Budget and decisions guide · Dogs and cats
We don't sell insurance and we won't recommend an insurer. What we do see is everything that comes after: the paperwork insurers ask for, the claims that sit pending for six weeks, and the families who have to let the price weigh on a decision. This guide is about that part. And it asks you to make a call, either way, while your animal is well.
The treatment plan
Almost everything people later hold against their insurance is decided right here, in the ten minutes when someone tells you what the care will cost. Four very different things collide at that moment, and confusing them is expensive.
It is your right, and it is the only real number. Before proceeding, your veterinarian must inform you of the foreseeable fees and get your agreement. Ask for it itemized, procedure by procedure: it is also the document your insurer will want if you request pre-authorization.
It confirms the appointment. It does not pay for the care and it has nothing to do with insurance. The details live on our First visit page.
It is your insurer's answer about whether a planned treatment is eligible, before it happens. It is not a guaranteed amount, and it is certainly not payment in advance: the bill is still due on the day of care.
It happens at the time of care. Insurance comes afterwards, and it comes to you.
Pre-authorization makes sense for a surgery scheduled three weeks out. It has no place in an emergency. If your animal needs care now, we treat now and the paperwork follows. That is true here, and it is written plainly in several insurers' own instructions, which tell members not to wait on their answer.
How the money moves
This is the most expensive misunderstanding in the category. In Quebec, pet insurance is almost always reimbursement based: you settle the bill at the clinic, you submit your claim, and the insurer pays you back. Which means you still need the money on a Friday night.
Everything else is vocabulary. These five decide every dollar, and each one turns into a question to ask before you sign.
What stays on your side before the insurer starts paying. Ask: is it annual, or per condition? And does it rise as my animal ages?
The percentage the insurer reimburses once the deductible is met. Ask: calculated on exactly what amount, and are exam fees and taxes included?
The point where the insurer stops paying. Ask: is it annual, per condition, lifetime? And does it reset?
The stretch after enrolment during which a new problem is not covered yet. Ask: how long, and is there a longer wait for certain conditions?
What the contract will never cover. Ask: which ones, and which are permanent rather than reviewable?
You will see examples everywhere along the lines of “a $5,000 bill, 80% reimbursement, so $4,000 back.” They are wrong about half the time, and not for the reason people assume: the order in which the deductible and the co-insurance are applied differs from one contract to another. Some wordings apply the percentage first and subtract the deductible from what remains. The same bill does not produce the same cheque. Nobody tells you this, and it is exactly why no figure printed here would replace reading your own contract.
The market has a fairly consistent shape: a short wait for accidents, a wait of a few weeks for illness, and a much longer one, often in the range of six months, for specific conditions including cruciate ligament injury, intervertebral disc disease and part of dental care. This is not a rule set by law or by the Autorité des marchés financiers: it is simply what most contracts do. The exact durations differ between insurers, sometimes by several days on accidents alone. The only duration that matters to you is the one written in your contract, and the best time to write it down is the day you enrol.
There is real-time payment at checkout, where the insurer pays its share to the hospital as you leave. It requires the hospital to run that insurer's software and to have agreed to that payment method. And there is redirected reimbursement, where the insurer, after assessing the claim, sends the money to the veterinarian instead of to you, often only above a certain amount, on request and case by case. Neither is automatic, and both leave the clinic waiting for its money.
Here, today, neither one: the insurer reimburses you. So plan to settle the bill in full on the day of care.
The pre-existing condition
If you take one thing from this page, take this one. It is the central mechanism of the product, and it is the one almost nobody understands before their first claim.
No, and let us say it plainly because a lot of people are afraid to ask: an animal that is already sick can still be insured. What will be excluded is the condition it already has, and whatever is related to it. Everything else, everything new that could happen, can be covered. A cat treated for a chronic illness can still swallow a string and need emergency surgery. So the real question is not “is it too late,” it is “what is still covered, and is that worth the premium?” That is a question we can think through together, with the record open.
An insurer treats a condition as pre-existing if a veterinarian gave advice about it, if the animal was treated for it, or if the animal showed signs consistent with it, before the policy took effect or during a waiting period. No diagnosis is required. The third case is the one that surprises people, and it is the most common.
