The vagaries of the English language are the reason why the legal field can be so lucrative. Take for instance the “Clip” paradox: when you clip a coupon out of a paper, you separate it; but when you clip a coupon to the paper, you fasten it. Or “Terrible” vs. “Terrific”: both stem from terror, but one means awful and the other means wonderful. The linguistic chaos of English turns legal documents into minefields where a single misplaced comma or double meaning can cost millions of dollars. Because English relies heavily on word order, context, and borrowed structures, it is uniquely prone to accidental loophole.

I’ve got a case right now that makes the point better than any textbook could.

My client is a tradesperson who was working on a scaffold at a large industrial site in Alberta. His crew had been assigned to work at the base of a tall vertical structure, in a confined scaffold environment directly beneath areas where ice and snow had accumulated overhead. A substantial piece of ice broke loose from roughly 50 feet above and landed approximately five feet from where he was standing. The scaffold shook. The ice shattered and sent debris into his face. He evacuated his crew immediately, because there was no way to know whether more was coming down.

He wasn’t killed, and he wasn’t taken to hospital. But he was diagnosed shortly after with PTSD by his treating psychologist, and he hasn’t been back to work since.

WCB denied his psychological injury claim. The employer backed that denial at every stage. Their position, stripped to its bones: he wasn’t physically struck by the main piece of ice, so it wasn’t a traumatic event. That’s where English steps in and starts causing trouble.

WCB Policy 03-01, Part II, Application 6 sets out four criteria for a compensable traumatic psychological injury. The event has to be sudden and unexpected, frightening or shocking, tied to a specific time and place. Then the fourth: it has to involve “actual or threatened death or serious injury.”

At the appeal, the employer conceded the first three without much resistance. Sudden? Agreed. Frightening? Agreed. Specific time and place? Obviously. I got those three for free.

Everything collapsed into four words: actual or threatened death.

The employer’s argument is, I’ll admit, clean. No physical contact, no documented injury, so by their reading, no traumatic event. They submitted a drop calculator — a tool that estimates injury potential based on the size and weight of a falling object — suggesting even direct contact would likely have caused only minor injury. They noted that my client’s claim about debris striking his face wasn’t recorded in his initial medical report. They characterized the incident as a near miss: an unplanned event that had the potential for harm but didn’t result in it. Near miss means close call. Close call means nobody actually got hurt.

It’s coherent. But it has a fatal flaw.

The policy doesn’t say “actual death or serious injury.” It says “actual or threatened death or serious injury.” That word, threatened, doesn’t appear by accident. It’s there because the drafters understood that workers can be traumatized by events where the worst outcome is narrowly avoided. If physical impact were required to meet the threshold, the word “threatened” would have no practical meaning whatsoever. The employer’s interpretation doesn’t read the policy. It rewrites it.

My argument is simpler. Threat means objectively credible potential. Not imagined danger or hindsight exaggeration, but real physical exposure assessed from where my client was actually standing when that ice came down.

He was on a scaffold, not in an open field where he could have stepped back and been fine. Movement was restricted, egress was limited, and there was nowhere to go. Ice fell from roughly 50 feet up, landed close enough to shake the platform under his feet, shattered into fragments, and sent debris into his face. He’d been in the direct impact zone minutes earlier as part of his normal work. The hazard was still active when he got his crew out. Five feet, in that context, isn’t a safe distance. It’s the hazard zone.

The drop calculator doesn’t change that. It’s a simplified calculation that misses things like fragmentation and secondary debris, and it says nothing about what happens to someone who loses footing on a scaffold with nowhere to brace. A hard hat reduces risk. It doesn’t make a person immune to ice falling from height. Those are very different things, and treating them as equivalent is how you end up with decisions that don’t survive scrutiny.

Here’s the question the Appeals Commission is going to have to answer, and it’s one the policy doesn’t resolve: if threat means potential, where does that potential end?

My client was five feet away. What if he’d been ten? Twenty? There’s presumably a distance at which even a reasonable observer would say the hazard wasn’t meaningfully directed at him. But that line doesn’t exist in the policy language. It has to be drawn contextually, which means looking at how far the ice fell, what environment the worker was confined to, and whether the danger persisted after impact. That kind of determination gets made case by case, which is exactly where serious advocacy matters.

The employer also argued that WCB’s own illustrations of traumatic events — hostage-takings, witnessed fatalities, catastrophic violence — sit in a materially different category than what happened here. That’s true in the sense that those are extreme examples. But a list of examples in a policy document is not an exhaustive definition. Using only the most severe scenarios to set the floor for all claims would mean the only workers who ever qualify are those who experienced something out of a disaster film. That can’t be what the policy intends.

My client didn’t witness someone die. But he experienced, directly and physically, what it felt like to almost be killed at work. There’s a real difference between imagining danger from across a room and having debris from a falling object hit you in the face while the scaffold shakes under your feet.

The Appeals Commission hasn’t ruled. We’re waiting.

What this case ultimately comes down to is whether “threatened” means what it says, or whether decision-makers will keep treating the absence of physical injury as grounds to pretend the word isn’t there. One word. A worker’s livelihood on the other side of it.

Stay tuned.

If you have questions about a WCB psychological injury claim in Alberta, visit wcblawyer.ca or contact Blue Collar Consulting.