[00:00:05] Russell Evans: This is Contributors, a show exploring how today's Canadian business leaders are building a better future for Canada. Welcome back to Contributors. I am here, as always, with my colleague Jade. How are you doing today, Jade?

[00:00:19] Jade Towle: I'm doing well. It's cold in Canada, but otherwise good. 

[00:00:24] Russell Evans: It is very, very cold. It's unusually cold, but that's okay. We are bundled up, and we're ready to talk to today's guest. Who are we speaking to?

[00:00:33] Jade Towle: Well, you are going to be speaking with Pamela Steer. She is the CEO of CPA. CPA stands for Chartered Professional Accountants Canada. Some of you, look on CPA's website, at the very top of the page, it says, The Canadian Ideal of Good Business. So I think she's going to have a lot of great tidbits for us. 

[00:00:54] Russell Evans: Yeah, I'm really excited to talk to Pamela. So we have some common people that we've worked with and we know. I think her story is really interesting. So some of our listeners might know that she won CFO of the Year a few years ago, and that was for an incredible business turnaround that she helped lead. So I want to talk to her about that. I also am really interested in talking to her about kind of the changing role of accountants within corporate Canada. So less about the numbers, more about strategic advisors within kind of the corporate structure. And I think that there's so much that we don't know about accountants. And I think as business leaders, there's ways in which we are not leveraging their skills and talents. So hoping to uncover some of that to really help us all be better at our jobs.

[00:01:51] Jade Towle: Let's dive in.

[00:01:53] Russell Evans: Let's go. So, Pamela, welcome to Contributors.
 
[00:02:03] Pamela Steer: Thank you so much, Russell. It is an absolute pleasure to be here. 

[00:02:07] Russell Evans: We are so excited to have you on the show today, and we're so happy when your team reached out because we're huge fans of yours, and we have a lot of questions about accountants and the role of accountants here in Canada. So before we get into that, why don't we start with a little bit about yourself and your background. 

[00:02:26] Pamela Steer: I obviously proud accountant and chartered professional accountant. Through a random coffee one day, a friend of mine who had just become CFO at WSIB, the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board in Ontario said to me, Oh, Pamela, you're leaving your gig? Can you just come and help me for a few months on a couple of really big projects? I'm here with massive turnaround, and help me out. So that was a total left turn into things I knew nothing about. Broader public sector insurance, pension, asset management, all of those wonderful things, which is how, in fact, I met Derek Dobson for the first time and was introduced to CAAT, which is a wonderful, a wonderful experience, to start to really learn about the importance of pension planning, the importance of long term liability planning and so forth. And so from there, it really led me to realize how important to me personally it is to have a higher purpose in what you do and the importance of social justice in economies and how helping people actually helps the economy as a whole and helps us all prosper. And then from there, I was very fortunate because of the great work that we did as a team, and then moving on to help another broader public sector organization, Payments Canada, as their chief strategy officer and chief operations officer, which led me to take on the role of CEO at CPA Canada. [00:04:06][100.0]

[00:04:07] Russell Evans: That's fantastic. Thank you. That was a very robust run through of your career. [00:04:11][3.9]

[00:04:11] Pamela Steer: Maybe a little long. [00:04:12][0.5]

[00:04:13] Russell Evans: And there's actually one thing in there that I did want to touch on, so why not now. In the excitement in having you on the show, I wanted to talk about accountants and I wanted to kind of talk about the broader impact of accountants because my boss, the COO of CAAT, is an accountant. I work really closely with our CFO, who is another accountant, and I know the power of accountants, and it's different than people might think, right? Like people think about income statements and balance sheets and, you know. [00:04:47][33.8]

[00:04:47] Pamela Steer: The boring. [00:04:48][0.3]

[00:04:48] Russell Evans: Accounting software. Yeah. They don't think about the business advisor, the in-house consultant, the other roles that you can play. And having you on the show, that's what I wanted to talk about. But the really interesting thing about you is we don't need you to talk about that with your CPA Canada hat. You can actually talk about that as an accountant, and the WSIB story is a great example of that. So I'm going to cue it up in kind of my simplified way, and you tell me if I've got it right, and then I'd like to kind of get into it. So my understanding is at WSIB you helped lead one of the greatest, if not the greatest turnaround stories in the history of this country, whereby you took the WSIB from a deficit of over $14 billion to fully funded and did that nine years ahead of schedule. Is that is that all correct at a high level? [00:05:47][59.6]

