As helpfully summarized by the Canadian Press, “CPA Canada was created in 2013 to unify the various professional accounting organizations across the country. (The) provincial organizations are regulators and enforcers of the profession, while the national organization is responsible for standards and co-ordinates education and the common exam written by all would-be CPAs, among other roles.” So you may recall (if you can stand to) that CPA Ontario shocked almost all its members one day last summer by sending out an email announcing that “it intends to conclude its current arrangement with CPA Canada” – CPA Quebec made a similar announcement on the same day. After a flurry of initial (mostly adverse) reaction and commentary, a few months went by without much of an update, and one might have hoped that this indicated an ongoing attempt to quietly patch things up. But then the Globe and Mail provided the following recent update:

• Canada’s national accounting organization has laid off a fifth of its employees in advance of the pullout of all its Ontario and Quebec members, as part of an industry split.
• Last week, The Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada’s chief executive officer, Pamela Steer, told employees in an internal memo the organization is “in a challenging operating environment” amid the impending withdrawals of CPA Ontario and CPA Quebec. The pullout, she said, triggered the CPA Canada leadership team to conduct a strategic review of the organization.
• “After sober reflection on future needs, it became clear that organizational changes are needed to ensure the long-term success of a CPA Canada that best serves members and the profession,” Ms. Steer wrote in the memo, which The Globe and Mail obtained. “Unfortunately, this means making difficult decisions that will impact 20 per cent of our workforce.”
• …In last week’s internal memo, Ms. Steer told CPA Canada employees that, despite many discussions and continuing efforts, “it has become clear that Ontario and Quebec will not change their current path,” and that, as of December, 2024, the two organizations will leave CPA Canada.

This seems in line with my previous comments, that the intention is partly to “dilute the standing and visibility of CPA Canada, turning it into a largely unseen workhorse that generates what its provincial masters ask of it, and maybe not much more.” Even by CPA Ontario’s own account, elements of all this seem to constitute pure pique-fueled power play:

• CPA Canada challenged our legislative role as the regulator and voice of the profession in Ontario. Without consulting us or any of the provinces, it registered a trademark for a designation that would impact your CPA designation—the Global CPA or GCPA. Only after months of pressure from us did CPA Canada finally agree to withdraw that registration. It is still not clear to us what they intended to do with that designation.

Really, a trademark! (On that item, CPA Canada assert that “there is no issue around a trademark,” without expanding further.) Anyway, such matters aside, the provincial bodies seem persuasive enough in claiming that most basic aspects of Canadian accounting will continue on much as they were. What’s not so clear is the fate of what you might term the non-basic stuff, the advocacy and research and thought leadership and visibility that supports a more expansive view of the profession and the value it provides. CPA Ontario’s initial announcement of their intentions indicated that anticipated benefits included “a significant cost reduction reflected in your annual membership dues, which currently includes both CPA Ontario and CPA Canada’s fee.” That aspect of things has been downplayed in recent communications, but questions surely arise about, for instance, what the laid off 20% of employees actually did: whether their functions were ones that Canadian accountants would generally consider important, and if so, whether that value is to be generated elsewhere or simply sacrificed.

It’s not unlikely, of course, that some portion of the 20% might not be assessed as being so great a loss, which would be a point in favour of the negative characterization of a bloated CPA Canada. It certainly seems that the national organization has been guilty of some hubris, perhaps of outright arrogance at times. But even so, it’s impossible to conclude that the current direction of things is for the best. It’s dispiriting that Canadian accounting has fallen into its own version of the dysfunctional partisanship and fragmentation which currently endangers forward-looking governance and risk management across the world (the US being merely the most prominent example – actually there’s something dispiritingly Trumpian about this whole mess). CPA Ontario state that “we remain committed to ensuring that Canada has a strong, unified voice on the world stage on matters that affect our Profession,” but this rings hollow when the obvious vessel for a Canadian-branded “strong, unified voice” is being so publicly humiliated and gutted.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.