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Chartered Accountants of Ontario interested in serving as members of the Council that oversees the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario have another chance to influence the direction the ICAO is taking: the next vote for positions is coming up soon, with 8 spots open, each for a two year term. The deadline to apply to run in the election is Tuesday, May 21, 2013 at 5:00 p.m. The application must be accompanied by candidate statements that'll be due on May 31, 2013. You need two get at least two CAs in Ontario to sign your nomination papers, and submit the other needed documentation explaining who you are and what you've been up to. Given the entire Canadian "CPA, CA" issue that's been front and centre throughout the year, I'm sure this election will continue to generate a fair deal of attention. In last year's election, for the first time I'm aware of, there were roughly twice as many candidates as their were openings on the Council, with opposing...
In the "olden days," the only way to become earn your Chartered Accountant designation was by 'paying your dues' and working through your 'slave years' at a CA firm. Didn't matter if it was a small shop or one of the Big 4 (or 5 or 6, or 8, depending on when you started), they got a solid lock on you for the first two or three years of your fledgling career, until you had "put in your hours" at your "CA Training Office" before you were free to fly off. Well, the market demand for qualified young blood to deliver all that advisory and analytical goodness continued to push for more people, and the accounting and auditing shops could only accomodate so many newbies. The ICAO decided it'd make sense to open the field to other companies willing to subject train new grads to the UFE process. Hence came "CATOs" outside of the core accounting profession. New places are announced with regularity - the latest list includes the lovely...
The results came in wicked-fast: earlier this afternoon the viral video-supported campaign by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario bore fruit. They scored the highest ever turnout, a record of 27.6% of the membership, with 85.4% voting in favour. Here's the press release explaining what the ICAO intends to do with its win. I won't bore you with the details, there's more than enough bureacratic bylaw details and associated nerd rage to go around if you're into that sort of thing, especially the counter-argument. The video itself was a pretty good summary of the proposal, though. The ICAO tried a few things to deliver its message. Aside from a series of webcasts and free breakfasts and lunches, the video was no doubt the biggest hit - there's now been over 11,000 views, up from 3496 when I started tracking its virality. Despite it making ICAO Chair Rod Barr feel deservedly silly - he chose not to play it at the breakfast I attended, despite it being in his...
Accountants have found that the internet has things like... online videos. The results are stunning. Rod Barr, the President and CEO of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario delivers a going concern level of delicious snark in the first 25 seconds of this video . He says that we are having an important vote, and "apparently our webinar series is not capturing the excitement of this complex, impending change." He continues, "accordingly, we have to try something new. How about this?" Then the "typography"-ish music video kicks into gear through the magic of a glowing yellow orb that appears in his hand. Apparently senior CAs who become FCAs have magic powers that are poorly understood. Feel free to discuss this madness on ACS' facebook page while I figure out how to upgrade the commenting system here. The video is at 3496 views as of now - curious to see how viral it gets.
The Ontario Chartered Accountants have voted, and the results are - mixed! Here's the list of members elected to the Council: Arnie Bose, CA Marrianne Bridge, FCA Anita Ferrari, FCA Christie E. Henderson, CA Delna Madon, CA Alan T. Mak, CA Robert C. Scullion, FCA John Wright, CA You see the three people with "FCA" after their name? Those are Fellows. It's kind of a Big Deal, as they've been around a long time and are very respected in the profession. They represent the part of the old guard that made it through. In this election there were, however, 18 candidates, half of whom were on the record as against the merger. Three anti-merger candidates on the above list are Arnie Bose, Delna Madon and Alan Mak. They represent fresh blood and a clear sign that the members are getting annoyed with the direction the Institute has been moving in. Of the people who didn't win, I'd say I was most amazed to see Allan Foerster not get elected - he's a respected professor...
Canada's accounting magazine The Bottom Line had an article on the ICAO elections five years ago - with a focus on those dissatisfied with the outcomes of the process. Let's see if people have more luck playing the underdog card this time. If you miss the 5 p.m. deadline, you could go attend the Annual General Meeting on Wednesday June 20, 2012 in person . It's at 4:30 pm. I'll be busy teaching financial literacy that day so I'll go vote online now. As I mentioned previously , this election is a Big Deal, as there's an actual competition in place: 18 candidates vying for 8 positions. You can retrieve your voting number by going to the election page , in case you have your member number and password memorized. Alternatively, use the number on the 2012 Ballot and Proxy that came in the mail a month ago and type that in directly on the voting site . If you're interested in hearing from a united group of 8 candidates led by the anti-merger petition organizer Ricky...
I've recently mentioned the furor associated with the idea of unifying Chartered Accountants with CMAs and CGAs . Things are getting hotter now that the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario is holding its election for the Council. Typically there's not much shock or awe associated with the election, but this time it's worth checking it out . I'll delve into the details shortly, but for now check out this PDF with candidate biographies - you'll notice that there's an amazing range of candidates for a change, including many people who are not the proverbial greybeards and Elders of the Profession that you'll typically see running again and again with little competition. I'm very curious to see how this is going to unfold. And, of course, kicking myself for not deciding to get myself nominated the join the fun - but as you can tell by my posting frequency, I've been busy enough with life as it is!
While Ontario's successful writers of the 2011 UFE prepare to party at the Westin Harbor Castle, the Globe offers its takes on the ongoing merger saga . Alberta's CAs recently decided to back out of the merger talks, while Ontario drives on towards June's non-binding vote. Much whinging has alreadyeen expressed about the pros and cons about the idea of merging Canada's three major accounting designations. Talk to people studying in the various programs and you'll get an earful about the different hoops the students have to jump through to qualify for their respective designations. The CGAs and CMAs have tough programs, but most of them will point out that the CAs set their bar even higher, particularly in terms of pre-requisties to be admitted to the program, in both marks and course requirements. The barriers to entry have shifted over time, but they're still a relevant factor to consider. Is it fair to let everyone to use the same credentials if they represent...