[00:05:48] Pamela Steer: Well, I can't take all the credit, obviously a huge team, but I can say that, you know, being an accountant, being the CFO, we have as a profession or as a group of industry professionals, we have the single best view of everything, because everything in an organization, eventually even your human capital is translated into dollars, and you see how those dollars flow and where they flow. So you have that unique lens on an organization that others don't have. [00:06:21][33.0]

[00:06:22] Russell Evans: And that's a really interesting point in that, I think people don't necessarily perceive it this way, but accountants are not, you know, just there to add up the dollars and cents, that ultimately the role of accountants in a professional environment is often the role of the data scientist that ultimately in a corporation, some of the the most telling data you have is the money. [00:06:46][24.7]

[00:06:47] Pamela Steer: Yeah, absolutely, Russell. Like how I think about it is accountants don't add up the books anymore. Computers do that. Systems do that. Where today's accountants really come in and shine is that value added insight, it's that value added professional skepticism, it's that value added what next or what are the implications of this, or what are the risks that we see to this, or what is wrong with the data? Like, I'm quite unique in my role now at CPA Canada, coming from industry in the CFO route. That role has evolved so tremendously over the last 10, 15 years to becoming the number two often behind the CEO. Because of that, that confluence of all the data comes back home to roost, and the CFO sees it all. [00:07:40][52.6]

[00:07:40] Russell Evans: Going back to WSIB for a moment, how did you do it? [00:07:44][3.7]

[00:07:45] Pamela Steer: Gosh, there are so many threads to that story and why such a big team was involved. But a number of things. So our investment fund had to be diversified, and so the investment team worked on that, risk managing that, which was really important to getting the risk down so that we could count on those returns. Former CEO came in, and he spent what I understand is like the first six months of his tenure, holed up in his office, hired a chief statistician to figure out what are the highest impact, highest cost injuries, how can we rehabilitate people. Because when I got there, our annual spend on benefits and rehabilitation for injured workers, which is the whole purpose of the worker's compensation scheme, was $3.2 billion. And so recognizing that was not tenable, and there was something wrong, and the part of it was looking at those high impact injuries, developing programs of care to help people get rehabilitated. So they didn't need to be on what I call the never never program of chiropractors, physiotherapists, etc. and creating a perpetual revenue stream for them. No, you want to get injured workers back to what matters to them, productive, healthy, contributing lives as quickly as safely as possible. You want them healed. We decreased those over my tenure from $3.2 billion a year to $2.4 billion a year. That's a big contributor to the bottom line. Then, of course, looking at the actual operational expenses, so, you know, just less than a billion dollars, and keeping them flat while investing in technology, rationalizing services, making services more accessible to Ontarians and Ontario businesses, and just making the whole thing run more efficiently. [00:09:37][112.9]

[00:09:39] Russell Evans: For those that do not know what is CPA Canada? [00:09:42][3.1]

[00:09:43] Pamela Steer: The way I think about CPA Canada and the ecosystem is you have a donut which has all of the provinces and territories in Bermuda. So we call the PTB, sitting in that donut ring. They are a company of equals with five different mandates in each province, but fairly similar and as aligned as possible. And then you have CPA Canada in the middle, which is not a regulatory body, but is that home of thought leadership, education. So we set the exams that are uniform across the country, so that when you enter and you become a CPA, you've done the same way with the same door to get through and the same challenges and hurdles as anybody else across the country. We do national and international relations. We do thought leadership. We do financial literacy work with our partners in the provinces across the country. And we set the standards that is the Canadian Accounting Handbook or GAAP, generally accepted accounting principles and audit principles or audit standards. [00:10:49][66.6]

[00:10:51] Russell Evans: How has the accounting profession changed over the last 15 or 20 years? Like I know as a non accountant, I know that 15 years ago, 20 years ago we had chartered accountants. Now we don't talk about chartered accountants anymore. [00:11:05][14.6]

[00:11:06] Pamela Steer: I am a proud possessor of the legacy designation, which was chartered accounting. There were three accounting bodies across Canada previously, so there were the chartered accountants, the certified management accountants and the certified general accountants. And these groups got together several years ago and said, well, wouldn't we have a stronger voice if we were one body? And so let's talk about, and eventually, indeed it came to pass that these three bodies merged into one which became CPA, the chartered professional accounting designation that we have today. And so what that means on a global scale is that CPA Canada or the Canadian CPAs are 220,000 strong, which is one of the largest and most influential accounting bodies in the world. And then more recently, the world is evolving quicker and quicker all the time. And so as new technology emerges, the importance of data science you mentioned earlier becomes even that much more important, then you have all the notions of sustainability and what that means on the environmental level, particularly with respect to climate, and then on the social level as well in Canada, as well as globally. The accounting profession last year published a new competency map that will incorporate more of these competencies in what it means to actually be a chartered professional accountant. And we're in the process right now of developing all of that new curriculum to have a brand new evolved path to get your CPA. [00:12:45][98.9]

