Compliance & Governance
Plan sponsors carry a standing, year-round burden: federal programs, provincial legislation and board-level fiduciary duty, all shifting at once. HUB's compliance and governance advisors bring Canadian-specific expertise to that landscape, turning regulatory change into clear direction for a plan sponsor's programs and board.
Stay Ahead of Business Challenges
Compliance and governance pressures facing plan sponsors
Regulatory intelligence, plan design and board oversight all move at different speeds — and staying current in one doesn't mean staying current in the others. Each pressure requires a different kind of advisory depth.
Federal programs and provincial rules rarely move in sync, and a generic bulletin built for a different market misses what applies to a specific plan. Plan sponsors need intelligence calibrated to the provinces where their people work — not a one-size-fits-all update.
Plan sponsors need regulatory intelligence spanning federal programs and province-specific rules — Quebec's Bill 68, Ontario's target benefit framework, the Canadian Dental Care Plan — and few advisors track every jurisdiction with equal depth.
HUB's compliance practice tracks federal and provincial change together, translating each development into what it means for a specific plan's design and jurisdictions.
A Quebec-only employer and a national employer with Quebec operations need genuinely different guidance on this legislation — one generic bulletin rarely serves both well.
Plan sponsors get regulatory guidance that is calibrated to the provinces where their people work — not a generic update, and not information built for a different country's rules.
New legislation doesn't wait for a plan's next renewal to take effect, and a document written under last year's rules can leave real gaps in coverage and claims administration. Staying current takes more than an annual glance at what changed.
New legislation like Quebec's Bill 68, which removed physician-note and referral requirements for certain claims, can leave plan wording and claims-administration practice outdated the moment it takes effect — and federal expansions like the Canadian Dental Care Plan quietly change what a private plan should still cover at all.
A structured annual review catches these gaps before an audit or a denied claim does and reconciles private plan design against what federal and provincial programs now cover.
The plans that stay current aren't the ones that react to a compliance bulletin; they're the ones already asking what last year's legislative changes mean for this year's wording.
Employers know their plan documents reflect this year's legislative reality — reducing the risk of a compliance gap surfacing at the worst possible moment, an audit or a claim.
Health, retirement and pension programs each generate their own compliance updates, but a board doesn't oversee them one at a time. Governance works when someone brings the full picture together, not when committees piece it together themselves.
Boards and committees overseeing benefit and retirement programs must synthesize compliance information across health, retirement and pension lines at once. No single compliance bulletin or annual regulatory update addresses how the governance structure itself should be designed.
HUB brings governance structure and regulatory tracking together across benefits, retirement and compliance, equipping boards and committees with the objective, defensible basis for decisions that fiduciary duty requires, rather than leaving them to synthesize scattered updates alone.
Fiduciary risk rarely comes from missing one update; it comes from no one owning how all the updates fit together across a plan's full structure.
Boards and committees reach decisions on a defensible, coordinated view of the plan's compliance and governance position, not a stack of disconnected bulletins they have to reconcile themselves.
Our Areas of Expertise
How HUB structures ongoing benefits compliance and governance support
Generic compliance tracking treats every plan sponsor the same; ongoing governance and fiduciary support layered on top require the same specialist attention. HUB structures this work around three connected disciplines that track, translate and coordinate change for benefit and retirement plans.
Plan sponsors operate across a patchwork of federal programs and provincial requirements, from CPP and QPP administration to Quebec's Bill 68 and Ontario's target benefit framework. HUB's compliance advisors monitor federal and provincial change together, digesting developments into a single reference point through HUB's flagship annual report, now well into its second decade. Between annual editions, topical alerts flag legislative events as they happen — new provincial legislation, federal program expansions, Ontario's benefit framework changes — so a plan sponsor is never working from information written for a different jurisdiction's rules."
Legislation rarely announces itself at renewal time, and a plan document written under last year's rules can leave real exposure once new requirements take effect. HUB's compliance advisors run structured reviews that check plan wording and administrative practice against the current legislative picture — federal, provincial and territorial — rather than waiting for an audit or a denied claim to surface the gap. Where a change like this federal expansion touches existing private plan design, the review reconciles the two rather than leaving them to overlap or conflict. The result is a plan document that matches this year's legislative reality, not last year's.
Boards and committees overseeing benefit and retirement programs are accountable for decisions across health, retirement and pension lines at once, and fiduciary duty requires an objective, defensible basis for those decisions — not a stack of updates left for committee members to reconcile on their own. HUB's advisors bring compliance tracking, plan design review and governance structure together into a single, coordinated view, giving boards the synthesis that no single bulletin or annual report provides on its own. This coordinated approach also connects naturally to HUB's broader retirement and financial planning expertise, where governance oversight and Capital Accumulation Plan guidelines overlap.
Insights for Your Business
Compliance & governance insights and research
