80 years and counting

By Robert Colapinto
Photographs : Edward Gajdel

As today’s profession moves forward, we look back at the changes these octogenarian CAs witnessed during their many years in the profession

Sydney Fox’s new accounting degree was supposed to be a refuge from the final dark days of the Great Depression. "I imagined it to be a place of cool, thoughtful and deliberative number-crunching," the 88-year-old says with a laugh. "Instead, it tried to get me killed." Called to serve in the Second World War, the army board looked at Fox’s CA and figured he was a math whiz, ideal for a position in artillery field survey. "Well, those fellows lasted about half an hour, so I transferred to the Royal Canadian Air Force, where, again, my so-called calculating skills dropped me right in it as a navigator. Little did I know that few of us would ever see Canada again." And Fox had much to return to, given that the early post-war years would be marked by unprecedented change and growth for the profession. "You just knew the CAs would be at the leading edge of the extraordinary economic expansion of that era," he says. Profound changes in the accounting profession meant it took him months to figure out what was going on. "It was frustrating, because my being a part of it was up in the air, literally."

Fox, Public Accountants Council license number 25, is the longest-serving licensed public accountant in continuous service in Ontario and a true survivor. He and a select few octogenarian CAs across the country have been active witnesses to the birth and weaning of what has been, in essence, the modern CA designation. As today’s profession looks to the future in an attempt to keep the 150-year-old craft abreast of change, these men can look back to the decades of change and adaptation they navigated. Their perspective on the uncertain future is enlightened by a lifetime in the trenches and a keen awareness that they represent a living history of the chartered accounting profession.

To a man, their fascination with the profession’s evolution has been so great, they simply cannot watch from the sidelines but must remain active and in the thick of that change. There is no sense of an enervating or bitter sacrifice to the profession at the expense of family and a well-earned place on golden pond. "I guess we’re part ancient history but also still insistent on being a part," says Fox. "In many ways, I still feel like the kid ready to run out the door and see what’s up, what’s next. It’s a calling and I can’t ever see it being a chore."

Fox’s return to civvy-street did not immediately epitomize the great changes to come. A humble family storefront in midtown Toronto was his stepping-off point for hitting the bricks. "I simply walked the length of St. Clair Avenue, going door to door offering my bookkeeping and tax services," he says. "Little did I know that a number of these businesses would thrive and my earnings from them would support secondary investments, which in time contributed to making me a very wealthy man." But it would be a chance encounter with a board member of a local Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) credit union that would establish Fox’s reputation as one of the province’s top sole proprietors. "I was asked to look after [CPR’s] credit union, which was nice. Too bad I had no idea what a credit union really was," he laughs.

Like so many CAs of his era, Fox earned his designation through a five-year correspondence course run by Queen’s University in association with the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario (ICAO) and the Dominion Association of Chartered Accountants (DACA became the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants in 1951). Young hopefuls articled with firms and wrote primary, intermediate and final examinations, which, by 1939, the provinces and DACA had agreed to standardize as uniform national exams.

Although the curriculum was no longer developed and administered at the whim of each provincial institute, this early education model was far from comprehensive. "It was clear even at this genesis stage of standardized schooling that we were a long way from understanding what tools were actually needed — especially in the post-war period," explains Fox. "I mean, I should have had a sense of the broad strokes of the workings of a credit union." This profession-wide ignorance would, ironically, work to Fox’s advantage. Upon receiving the CPR brief, he marched down to the ICAO, read everything it had on credit unions, and then walked not-so-confidently into the CPR union hall as a "qualified" expert. In time, Fox would become a true expert in the field, with the unions at Canadian General Electric, the Toronto Transit Commission and Kodak — to name a few — as clients. "It certainly was a looser time," he says, "one with all sorts of opportunities that today’s storefront accountant can only dream about."

Opportunity was just what Paul Roozen, an émigré from Holland after the Second World War, was looking for when he settled in Calgary in 1952.

Now a sprightly 82, Roozen had every reason to yearn for a different experience because, during the war, the occupying Nazis closed his country’s universities and assigned students to jobs in foreign worker camps in Germany, where he worked as a medic. "I survived the war and the camps," he says quietly and with an unspoken admonition that he has no more to say on this difficult period, "and it made me all the more adamant that I live in a country where I could exercise my free will, liberty and whatever smarts God blessed me with." Roozen had also chosen the five-year correspondence program, but was forgiven two years because he came armed with the Dutch equivalent of an MBA. "The Institute of Chartered Accountants in Alberta was not sure how to evaluate my foreign degree," he says, "but it gave me two years off." The CA path was clearly a natural extension to Roozen’s MBA.