[00:12:46] Russell Evans: It's interesting to hear that ultimately where CPA came from was, you know, it sounds like a merger of equals. I was never sure what that was. I thought maybe that was like, you know, Mike Harris made the megacity, and North York still mad about it. But it sounds like that's not at all what happened there. And in fact, it was these organizations deciding to combine to achieve that scale, to achieve larger influence. And that's exactly what's come about. [00:13:14][27.7]

[00:13:15] Pamela Steer: Well, I'm going to say it's like any happy family. You know, there are scraps from time to time. But I think largely you can say there has been the desire or the goals that were set when the three professions got together to start these discussions. I think the goals have largely been reached. And I only see more and better things to come for the profession and what we can achieve. [00:13:40][24.8]

[00:13:41] Russell Evans: So, Pamela, one of the things I wanted to talk about today was a recent Harvard Business Review article. I'm not sure if you've seen it, but it was actually entitled How Financial Accounting Screws Up HR. Quite a bold title. Have you seen this piece? [00:13:54][13.2]

[00:13:55] Pamela Steer: I have. Thanks very much for letting us. [00:13:59][3.8]

[00:14:00] Russell Evans: So for our listeners, I'm going to kind of summarize it as I see it. You tell me what you kind of took from the article, but but effectively, I should start by saying the article blew my mind. It absolutely blew my mind, because it's one of those insights that is very obvious in retrospect, but something that I had never thought of before. So the insight in the article was effectively that while as business leaders, we talk about our people as assets, we often say, my people are my greatest asset. Actually in financial accounting, they are not an asset. They are outlined as an expense on an income statement. They show up nowhere on a balance sheet. And the article goes on to say that even investing in your people, even things like learning and development, are an expense, not an asset. And as a result, especially when economic, economic times are hard, it's way too easy and it's way too attractive to terminate employees. Whereas if we were literally accounting for them as an asset, we as business leaders might act differently. Fair, fair summary, Pamela? [00:15:07][66.7]

[00:15:08] Pamela Steer: I really like your summary, actually. I agree with your perch, and I think it's actually much better articulated and outlined than the author of the article with whom I would have significant debates. And actually, while he might be an expert in people and talent, he's certainly not an expert in accounting and accounting rules. [00:15:26][18.5]

[00:15:27] Russell Evans: So my question to you is and I thought this was so interesting because it really is where the rubber hits the road, because sometimes if you're not an accountant, accounting can feel almost esoteric. But this was a really interesting case of the financial records don't reflect the reality as we see it. And as you know, I'm not in accounting. I'm a comms marketing guy, but I've taken some accounting courses, and for me this brought to mind depreciation. So depreciation, and again, I mean, I may misspeak, but to me depreciation is not a real expense, because a fake expense that we made up because we know that eventually our computers are going to wear out and we're gonna need to buy new computers. So we made up this concept of depreciation to account for that. And I thought, isn't there something we can do? Isn't there some depreciation like thing that we can make up so that our people who are so valuable show up on the balance sheet? Pamela, can we do something? [00:16:21][54.0]

[00:16:22] Pamela Steer: Yes, absolutely we can. And there is a lot of effort underway to do that and a number of different ways. So the authors talks about the distinction between American GAAP, so generally accepted accounting principles versus international accounting principles. And while he has a lot wrong in that, factually, what is a fight internationally is this movement towards what's called Integrated Reporting, which brings in not just the financial and the traditional financial, but also what they call Different Capitals. So intellectual capital, human capital, manufactured capital, relationship capital. Absolutely, you do need to identify what your human capital because let's face it, especially in a service economy or service driven economy, what is the number one cost? I'm not going to say expense or asset. What's the number one cost that we have? And that is our people whether that's benefits, salaries, office related, etc.. So there are a lot of different metrics that you can use to identify the value and the investment in people. One of the interesting concepts that he brings in is this idea of leased employees. I think what is true is that there is a use of organizations when you need additional expertise, when you need to flex and make change, when you have projects in which you're planning to invest. And so you wouldn't have those employees as full time employees forever and a day, because you don't need those skills. So if you need to implement a new a new piece of software, big enterprise software, you're going to need specialists to help you put that into place that you're not going to necessarily need. So in that case, scaling with those kinds of outsourced enterprises makes a whole lot of sense. [00:18:18][115.5]

