Union seeks line of duty death benefit worth two times salary for estates of six former firefighters
Firefighters who died of cancers linked to the job could not claim a death benefit from their employer. Why? Because of timing issues, an arbitrator found they did not have such coverage at work.
In an award dated July 8, 2026, sole arbitrator Eli Gedalof dismissed three grievances brought by the Cambridge Professional Fire Fighters' Association, Local 499, against the City of Cambridge.
The union had sought a line of duty death benefit worth two times salary for the estates of six former firefighters who retired before being diagnosed with presumptive occupational cancers and later died of those diseases.
Death benefit implemented
The dispute centred on a death benefit that pays two times a firefighter's salary. The parties first introduced it in 2010 through minutes of settlement, and reworked the language when they bargained their 2018 to 2022 collective agreement.
All six of the former firefighters had retired well before any version of the benefit existed, and none were diagnosed with an occupational illness while still on the job.
The men were hired between 1952 and 1978 and retired between 1983 and 2009. Years later, each one was diagnosed with a cancer recognized as a presumptive occupational disease under Ontario's Workplace Safety and Insurance Act, and each died of that disease.
Their estates obtained survivor benefits from the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) but the City denied them the death benefit under the collective agreement.
Bargaining agreements
The retirees' lifetime coverage traced back to 2007 minutes of settlement, in which the City committed to providing "current retiree benefits (beyond age 65)" to employees hired before that summer. The firefighters' association argued that this grandparented group was entitled to the full basket of benefits the employer funded, and to improvements in that basket as they came.
Over the years, the union noted, the City had added coverage the retirees did not have in 2007, including massage therapy and clinical psychology services. If those enhancements flowed to the retirees, the association submitted, so should improvements to the death benefit.
It also argued that, in bargaining the 2018 agreement, the parties had eliminated the earlier temporal restriction on the benefit.
The City maintained that the death benefit was different from the extended health perks the retirees had received. The arbitrator agreed there was "no meaningful comparison between an increased annual eyeglass allowance in the range of a few hundred dollars, and an LODD benefit worth two times a firefighter's annual salary."
Retiree benefits package
Gedalof found that the source of the retirees' coverage was the 2007 settlement, and its wording set the boundary. The retirees had never held the death benefit during their working years, so any entitlement had to come from the retiree benefits package, which did not include it in 2007.
The fact that the City had layered on some newer health services did not, in the arbitrator's view, show any agreement to extend a costly insured benefit that had never been paid to a retiree in the history of the relationship. He noted that accepting the union's reading would require the City to retroactively insure people for events that predated the benefit by as much as 23 years.
In dismissing the three grievances, the arbitrator held that "the use of the word 'current' indicates that the set of rights being preserved is defined by what was actually being provided at the time those rights were grand parented."
He left open a separate question the parties had raised, whether the current benefit requires a diagnosis before retirement, saying it was better resolved in bargaining or a future case.