There were only two professions in the 1930s and 1940s that high school graduates could enter with relative ease, adds Fox. "You could go with pharmacy or accounting, and many of us business-minded students naturally opted for the one that sounded like it dealt with more numbers." Fox believed accounting offered far greater prospects for growth and expansion. "The ’50s and ’60s were a time of amazing developments in Alberta," Roozen says. "Me and my colleagues could see that accounting would provide us with a good living."

Now in his 17th year of semi-retirement from his firm, Roozen Bailie & Co., and managing estates of former clients, Roozen laments the passing of a simpler era.

The introduction of the CICA Hand-book in late 1968 — replacing the periodic and often standards-conflicting CICA Bulletins — has been of some benefit to the profession.

The most dramatic internal transformation to the professional landscape has been the ascension of the mega-CA firm and its attendant focus on the managing accounting affairs of equally powerful clientele. "As they began to whittle down, starting in the 1960s, from the big-city, blue-chip firms to the Big Eight, now the Big Four, regional firms like ours were handed a market niche we’ve done quite well by," says Reginald Pope, FCA, CBV, of Timmins, Ont.-based Ross Pope & Co. "In fact, it was almost like a return to the sole reliance on the hometown CAs of my early days in the profession."

At 86, Pope looks back on a career founded on intimate face-to-face interactions with the fiercely independent small businesses and institutions of Ontario’s north country. Upon his release from the RCAF — where he was navigator in the famed two-seat Mosquito fighter/bomber — Pope returned to his native Timmins to complete his articling at G.N. Ross. "We had a busy practice in a town and region dominated by thriving mines, lumber companies and all the infrastructure required to support them," he recalls. It was a time when the profession was increasingly called on to help get a handle on costs and value, as these industry towns, their operating processes, the accounting profession and taxation procedures grew increasingly more complicated. About 1948 G.N. Ross became Ross Pope & Co. and would soon become an integral component in the determination of how these communities managed their economies. "Busy wasn’t the word," laughs Pope. "I remember, on top of everything else, personally auditing some 88 separate school boards in just one year around the region."

Pope’s interest in the orderly growth of the northern business community led him to cofound one of the area’s first trust companies, Northland Trust Co. (which became Ontario Trust, later acquired by Canada Trust) and to sit on the advisory board of Fednor, a federal program tasked with revitalizing economic and social development in Northern Ontario. "I point this out because I’ve been able to use my skills and influence as an accountant to try to add something to the fabric of the country," he explains. "And that’s a difficult thing for the busy self-interested CAs of today to do or even want to strive for." And this notion of service he instilled into his twin sons, one of whom is a former at-
torney general of Ontario and minister of health Alan Pope.

Over the decades, Ross Pope has expanded into offices across Northern Ontario, as it pursues the local entrepreneurial client base that has only recently attracted the interest of the Big Four. The de-emphasis of the middle-market client by the large firms was very important in the evolution of the profession, Pope believes. "It allowed the little guy some chance, and put firms like ours in a position to have a very positive effect on our communities," he says. "And let’s face it, it can’t help a CA firm in communities like ours, if it is seen as an outsider or such a monolith that it can’t understand the needs and expectations of the people who inhabit that particular market."

Indeed, one of the more profound changes in the professional life of this elder generation of CAs has been the evolution of CA from expert reporter and analyst of past business and financial activity to trusted business adviser for the client’s future. "What do they call it?" asks Roozen. "The Information Age, the knowledge economy? The CA in such a world has to be equipped with a whole host of value-added skills to be effective. Over the past 30 years, we’ve watched the profession become more specialized in fields related to the future financial health of the individual, business and nation."

For Roozen, adapting to these challenges and taking on new skill sets is much of the reason why he still works. "It keeps the blood flowing," he says. "Just because you’re old doesn’t mean you can’t accept change. Indeed, it’s that freshness that makes it easier to still sit behind a desk, take calls, whittle down those files. It’s my job — simple as that." Nor does it mean that any of these octogenarian CAs think they are the font of all knowledge. Even though his primary focus is to make a contribution to society, Pope still works in order to help himself. It is no chore to shower, dress and hit the bricks each day. "For me, it was always to be a life-long service to myself as well," he says. "And with a profession in such flux, it’s become a real kick to still be in the mix."

The catalyst for much of the change facing CAs has been the intrusion of competing professions into the CA’s traditional and specialized markets. Pope believes the most effective way to combat these forces is to focus on the client not on the reasons for the new climate of competition. "You can fuss about the recent scandals and bankruptcies, for example," says Roozen, "but in the end, we’ve known that the constant through our many decades in the profession is the concentration on doing all we can as individuals to develop close and trusting relationships with our clients. That’s what wins out."