[00:18:19] Russell Evans: ESG is another area I wanted to talk. So I think if you go back 20 years, we would think of ESG as over here, and in accounting over there and they were different. And in my mind, you know, environmental social governance factors are really embedded in the profession now. How are you seeing that, and how does CPA Canada help your members navigate these waters? [00:18:43][23.8]

[00:18:44] Pamela Steer: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I couldn't agree more with your statement. And I would say it's analogous to your own environment. I mean, CAAT has a long and proud history of integrating ESG factors into their investment decisions. But it's just that. It's moved from being a separate group to being fully embedded in teams. And the accounting world is no different. Again, so many things come to roost as calculations that are data that start from science, but at some point they make their way into financial reporting or risk reporting. And so CPA Canada and others had a real big role to play in TCFD. So financial disclosure about climate, what we're seeing is that once again, the CFO is called upon. So yes, we need engineers. Yes, we need scientists. There is no doubt about it. I see CPAs are not going to pretend to have that expertise. But what we do know is when and how to rely on that expertise, first of all, and how to synthesize all that information together. And then at the end of the day, if you think of publicly traded companies who signs those quarterly reports, it's the CEO and the CFO. And so the CFO is going to make damn sure that they're comfortable with those risk statements. They're working through those scenarios with elements of the rest of the team and the experts, which I identified. [00:20:17][92.4]

[00:20:18] Russell Evans: Let's talk a little bit about financial literacy. Does CPA Canada have a role to play in financial literacy for Canadians? And if so, what is that role? [00:20:29][10.3]

[00:20:30] Pamela Steer: Absolutely, unequivocally, and it is one of the top five priorities we have here at CPA Canada. We have an absolutely fantastic, small but mighty team of individuals at CPA Canada to coordinate and lead the charge of over 7000 volunteers across Canada. And again, we provide literacy, financial literacy, training, advice, support for cradle to grave. So we come into your high schools, and we talk about the importance of personal financial planning and budgeting and how that works as a high school student going into university. We talk to people about retirement planning and the importance of that. We talk to people about estate planning. We talk to people about divorce. We have tons and tons of materials and courses and resources that are available to everyone in Canada for free. I think a financially literate population is a much more prosperous, successful and dare I say, happy population if they understand and are in control of their own finances and their own destiny. [00:21:43][72.1]

[00:21:43] Russell Evans: So one of the things that I always hear people say is why don't you learn how to pay your taxes in high school? Why is that not a course? Are you guys working on that? [00:21:53][9.2]

[00:21:53] Pamela Steer: Really great, great question. I am so glad you asked that, because I'll say it in a different way. So we do talk to kids about their first jobs and what that means and the implications of, like managing a credit card and budgeting. We don't talk about taxes specifically. They're pretty simple at that age, to be quite honest. Right. But what I do want to see is a revamped high school curriculum in finance, accounting, budgeting, whatever you want to call it, because a public policy has been extremely successful and rightly so in focusing for the last however many years on STEM. They've been really, really successful. Unfortunately, someone at the expense of good, financially literate education for high school students. So in many high schools, finance is not offered anymore. And if it is, it's the same damn course that I took many decades ago. And then for those of us, CPAs who wish to see a new generation coming up, who sees the value, the purpose, what you can have as a career, and how rewarding it can be both for you as well as society. We're missing that boat, so we are doing ourselves any favors for for attracting new kids into this wonderful profession of accounting and finance. And so I think that is going to be one of the things that I focus on as what I would see would be successful when I leave. If we have a lot of aspiring, amazing, brightest and best students wanting to pursue an accounting designation, then I've done my job. [00:23:34][100.4]

[00:23:34] Russell Evans: Let's go back to the role of the accountant kind of within the business. So thinking about the role of the CFO in particular. You're someone who spent a big portion of your career as a CFO. You were CFO of the year. If we have business leaders listening today, so, you know, CEOs, COOs, CHROs, and they're wondering, how do I leverage that individual? So how do I leverage that CPA, that chief financial officer? What do I need to be using them for? Or how do I need to be partnering with them? What advice would you give them? [00:24:13][38.9]