After a long day it's nice to unwind and check out news coverage of the protests that is arguably scant - the following links are courtesy of that last article, though at least you can always rely on Google News to provide you with information from various sources. The idea that Yahoo somehow blocked or censored mail related to the protest is weird and troubling though .Oh, and innocent spam filter issue . Right, the only thing their spam filters can stop is political agit-prop. At the same time, my rarely used Yahoo account receives an unending stream of spam, phishing scams and other idiocy that Google rarely if ever lets through. That aside, it's nice to see the police barricade guarding the 'sacred cow' of Wall Street , though I'm sure there could've been a more impressive picture. Oh, the Daily Mail obliges , while dressing down the event as 'merely' over a thousand people. The Guardian , on the other hand, goes with the estimate of 5000 on the weekend...
The newest gem to land in Toronto's lap is a report on where services can be cut back to save money - you can read the report yourself here - the city has kindly posted the PDF for all to see . According to NOW Magazine, the report cost $300,000 , which suggests a 1000 hour job if the consultants charged about $300 an hour to do the work. That's just a wild guesstimate, but scale the hours and hourly rate accordingly based on how much work you think it took to put this report together. It's not surprising, if NOW's math is to be correct, that only $15 million of savings has been identified, however, considering the majority of the findings in the report are in the "low" savings category, which means it'll save us 5% or less. Did the consultants correctly identify the risk associated with publishing a report where they were going to draw the ire of everyone from cyclists to dentists? Who angers dentists, seriously ? Candy companies. And global consultancies...
Globally I'm sure this is still off the radar, but in Canada we're all in a state of shock, having learned that the government plans to spend a billion dollars hosting the G8 and G20 summits this month: the G8 in the rural town of Huntsville, and the G20 in downtown Toronto. $1,000,000,000. Nice. I've seen the first wave of spending allocated to installing more security cameras, presumably temporarily removing the garbage cans downtown and replacing them with transparent bags taped to lamp posts - which just look fabulous in a ghetto chic sort of way - and let's not forget the coup de grace. They're scraping all the posters and political propaganda stickers off the lamp posts as well. I've seen it on my bike rides to work. Heaven forbid Obama learn that Paul Oakenfold had a show at the Koolhaus in March and they didn't invite Barry to check it out. Newspapers are hot on the trail of this unfolding fiasco. The Post asked the ten federal agencies getting this...
Subtle strike commentary? Perhaps I disagree with Post columnist Terence Corcoran when I read much of his work - so much so that I tend to avoid buying or reading the Post to avoid getting a nasty case of "I can't believe you said that, do you have life?" And yet, I can now forgive the last 100 times he's annoyed me after his spot on front page editorial piece in yesterday's Post : While the Mayor goes down in the media and with the public, union leaders chug relatively unscathed through their ritual assaults on taxpayers, good sense and rationality. Mark Ferguson, head of Toronto Local 416 of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, which represents garbage and other outside workers, turned up in a weekend Toronto Star profile as soft-hearted New Wave mystic. He reads works by the Dalai Lama and allegedly seeks to avoid confrontation in favour of fairness. What Mr. Ferguson also reads, however, is the same old union class-warfare texts that have animated union power...
Toronto's on strike. Two of the city workers' unions are , anyway. And from one union only 5% of union membership turned out to vote on the long weeknd in May. Great timing on the part of union leadership to ensure that they'd get only the diehard "hell no, we won't work" crowd to come out. The city no doubt knew this was a foregone conclusion given they invested thousands of dollars in "out of order" signs for public garbage cans. No wait, I take it back. Turns out garbage workers were already on strike for eight days and I hadn't noticed. Oh well, it's still bizarre to be putting up these signs. No wait again, that article is from 2002 . The strike just started. Brilliant. I wonder if any lazy journalists will start plagairizing from the 2002 article anyway? We can only hope, for the laughter. Oddly enough the first thing CBC does is reference the 2002 strike talking about 2009 . Going back to those signs, I've already seen kids ripping...
I'm shaking my head. You might be shaking your fist too, after reading this , in response to the plan to limit executive pay to a cool half million dollars US as part the American economic bailout plans: “That is pretty draconian — $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus,” said James F. Reda, founder and managing director of James F. Reda & Associates, a compensation consulting firm. “And you know these companies that are in trouble are not going to pay much of an annual dividend.” Mr. Reda said only a handful of big companies pay chief executives and other senior executives $500,000 or less in total compensation. He said such limits will make it hard for the companies to recruit and keep executives, most of whom could earn more money at other firms. I completely understand his logic. And it fails miserably. If you're experiencing boom times there are still problems with executive compensation, but at least you can try and argue that they're earning...
The internet is full of lively conversations about Canada's proposed federal budget. @krisjoseph Tomorrow morn Jack Layton will pitch the burial of C Party leadership as a shovel-ready infrastructure project As with most parliamentary democracies, the government's budget must be approved by the elected officials in Parliament before it is accepted. If it is rejected - a risk in minority government scenarios such as the one Canada finds itself in - the government falls. The opposition can try to assemble a coalition government. Failing that, an election takes place. It must have been a little annoying to be a young CA tax professional with the thought in mind "this may never end up actually becoming the country's budget if the government falls tomorrow," while rushing to complete an astute summary of the budget to share with all the firm's clients and the general public. Knowing that everyone likes a little publicity, the firms promptly posted their highlights...
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