For Ben Burke, an 83-year-old semi-retired CA who still keeps his hand in on mornings as a counsel at Manitoba’s Burke Cantor Chartered Accountants LLP, the old days were a kinder, gentler time. "Today, of course, most of my clients are people I’ve known for many decades." With business consulting and tax and estate planning his forte, Burke works on trusts and estate planning for the second and third generations of his first client base back in the early 1950s. "It’s an interesting chronological follow through that I thoroughly enjoy," he says.

Also a veteran of the Second World War, Burke earned his CA at the University of Manitoba and joined what he describes as a conservative profession, where one’s loyalty to the client and his partners was paramount. Burke Cantor was broached many times by national firms with merger proposals, but always rejected them in order to remain independent, maintain a close relationship with clients and not lose control.

This turn to partnerships of profits, not productivity, was the disheartening thin edge of the wedge for many old-timers as they watched the profession approach a new century encumbered with scandal and public distrust. It was just the negative perception they had so proudly avoided throughout their long careers in service to the public good. "Explaining these shenanigans as the result of the complexity of today’s world of business is not a good enough answer," asserts Ronald Fath, CA, who also holds a law degree from a Wisconsin university where he was a qualified certified public accountant before taking up residence in Canada. Fath is chairman of Edmonton’s O’Hanlon Paving Ltd. and Fath Industries.

The 88-year-old US expatriate, who was first posted to Edmonton after completing his training in the US for military service abroad, settled in Canada in 1949 after discharge from the army and completion of his education. Fath believes that like any business, CA firms that ran afoul of the law were possibly afraid of losing their clients — no matter that these clients might be crooks. "When a client wants to do things with his statements that you can’t certify, the CA can’t lean over backwards too far. And obviously," he says, "we had a lot of people who fell right out of their chairs."

Fath remembers being taught that CAs, by necessity, had to maintain a far higher standard than the average employee without a professional designation. "They could not be compared to when it came to that trust and holding a higher moral standard, which was, in my day, a given for a CA." Fath recalls that in the 1940s ethical conduct was a rigorously applied concept pounded into every area of business study. "Perhaps the profession that is so well known for adapting to change had some trouble catching up to itself," he says. "But when the first warning bells — like the nonsense of the 1980s S&L crisis — were rung, someone should have awakened. We’re only now coming out from under." Despite the scandals, he still believes CAs have largely maintained their positions as persons of integrity.

For Fath, part of the solution and a springboard into the 21st century was the proposed CA/CMA merger. It seemed a radical idea, but one he was willing to embrace. From an old-school CA, the willingness to accept such extraordinary change is quite something, he agrees. Although, as a past president of the Edmonton chapter of the Society of Industrial and Management Accountants, now the CMA, his concern over the hegemony of the CA gold-standard may not have been as great as his contemporaries’. "The issue was customer satisfaction, putting a united front for the accounting profession to clients and the kind of controls and competitive advantage over other professions the merger hoped to provide," he says. "Instead, it came down to pride and ego. They just couldn’t get agreement that there could be any equivalent to the CA."

That such a radical change could be contemplated crystallizes for Fox the extraordinary transformation of the profession since the 1930s. "The only thing that’s remained the same in all this time," he says, "is that a debit is a debit and a credit a credit. If I didn’t take about five courses a year, I’d be totally out of it. I sure wish I’d be around for a while longer to see what else is in store for the profession."

Fox, like the others, has no immediate plans to retire. "Accounting is really a hobby for me now; besides, I have no other talents," he says. "I can’t imagine what I’d do." Fath’s wife of 61 years, Mary, supports her husband’s decision to keep working. "It’s a good thing that he keeps actively involved in business and community," she says. "It’s important to remain active, to read and keep abreast of changes in the world."

"A person has to have a place to go and has to have commitments," agrees Burke. "As long as you are in a position to provide the expertise clients require and clients are satisfied with your advice and performance, it becomes a matter of service to yourself and your clients." He enjoys the workplace interactions with the "young people" who work at Burke Cantor, and as he puts it: "I enjoy the association with younger people who are interested in the accounting field."

Pope also sees his work as a special calling, as well as a reason for his continued longevity. "Accounting is a unique profession," he says, "in that, at our age, a lot of clients become trusted friends and you feel obliged to continue to guide them. People do start to deteriorate, and they rely that much more on you. It’s hard to let go."

Rob Colapinto is a Toronto-based writer