[00:24:14] Pamela Steer: There are so many skills that CPAs, CFOs, senior finance people in an organization can offer today. And they yes, we have financial acumen. So you think about dollar signs, you think about accountants, but there's so much more. So a real process discipline, focus at looking at data, ways of looking at data to ensure that it's got integrity, that it to ensure that it says the things that it wants to, to have that skeptical eye over a story that hangs together from a business perspective. So bringing that discipline that we all learn as CPAs to bear across an organization can be so helpful and powerful to leverage, to not only utilize and leverage those skills from the CPA, but also teach them to others in other aspects of business. Financial acumen is always going to be important. Those skills transfer, no matter what the subject matter is. And so helping executives have enough financial acumen as well in order to do their jobs better, to be more skeptical thinkers, to be able to ask those probing questions that were raised on, quite frankly, is so helpful and valuable. [00:25:35][81.0]

[00:25:36] Russell Evans: I think that's a really good point. I think the other thing that I've seen personally, whether it's working with my boss, Kevin, who is the chief operating officer or our CFO, Mike, is accountants can be really strong communicators. And one of the places that I've gotten inspiration from working with those two gentlemen is the idea of letting the data tell the story. That's the strongest argument you often have. So rather than trying to, you know, craft a story, craft the narrative in your own mind or what you're trying to achieve, start with what we know to be true. [00:26:13][36.8]

[00:26:15] Pamela Steer: Yeah. Russell is a really good aspect or perspective, and I would just tweak it a little bit, and say that what the accountant or the CEO, CFO can bring, is they do lead with the data and they know how to tell a story that goes with the data, that could be a very complex topic that they synthesize down to its core pieces and they use the data to support the narrative that they need to tell to a board, to shareholders, to stakeholders, to customers. [00:26:46][31.6]

[00:26:47] Russell Evans: So this show, as you know, is called Contributors. And one of our favorite questions to ask is how is your organization, CPA Canada, contributing to a better Canada? [00:26:58][10.8]

[00:27:00] Pamela Steer: First of all, we have great financial literacy programs, and I think that is one of the main ways that we can contribute to making every person's life better in Canada financially, because if they're knowledgeable and educated and they can be the masters of their own destiny with respect to their personal finances, that's going to help the whole economy. So that's one. Two is with our education standards, particularly with entrance to the CPA, we're ensuring that Canadians professional accounting services and cadre or cohort have a uniform, very high level, high standards of excellence, so that they know that they will be well-served when they hire and use a CPA skills. Three is in the standard setting process. We know how important having consistent, well-understood, well-respected standards that are respected globally and inter-reusable and understandable globally matter on the world's global stage, public markets, investments and so forth. [00:28:08][68.5]

[00:28:09] Russell Evans: I want to now ask what I like to call our secret sauce question. This is where I typically reach out to people that have worked with the guest or know the guest. And I say, what is the secret behind their success? So I did do that in your case. And, you know, a lot of people talked about your amazing accomplishments at WSIB and your award. I also heard some interesting stuff about the trapeze, which unfortunately don't have enough time to get to today. But I did hear again and again about your leadership philosophy and something called the three C's. So I wonder if you could tell us what are the three C's and kind of what's behind that? [00:28:50][41.4]

[00:28:51] Pamela Steer: Yeah, it's great. It actually came to me as I was preparing a talk that I was giving to a group of executive women, like a global group and and thinking about the importance of leadership. And clearly competence matters, technical expertise matters. Like that's not in question at that level. So what distinguishes leadership from that technology technocrat kind of capability? And the three C's are courage, communications and common sense. I kind of joke a lot that common sense isn't very common, unfortunately, and it's, you know, taking something, taking the fact the story that you've been presented, stepping back and just say, okay, just does it just make sense? Like, is it over complex? We love to make things way more complex than they need to be. And in courage is you just you have to speak truth to power or you have to be able to say your say with conviction and take your space and not be afraid of the blowback or the criticism, because that's how we all learn together. And then communications, because if you can't tell a story in a way that everybody understands in the same way, right, you know, you encode, you speak, and then somebody decodes it often very differently. But if you can't get your message across, you can't make the change that you need, you can't convey your conviction with authority. Then going back to the trapeze, you got to be able to poke fun at yourself. So, you know, I used to joke like, you can't think about accounting and being a CFO if you're hanging upside down 35 feet in the air with somebody else literally holding your life in their hands. And so you kind of have to step back and say, okay, yeah, I just I put my pants on, one leg at a time, much as I'd like to think I don't. And you just got to have a bit of humility as well. [00:30:47][115.7]

