Barbara Stymiest

Image: ChatGPT The word “unprecedented” is frequently used by leaders today, particularly when considering the range and scale of challenges confronting them. In some cases, things may well be unprecedented. But in others, there are in fact deep precedents. What’s new is often what’s old. As historian Niall Ferguson wrote in The Times in January, “wherever you look, the issues of our time are issues our great-grandfathers debated 120 years ago.” History has value, in other words.

Open this photo in gallery: A flare stack lights the sky from an oil refinery in Edmonton on December 28, 2018.JASON FRANSON/The Canadian Press Please log in to bookmark this story.Log InCreate Free Account Barbara Zvan is the president and chief executive officer of University Pension Plan Ontario and was one of four members of Canada’s Expert Panel on Sustainable Finance. Barbara Stymiest is an accountant and corporate director.

The accounting profession’s current squabbles between the provincial and federal bodies reminds us of an old saying: “Nero fiddles while Rome burns.” Rather than arguing over which body accountants are members of, we must come together to solve the existential threat of the profession’s irrelevance.