A Class Action for Students Enrolled in Group Insurance Without Consent

Between 2019 and 2025, some students may have unknowingly paid for a group insurance when registering for their classes. This automatic enrollment caused problems, since many didn’t actually need the insurance. Several students reportedly tried to get refunded for the premiums they had paid, but their requests were denied. On July 31, 2025, the Superior Court authorized a class action challenging the automatic enrollment of students in group insurance plans.

This court application involves two representative plaintiffs. The first plaintiff was a student enrolled at Concordia University in the fall of 2017. Her tuition fees included a premium for a group insurance plan, which she didn’t realize was optional. In her case, the coverage was unnecessary, since she was already insured under her mother’s insurance plan.

During her second year at Concordia University, she learned that she could opt out of the group insurance plan and request a refund for the premium included in her tuition. She successfully did this for the 2018–2019 and 2019–2020 school years. However, her request to opt out was denied for 2020–2021. The deadline to opt out, which was earlier than in previous years, had already passed when she submitted her request.

The court application also states that the second representative plaintiff was enrolled part-time at McGill University in the winter of 2024. The student was working while studying, and her employer provided her with health and dental insurance. Like the Concordia student, she paid the insurance premium included in her tuition without fully understanding the details. She tried to opt out in April 2024, but her request was denied because she had missed the deadline of January 31, 2024.

The students thus turned to the court to ask to be reimbursed the premiums they paid unnecessarily.

A class action instead of individual claims

In a class action, one person or a few people make a request to the court on behalf of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people facing a similar problem, called the “members” of the class action. If the representative or representatives win the case, all members of the class action can get an amount of money or other form of compensation. They don’t have to go to court themselves.

However, a judge must first give their permission before a class action can go ahead. This permission acts as a preliminary filter to separate cases that have a reasonable chance of success from those that do not. The decision to allow a class action to go forward is based on several criteria:

• Other people have the same problem.
• Under the circumstances, a class action is better than many separate court cases to solve the problem.
• The representative or representatives leading the class action are qualified to represent the members.
• The class action has a chance of succeeding.

In the case of the student group insurance plans, the judge found that these criteria were met. At this stage, the judge determined that the students have a reasonable chance of proving that the schools and insurers committed a fault. Thousands of other students may have attended the same schools and been automatically enrolled in the same insurance plans. A class action allows a simpler and more effective way to address the problem rather than having thousands of individual lawsuits.

But getting the judge’s permission to start the class action does not mean that the students automatically “win” their case. A trial must still take place to determine whether the schools and the insurers have to refund students their insurance premiums. Some of the questions the court will need to address include:

• Is it legal to automatically enroll students in group insurance?
• When the insurance premium was collected, was the information provided to students sufficient (particularly about the insurance being optional and the possibility to opt out)?
• Was the opt-out period too short?

It is also possible that this trial never happens if the parties reach a settlement. According to a 2022 Radio-Canada article, over 80% of class actions are resolved through an out-of-court settlement. So stay tuned!