No universal conclusion follows from the word leave. Review the employment relationship, location, duties and dates against the applicable qualifying-employment requirements.
Avoid a rule invented from a payroll gap
An absence of wages does not explain every legal and factual aspect of the period. Obtain the employer’s account and supporting records, and assess the required continuous qualifying year abroad in the relevant three-year period. Review actual managerial or executive capacity independently.
Do not guarantee that a particular interval counts or restart the entire calendar without an individual analysis. Hypothetical example: A Trois-Rivières specialty-coffee roastery operations director took an unpaid medical leave during the three-year lookback. The first review should build a calendar from payroll, leave authorization, correspondence and work-location records, then identify exactly what the company can confirm about the employment relationship.
It should separately examine the director’s authority over staff, budgets and operating decisions before and after the leave. Do not treat the absence as automatically disqualifying or automatically countable. The practical decision is whether the available records support the required continuous qualifying employment and the proposed managerial or executive role.
A weak approach starts by choosing the desired result and asking human resources for a retroactive narrative. Begin with contemporaneous records, identify uncertainty, and obtain a legal assessment of the actual interval.