[00:30:48] Russell Evans: I did go to a trapeze place once, I think it was called Circus Arts. It was for my daughter's birthday. I want to say, like three or four years ago. And I'm telling you, my back still hurts today. [00:31:00][11.5]

[00:31:01] Pamela Steer: Well, that's unfortunate. We can have another conversation about that, Russell. Happy to talk about trapeze anytime. But, you know, you got to be humble. And that means willing to learn and willing to be wrong and willing to to take the criticism and say, oh, you know what? I can learn something here. I can do something better and make it even better. And that's what I'm here to do. [00:31:23][21.9]

[00:31:25] Russell Evans: So this has been an amazing conversation, and I'm so happy that I got the opportunity to speak to you. How can our listeners learn more about yourself and CPA Canada? [00:31:35][10.1]

[00:31:36] Pamela Steer: So first of all, the important thing is where to find CPA Canada. You can look at us on CPACanada.ca. Our website is full of resources. If you really feel the need to look at me, LinkedIn is always an easy place to find me. There are very few Pamela Steer on this planet. I think I've only seen two or three. I was really touched, delighted, and I've really enjoyed this conversation as well, Russell. So thank you so much for having me on Contributors. [00:32:07][30.4]
[00:32:08] Russell Evans: Thank you. Have a great day. [00:32:09][1.2]

[00:32:13] Jade Towle: I thought that was such an insightful conversation between you and Pamela Russell. She's clearly an advocate for so many topical things for employers in Canada, financial literacy, ESG reporting, good business overall. I love that she's an advocate for harnessing the power of women leaders too. [00:32:35][22.3]

[00:32:36] Russell Evans: She's phenomenal. She kind of blew me away. I thought, it's funny that she is an accountant who is the CEO of CPA Canada because in many ways she could be your chief cultural officer. Right? She is an advocate for so much to do with business culture. Like the things that I heard from her are don't be afraid to take risks. Don't be afraid to break the process. Think about outcomes. And that came across very clear in her approach to leadership, came across in her three C's, you know, communications, courage, common sense. I love her approach. For me, it was really interesting to hear the background of her award as CFO of the Year, because for me, what really was so inspiring about that is that ultimately she received that award because she was willing to take this really complex situation and find the levers that she could pull to turn the business around. So one by one, looking at them in like one of the simple things is you have workers, they're injured or they're not well, and ultimately they want to come back to work. Right? They don't want to stay in rehabilitation for weeks and months and in some cases years. They want to come back to work. So it's around removing those barriers, helped turn the business around, but also made life better for those individuals. Love that. [00:34:14][97.1]

[00:34:15] Jade Towle: Yeah, those are really great points. And I think another underlying theme was around data and letting data tell the story. She talked a lot about the value of critical thinking, and I think I heard this on a nice podcast actually, which I know we love here, the way you share data is more important, almost more important than the data itself. And I think that's where accountants and CFOs and CPAs can really support business leaders and organizations to bring that story to life. [00:34:48][33.4]

[00:34:49] Russell Evans: I completely agree. And I think one of the things that was interesting about her is it's important to sort of go where the data leads, but at the same time, it's important not to get buried in the data, right? Like, not to get that analysis paralysis, that you really want to be able to get into the details, and then find a way to bring it up a level, to get it up to the 10,000 feet so you can convey what you want to convey. And it reminded me so much of something that our chief operating officer, Kevin, likes to talk about, which is he loves to say, pensions are complicated. It's our job to make them simple. And that's really what I heard from Pamela is, you know, business is complicated, and it's the role of the accountant to help make it simple. [00:35:38][49.0]

[00:35:39] Jade Towle: I love that. And I was thinking of the exact same thing. Overall, such a great episode, and I think she mentioned she'd love to come back, so we'll have to see her next season. [00:35:49][10.3]

[00:35:51] Russell Evans: Absolutely. Pamela, you are welcome back anytime. You are awesome. [00:35:53][2.6]
[00:35:54] Jade Towle: Any time. [00:35:54][0.3]

[00:35:57] Russell Evans: Thank you for listening to Contributors, the podcast for Canadian leaders. We hope you'll take away some valuable insights and lessons from today's conversation. To help us reach even more listeners, please subscribe, rate and review Contributors on Apple Podcasts. If you'd like to learn more about CAAT, visit us at CAATPension.ca. [00:35:57][0.0]