Chartered Professional Accountant

Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) (French: comptable professionnel agréé) is a professional designation that is replacing those granted by the three former accounting bodies in Canada:

Progress towards full adoption of the designation is substantially complete, as of September 2015:

"Chartered Professional Accountant" is borrowed from a similar but aborted Australian merger attempt in 1998. It has been registered as an EU Community trademark by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. However, applications to register "CPA" as such were either withdrawn or refused.

Registration as a Canadian trademark was originally sought by the Ordre des comptables agréés du Québec in September 2010, but the application lapsed. It was subsequently secured by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario in August 2011.

While other professional accounting bodies around the world are currently extending their reach through various globalization activities, the Canadian accounting profession appears to be relatively fractured in comparison. The current initiative is the latest of a series of consolidating moves that has affected the Canadian accounting profession between 1880 and 2010, of which the last significant merger occurred between Canadian chartered accountants and certified public accountants in the 1960s. Several attempts were made to merge the CGAs and CMAs during the 1960s, as well as of all three bodies during the 1970s. A subsequent merger attempt between chartered accountants and certified management accountants occurred in 2004, being promoted by their leaders but failing to secure adequate membership support.

In 2011, all three main bodies agreed to work towards a merger that would see a new organization with 180,000 professional members and 10,000 candidates and registered students. This new accounting body would be one of the largest in the world. The guiding principles for the discussion were expressed to be:

While the merger proposal is framed in a national context, approval must be undertaken on a province-by-province basis, as recognition of professional status has been accepted as a matter of provincial jurisdiction since 1911. The concept of unification has received significant support from business stakeholders and accounting academics.

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