Open your animal's record and you will find ordinary lines, written two years ago by a busy veterinarian, that meant nothing serious at the time:
Three unremarkable notes. Three possible exclusions. The first can be used to set aside inflammatory bowel disease diagnosed four years later. The second, a chronic allergy. The third, heart disease. The insurer is not cheating when it does this: it is applying the definition you signed. Which is why reading your own record before you enrol is worth more than reading ten comparison articles.
When we examine a puppy or a kitten, we always listen to the heart, and sometimes we hear a murmur. Most of the time it is benign and it resolves on its own. The note, however, stays in the record, and a murmur heard at eight weeks can ground a cardiac exclusion for life. This is the strongest argument for enrolling very early, and it has nothing to do with price: at two months, it is not just that the animal is healthy, it is that its record is still short.
One knee, one eye or one ear affected before enrolment can get the other side excluded too, even if it was perfectly healthy the day you signed. The insurer's reasoning is statistical: the weakness is often structural, so both sides are treated as a single condition. Cruciate ligament injury is the classic example. This clause is something you look up in the contract, not something you discover at claim time.
You will read everywhere that after twelve symptom-free months, a curable condition “becomes covered.” That is not true, and believing it leads straight to a bad surprise. Here is what is true: some insurers will review an exclusion after a continuous stretch with no signs, no treatment and no management, running from roughly six months to a year depending on the insurer and the condition. The review has to be requested by you, it requires a recent veterinary exam at your expense, and it can end with the exclusion extended another year, or made permanent. Many exclusions are never reviewable at all. Only your own policy wording says which kind you have.
Quebec civil law requires you to disclose every circumstance likely to influence an insurer's assessment of the risk, and it is not for you to decide that a detail is minor. A concealment or a misrepresentation can void the contract, including for a loss that has nothing to do with the omitted information. Filling out the application honestly is therefore not a matter of ethics: it is the condition on which your coverage exists at all.
The medical record
This is the part nobody sees coming, and it is where most claims get stuck. Your first claim is not judged on today's invoice: it is judged on your animal's complete medical history.
Almost always the first claim on a new policy. The insurer opens a history review, and it can request records from every clinic your animal has attended: the previous veterinarian, the emergency hospital from that one snowy night, the specialist, the shelter. Not just ours.
It varies by insurer and by policy, and we are not going to hand you a number of months that would be wrong for half of you. Ask your insurer. In the meantime, assume the widest answer: everything there is.
On your authorization, which we log. That is also why we send nothing to an insurer who calls us on their own initiative. It is not obstruction: it is your record, and it is your call.
Three things to ask for before you leave the desk. They take a minute and they save weeks.
On the day you enrol, request the complete record from every clinic your animal has attended, keep a copy at home, and send the history to the insurer once the illness waiting period has run out. Calmly, on a Tuesday, when nobody is sick. That is about twenty minutes of admin that will spare you six weeks of waiting at the worst possible moment.
We keep records for years after the last service, but not forever, and a clinic that closes its doors complicates everything. Your own copy, on the other hand, is only lost if you lose it. That is the best reason to ask for it now rather than on the day you need it.
The claim
“Pending” means the insurer does not yet have enough information to decide. It is administrative, not medical, and it almost always clears. You just have to clear the right thing.
Your half: your details, the animal's details, your signature. The clinical half: the reason for the visit, the diagnosis, the procedures. Knowing which half is yours is most of the battle, because each one stalls for different reasons and gets unstuck by different people.
When an insurer has built a route meant for the clinic, a portal, a web page or a form addressed to us, we complete it and we send what it asks for. What we do not complete is the part you have to fill in yourself: it carries your signature, and nobody can sign in your place.
There is the deadline to submit a claim, and there is the deadline to appeal a decision. They are two different lengths, they vary between insurers, and you look them up on the day you enrol, not on the day you need them. Write them down somewhere you will find them again.
