Canada Pension Plan disability General Division: How to appeal

Starting your appeal

Fill out and send us the Notice of Appeal – Income Security – General Division form to start your appeal. You have 90 days to send us the form after you receive the reconsideration decision from Service Canada.

On the Notice of Appeal form you send us, you can choose the type of hearing you want. You can change your type of hearing later if you want to. Learn more about the different types of hearing.

You can send us documents to support your appeal. You don’t need to send them with your form, but you should send them to us as soon as possible.

You need a Service Canada reconsideration decision to appeal.

If you can’t find your reconsideration decision, you can do 1 of these things:

look for it on your My Service Canada Account
visit a Service Canada Centre
call Service Canada at 1-800-277-9914

You need to explain why you disagree with Service Canada’s reconsideration decision.

The Notice of Appeal form asks you to explain what you disagree with in the reconsideration decision and why. These are called your “arguments”.

Arguments express your point of view about why the General Division should agree with you. You then use evidence (for example, a medical report) to support your arguments. Evidence is used to help prove a fact. Arguments are you telling us how you want the General Division member (the decision-maker) to interpret the evidence. You can use supporting documents and witness testimony as evidence. Testimony is oral evidence given at the hearing.

You can send us more arguments and evidence after you’ve sent us your Notice of Appeal form.

Sending supporting documents

We encourage you to send us documents you think will support your appeal, if you have any.

The Social Security Tribunal (SST) doesn’t investigate or seek out supporting documents (evidence). We don’t contact people to get more information on your behalf. It’s up to you to send us your supporting documents.

Supporting documents could include:

medical reports
specialist’s reports
evaluations (for example, functional capacity assessments)
provincial workers’ compensation board or workers’ safety and insurance board files
proof of attempts to work or attempts to find work

Send us your documents by email, mail or fax. If you send them by email, make sure they’re in a format we can open.

We share the documents we receive with all the parties involved in your appeal.

Keep your originals. Send us copies.

When to send supporting documents

Send us any supporting documents as soon as possible. Your appeal may be delayed if you don’t.

You can send them with your Notice of Appeal form. You can also send them after. We’ll send you a schedule that sets out the deadlines for you to send us your documents.

In most cases, we follow this process:

Step 1: It’s your time to prepare. Send us documents to support your appeal. When you’ve sent us everything, let us know and we’ll move to the next step. The maximum time that you can take to send us your documents is 20 months from when you file your appeal.
Step 2: It’s Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC)’s time to prepare. ESDC is a party in the appeal. Service Canada sent you the reconsideration decision on behalf of ESDC. ESDC will have up to 3 months to send us their documents. We’ll share them with you.
Step 3: You have 30 days to reply to what ESDC sent us.

In some cases, the General Division member (decision-maker) may decide to change this process. If this happens, we’ll let you know.

If you send us documents (evidence) after the reply period, they’ll be considered late. The member will need to decide whether you can use them in your appeal. They’ll look at whether:

the documents are new and relevant
they could have been sent to us sooner
accepting the documents would be unfair to the other party and whether it would cause delays

Translating documents

We can accept documents only in English or French. If your documents are in another language, they must be translated. You’re responsible for getting a translation of any document that you want to use to support your appeal.

If you send us documents in a language other than English or French without a translation, we won’t accept them. We’ll return them to you without sharing them with anyone else.

Costs

There’s no fee to appeal to the SST.

But, you’ll have to pay costs related to your appeal such as:

making photocopies of documents you want to send to us
sending documents to us by Canada Post or a courier service
paying a health professional to write a report for you
hiring a representative
translating documents into either English or French
travelling to an in-person hearing

In very rare cases, if you’re required to attend a hearing, you may be able to get reimbursed for travel expenses, living expenses or lost income. The SST chairperson decides if there are special reasons that justify a reimbursement. See section 63(1) of the Department of Employment and Social Development Act.