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CPA Ontario Insights
Thought Leadership, Research & CPA Spotlights
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A New Way Forward For The Profession: What We’ve Been Hearing

We are now ten months into architecting a new way of working with CPA Canada and our counterparts across the country. Over that time, we have undertaken an extensive engagement program to hear your voices. From a survey to 30,000 of our members and roundtables across the province on the future of our profession, to meetings with the largest employers of CPAs and many 1-1 conversations, your input will help to inform our way forward.

Over the past few months, CPA Ontario has held a series of town halls with some of Ontario’s largest employers of CPAs on the future of the profession and our progress on establishing a new way of working together across the country.

Here Are The Top Three Things We Have Heard:

  • Technology, generative AI and the knowledge economy continue to be identified as the most important threat, and as the greatest opportunity, for the profession.
  • Maintaining the profession’s reputation for trust and quality, and ensuring its relevance is a top priority.
  • CPAs want to know more about sustainability standards and the important role that CPAs will play in sustainability reporting.

Across the employer town halls, CPAs were talking about:

Word cloud on AI

As we move forward, we will find a new way of working together that is focused on the following principles:

  • Ensure the role of CPA Canada is clearly defined in areas where we continue working together.
  • Ensure greater transparency, accountability and speed in the ways we work together with CPA Canada and our counterparts across the country.
  • Improve collaboration on matters of national and international significance.

We will continue working with CPA Canada and our counterparts where it makes sense to do so. Here are a few of those areas:

  • Education. As we announced on November 27, 2023, we are delighted to have agreed terms with L’Ordre des CPA du Québec, CPA Canada and all the other Provincial, Territorial and Bermudian CPA bodies to maintain the uninterrupted educational journey of CPA students in Ontario, ensuring common standards of entry into the profession across Canada.
  • Standard setting. CPA Ontario will continue to support and fund standard-setting and is committed to collaborating across the country to uphold the same high standards for the profession in Canada. We are currently in the process of finalizing an agreement between L’Ordre des CPA du Québec and CPA Canada on Standard Setting, in the same way as we have done for Education.
  • Mobility. Interprovincial mobility remains unchanged as this is determined by PTBs. And CPAs will continue to have the ability to work internationally, as well.
  • International representation. We remain committed to working together to ensure that Canada has a strong, unified voice on the world stage.

Through this new way forward, we will have the capacity we need to move forward with a vision for the profession that can harness the power of AI, a case that we lay out in our thought leadership paper Trust in New Frontiers: Putting AI Governance into Practice.

A profession that can drive commercialization, help scale-up the next generation of Canadian success stories with the skills developed through forward-thinking professional development, like our Innovation Leadership Accelerator.

A profession that can bring clarity and rigour to sustainability reporting, empowered and supported through our Sustainability Simplified Knowledge Hub.

These town halls are part of an ongoing engagement program. Through surveys, town halls, roundtables and roadshows, we will continue to gather the views and perspectives of our members and students and use that insight to help inform our way forward.

For more information, visit CPA Ontario | Answering Your Questions.