It is counterintuitive and it is written in several insurers' own instructions: a duplicate request does not move the file forward, it creates a second queue. If your claim is asleep, do not send it again. Call, and ask these five questions.
Ask for the answers in writing, or note the date, the time and the name of the person you spoke to. It feels pointless while things are fine, and it is worth a great deal on the day you have to contest something.
The refusal
A refusal is not the end of the file. But an appeal is not won by saying you disagree: it is won by pinpointing exactly what the insurer relied on.
The exact contract clause the refusal rests on. And the precise record entry, with its date, that the insurer treats as the earlier sign. Until you have both, you are contesting blind, and that is the number one reason appeals fail.
Plenty of articles will tell you to ask your veterinarian for a letter explaining that the current condition has nothing to do with the old note. We will be straight with you: we do not write those letters. What we do instead, and it works better, is send the complete record, with the clinical reasoning as it was written at the time. A record contemporaneous with the events carries more weight than a letter drafted after a refusal, and it is already the document the insurer is asking for. If the insurer has specific clinical questions, it has its own channels to put them to us, and we answer them.
We will not rewrite your animal's clinical history so a claim goes through: no backdating, no rewording, no removing a note. The record is a legal document, you have the right to a copy of it, and a softened record is worth less to you than an accurate one. That said, if information in the record is inaccurate or incomplete, you have the right to have it corrected, and your disagreement can be noted in the file. These are two very different things and we do not confuse them.
Ask the insurer to reconsider, with the clause and the record entry in hand, and the complete record sent in.
Under the regulation in force since July 1, 2025, your complaint must be entered in the complaints register without delay, you receive an acknowledgment within 10 days of that entry, and the insurer owes you a written final response within 60 days, extended to 90 in the circumstances the regulation allows.
This is the statutory route in Quebec. You can ask for your complaint file to be transferred to it, and the Autorité will examine it.
An independent, free dispute resolution service, which may be available depending on your insurer and the nature of the dispute. Worth confirming with them rather than assuming.
A last resort, for amounts under the current ceiling. Lawyers do not appear at the hearing, which keeps costs low.
You are entitled to the quote, the policy and every document attached to it in French, before anyone asks whether you would rather sign in English. That is a right, not a courtesy. And if the French and the English versions say two different things about an exclusion, the French one is what you were entitled to rely on.
Before you sign
We do not compare insurers and we publish no rankings: it would be out of date before the year is out, and it is not the best thing a clinic can give you. What we can give you is the method.
This is the single most useful fact on this page for shopping. Several separately advertised brands, and several programs offered through a financial institution or a membership card, sit on the same insurer behind the scenes and often on the same policy wording. Getting five quotes can mean comparing two products. So always ask: who underwrites this policy? The wording is the product; the brand is just the storefront.
Brands that are highly visible in Canadian search results state, in their legal footer, that they do not sell in Quebec. The homepage does not say so. That is an evening lost on an application that was never going to go through. Three checks, in this order.
This is the sentence that protects the most money on this page. If you switch insurers, everything your animal developed under the old policy becomes pre-existing under the new one. An ordinary policy you have held for four years can be worth far more than a better offer starting from zero. If you shop anyway, cancel nothing until the new policy has been issued and you have read its exclusions.
We publish the questions; the answers, you copy from your own quotes. It is the only honest way to compare, because the only figures that matter are the ones for your animal, at your postal code, on the day you are shopping. Print this sheet and fill it in while you have all three tabs open.
| What to compare | Insurer A | Insurer B | Insurer C |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who underwrites the policy | |||
| The policy exists in French | |||
| Monthly premium | |||
| Deductible: annual or per condition, changes with age | |||
| Co-insurance, and calculated on what amount | |||
| Limit: annual, per condition, lifetime | |||
| Exam fees and taxes reimbursed | |||
| Waiting periods: accident, illness, long | |||
| Definition of pre-existing, and history look-back | |||
| Deadline to claim, deadline to appeal |
Print the sheet
The real question
We are educators, not salespeople. Both answers are good ones, and we will support either. The only bad answer is not deciding, and then meeting the question in a waiting room at 9 p.m.
