This is from the page on CPA Canada’s website titled “Advocacy: In support of the public interest”:

• We ensure Canada’s accounting profession optimally serves the public interest by providing high-quality professional development and extensive guidance to members, contributing to accounting standard setting in Canada and worldwide, and advocating for the profession and the public on Parliament Hill and with public office holders across the country.

That’s a fairly focused, discipline-specific concept of the public interest. But browsing the website further, I was struck by the following phrase, included in the description of a podcast episode:

• As AI becomes more integrated into the accounting profession, CPAs will need to maintain control over access to data and data quality to protect the public interest and ensure that intelligent machines will make decisions that are morally justifiable and consistent with our society’s current values.

“Public interest” is, clearly, among the more malleable of terms, as potentially applicable to small gestures of mercy as to vast acts of devastation. But presumably CPA Canada, and most individual CPA members, intend the term to mean something more than just “practicing accountancy.” The concept was recently considered by Canada’s Independent Review Committee on Standard Setting, which noted in its final report: “While the public interest is a foundational issue, defining it with precision is difficult because it is a dynamic concept and highly contextual to particular circumstances. In some cases, the consideration of the public interest and how it might best be served is straightforward. In others, there are complexities and trade-offs, requiring a more thorough analysis and the use of judgment. Accordingly, the Committee makes no recommendation on how Canadian standard-setting bodies should define the term “public interest”, or whether they should develop a common public interest framework.” Still, the podcast description raises the question: if CPAs are assumed to have a role in ensuring that “intelligent machines will make decisions that are morally justifiable and consistent with our society’s current values,” then should our success in serving the public interest always be measured in part with reference to morality and broad social values? And if so, what would that mean, given the absence of any ready consensus over those concepts?

In truth, the podcast description is probably an outlier, not intended to be applied more broadly. Still, it’s interesting to ponder how CPA Canada and the profession as a whole would define moral justification and current social values, if pushed to do so. As so often, the Trump administration provides a vivid current litmus test: given that he was, it seems, fairly elected, is any action he takes by definition morally justifiable? What are society’s “current values” regarding, say, gender identity, or participation in international efforts, or the deference owed to billionaires, given Trump’s hostile activism in such areas? To what extent does the Canadian sense of the public interest differ from the American or global one? Is the public whose interest is being served mainly that of the capital-owning, rent-collecting class? And on and on from there…

To give that a bit more specificity, sustainability reporting is certainly one of CPA Canada’s more high-profile areas of advocacy, usually proceeding from the premise that a demand for sustainability-related information can be identified and should be satisfied, without particularly commenting on the uses to which that information might best be put. For example, the description of an on-line learning event addresses the “What’s in it for me” question as follows:

• The competency of sustainability is one of the largest disruptions in the profession in more than 100 years. Developing your knowledge is a gateway to opportunity in this growing field with an increasing number of roles such as sustainability controller popping up. Those who have a base knowledge in sustainability will become increasingly valuable to the organization as well, those that have well rounded financial and business acumen to accompany this knowledge will have a competitive skills advantage. Becoming a key resource at your organization will give you the opportunity to position yourself for more senior positions and add increasing value to your organization’s future….

The description, one will note, is sublimely neutral: in a different context one could substitute any number of words for “sustainability” and it would flow just as smoothly. But it’s reasonable to ask whether the public interest demands more: that is, that sustainability reporting should be used to promote good practice (rather than, say, merely to price bad practice more accurately). And yet, our leaders increasingly either dismiss climate change risk outright, or else pay lip service to it while doing nothing consequential. As elected representatives, are they the voice of the public interest, or the most prominent thwarters of it? And whatever the answer, is it appropriate that a professional accounting firm should just neutrally go along with it? Building on that, are some of the services provided by the firms (such as lending their names to fuzzy, agenda-driven “economic impact studies” and the like) ever truly in the public interest, however that’s defined?

Plainly, the above is made up more of questions than answers, but at this fraught time in human history, I think it’s fair to argue that individuals or organizations identifying themselves with the “public interest” should be willing to explain (even if at the cost of some political or, in some quarters, reputational risk) more fully how they define and monitor that concept and discharge the resulting obligations. Because, really, what good is it otherwise…?

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.