept it to yourself, showed up anyway.
I understand that instinct. I lived it for years before I understood how much it was costing me.
The stigma around mental health doesn't just affect whether people seek help. It shapes whether they even name what's happening to them. An employee who is drowning in grief or financial stress or a marriage that's falling apart at the seams often doesn't frame it as a mental health issue. They frame it as a personal problem. Something to sort out at home. Something that shouldn't be brought to work.
So they don't bring it to work. They bring the symptoms of it instead: the distraction, the irritability, the withdrawal, the declining output. And nobody in their workplace has the language or the relationship to connect those dots.
The research on this is clear. Stigma prevents people from seeking help, which means the underlying condition worsens, which means the workplace impact deepens, which means the cost compounds. The employer who could have caught something early ends up managing a crisis because the culture made early intervention impossible.
Something I've sat with for a long time
There is a specific kind of loneliness that comes from carrying something heavy in a room full of people who don't know.
I know what that feels like. I've sat in it. There was a stretch in my own life when I was working night shifts in a sawmill, fourteen hours, alone in a big building, and the only way I could manage was to set a ten-minute alarm on my watch. Not because I thought I could handle the whole shift. Just because I thought I could handle ten minutes.
Most people in Alberta workplaces aren't working through anything that dramatic. But a surprising number of them are running on their own version of a ten-minute alarm, one manageable unit at a time, hoping nobody notices they're not okay.
What I've learned from that season of my own life, and from years of sitting with people who are in the middle of theirs, is that it doesn't take much to change the trajectory. It doesn't take a program or a policy or a mental health strategy document.
It takes someone who is already there, who already knows your name, and who asks the right question at the right moment.
The math on that isn't complicated. It's just easy to keep putting off until the cost has already been paid.
Try this this week
Think about the last three months in your workplace. Not the numbers. Not the performance reviews.
Think about the people in your organization.
Who has seemed a little off? Who has gone quieter than usual, or louder than usual? Who took a day here and a day there and you wrote it off as nothing? Who came back from lunch last week and seemed like they'd been crying, and you let it go because you didn't know what to say?
Write that name down if one comes to mind. You don't have to do anything with it yet.
Then ask yourself one honest question: is there someone whose job it is to check on that person? Not because their performance has slipped past a threshold. Just because they're a person and something might be going on.
If the answer is no, or not really, that's probably the most important thing you've read in this piece.
The $20 billion in annual productivity loss, the $6.3 billion in combined absenteeism and presenteeism costs, the 42% of Albertans who reported mental health concerns: none of those numbers started as a statistic. They started as one person, in one workplace, with nobody to talk to.
What does that look like in yours?
Workplace Chaplaincy helps employers offer compassionate, confidential support through a familiar, trusted presence, supporting employees in navigating stress, grief, family challenges, and difficult transitions.
Our permission-based care welcomes people of every belief and works alongside leadership, HR, and existing employee resources. Serving Central Alberta in person and offering virtual support nationwide, we help you build a workplace where people feel supported, not just employed.
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A note on the numbers
The statistics in this article aren't abstractions pulled from the internet. The national figures on productivity loss, absenteeism, and the projected $2.5 trillion cost to Canada come from the Mental Health Commission of Canada's workplace mental health research. The Alberta-specific data on residents reporting mental health concerns during the pandemic comes from the Canadian Mental Health Association Alberta Division. Both sources are linked below for anyone who wants to read further.
The math is sobering. But the point of this piece was never really about the math. It was about the person behind the number sitting three desks away from you right now.