For someone disciplined, who already has a liquid cushion and does not touch a dedicated account, putting aside the equivalent of a premium every month often costs less over an animal's whole life. You keep every dollar, and there is no deductible, no exclusion, no waiting period and no claim to defend.
This is the argument that decides it, and it is simple: the fund is nearly empty in the first year. A puppy that swallows a sock in month three does not care about your ten-year plan. Insurance does not make you money on average, and it does not claim to: it transfers the risk of an early, large bill, which is exactly the risk a young fund cannot absorb.
An intention is not a fund. What works: a separate account, an automatic transfer on payday, and a rule that it is not touched for anything else. What does not work: putting some aside when you can. And on the day you draw it down for an emergency, restart the transfer the following month. That is where most funds quietly die.
It does not reduce the bill. In most cases it does not pay before you do. And it does not cover what was already there. A wellness or preventive add-on, for its part, is not protection against a catastrophe: it is a budgeting tool for predictable care, and the two do not compare.
Not primarily because the premium is lower, but because the record is shorter: there is less medical history available to be excluded. That is a fact about how the product works, not a sales argument.
If your animal needed several thousand dollars of care tomorrow, could you pay without high-interest borrowing, without postponing a test, without letting the price choose the treatment, and without touching the money set aside for rent? If yes, saving suits you. If no, that is exactly what insurance is for.
When money is short
This section sells nothing. It exists because the moment when someone chooses euthanasia for financial reasons is precisely what this guide would like to make rarer.
This is the most useful sentence on the page. Almost every assistance route in Quebec requires a request filed by a veterinarian before the procedure. Once treatment has started, the options close. And saying “I can't pay for that” is not an admission of failure: it is clinical information like any other, and it changes what we propose.
Between the ideal plan and doing nothing, there is a space, and showing it to you is our job: what actually changes the outcome, what can wait, what can be done in stages, what can be managed at home. Asking for the option that fits your budget is a normal clinical conversation, and we have it every week.
Two Quebec resources, each with its own criteria on its own page:
One clarification, because the confusion is common: the veterinary teaching hospital in Saint-Hyacinthe is a referral and specialty hospital. It is a valuable resource, but it is not a discount option.
Call us. There is nothing to fill in to start this discussion, and the earlier it happens, the more doors are still open.
Our role
A page explaining insurance on a clinic's own website owes you a clear statement of where it stands. Here it is.
We are neither agent nor broker, we run no quote form, and we will not tell you which policy to buy. That advice has to come from someone licensed to give it, and that licence can be checked in the register of the Autorité des marchés financiers.
Today, we do not bill any insurer and no insurer pays us directly. You settle the bill at the time of care, then you claim. Plan for it, especially for surgery.
When an insurer has built a route meant for the clinic, a portal, a web page or a form, we complete it. The part you have to fill in and sign yourself stays yours.
Itemized invoice, medical record, consultation notes: ask and we provide. It is your record.
Use our online form: it routes your request to the right person, with what they need to get started.
Open the claim form (opens in a new tab)Puppies and kittens leave here with a welcome gift that includes a free 30-day trial of coverage from one insurer. The company's name is on the offer itself: we are not repeating it here, because this guide names no insurer and recommends none. Insurance representatives visit us and leave us material, as they do at every clinic. We do not sell insurance and we are neither agent nor broker. Treat that offer as what it is: a promotional offer, and not our recommendation. And if you activate it, read its own terms before assuming you are covered on the drive home.
The Autorité des marchés financiers publishes its own consumer page on pet insurance. It sells nothing and it has no stake in your decision.
The Autorité des marchés financiers page (opens in a new tab)FAQ
Including the ones people hesitate to ask at the front desk.
Verified September 2026. Insurers change their terms without notice: your own policy is what counts.
This guide explains how insurance products generally work in Quebec, based on what a clinic sees. It is neither insurance advice nor legal advice: only your contract and your insurer can tell you what you are covered for. For any question about your animal's health, talk to us.
Whether you are insured, thinking about it, or set on saving instead, we are glad to talk it through. It is much easier to put everything in place while things are fine.
FR
EN