CPA's second career has him travelling the world

Applying many of the same skills that made him a successful auditor and accountant, CPA Dan Rubenstein has dedicated his time to serving in emergent nations, helping to improve the lives of local residents and preserve endangered ecosystems and species.   

“After I retired, I had a hunger for a new, more adventurous career. That is when I discovered volunteering in the developing world,” he says. “I know so many CPAs that are active in their retirement. They serve on boards. They play a vital role in [the] governance and oversight of organizations. Volunteerism is hard-wired into their professional DNA.” 

Read more

• Performance measurement for non-profit organizations
• Become a financial literacy volunteer
• Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions — are they on your radar?

In 2013, Rubenstein became a volunteer with the Canadian Executive Service Organization (CESO), since renamed Catalyste+. The organization provides assignments for retired Canadian professionals in developing countries who require their skills and expertise to advance local economic, social and living conditions. From that point on, his days and years were filled with volunteer assignments around the world and, eventually, right at home. 

Shortly after joining CESO in 2013, Rubenstein’s first assignment was in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, to work with the local Fundación Merendón—a not-for-profit organization that assists local farmers in finding new methods that are less destructive to the environment. He spent three weeks completing an environmental audit of the human impact on the 40,000-hectare Merendón Forest Reserve, living with coffee and cacao workers in remote villages in the Merendon watershed. 

He loved the experience. “When you’re a volunteer, you’re embedded with the local people in that community for weeks. You feel their concerns. You see the country through their eyes.” He returned to Honduras later that year to help the Fundación develop an environmental education program for the children of the coffee growers.  

Rubenstein’s next overseas volunteer initiative was in Guyana in 2014, assisting staff in the Audit Office of Guyana as they learned performance auditing. He returned in 2016 to help them develop a five-year strategic plan. The following year he aided the Guyana Environmental Protection Agency as it worked on a five-year strategic plan of its own. 

Also in 2017, Rubenstein went to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, to work with a group dedicated to protecting the Chiquitano Dry Forest—a forest that can survive with very little water. He helped them develop a strategic plan. 

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, Rubenstein began working remotely with the Paran Women Group in Kenya in 2022, providing them with training in double-entry bookkeeping. Over 2022 and 2023, he helped the Government of Suriname draft enabling legislation to launch that country’s sovereign wealth fund. 

His most recent assignment in 2024 was with a Métis group in Yellowknife, where he assisted with contaminated mine sites requiring remediation and monitoring. 

"Dan is one of our best advisers,” says Wendy Harris, CPA and President and CEO of Catalyste+. “What makes him such an effective adviser is that he’s always there to learn and to help. He understands the importance of localized priorities. Dan is a lifelong learner, so it comes naturally to him to want to learn, understand and contribute,” she adds. 

Rubenstein, 77, says his sense of equality and interest in volunteering was honed at an early age as he grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York, the son of a painter and an art historian “who loved experiencing the diversity of humanity.” 

When Rubenstein left home to attend Tufts University in Boston in 1964, “I’d seen a fair bit of the world,” he says, recalling a childhood trip to rural Mexico in 1952 and living in Tokyo in 1958 where his parents were Fulbright scholars.   

At Tufts, Rubenstein majored in economics and creative writing but was uncertain about his career choice. He recalls taking one course in accounting and being bored by it. “In college, I never thought I would have any future in accountancy,” he laughs. 

As an American college student in that era, however, he faced another pressing concern. “The Vietnam War cast a shadow over millions of men my age,” says Rubenstein.  

After graduating in 1968, he gained conscientious objector status. As part of his alternative service, Rubenstein worked with Vietnam veterans at a rehabilitation centre in New York City, then helped to organize a fishing co-operative in Pompano Beach, Florida. 

In 1968, he met Nancy Dyson, “and we fell in love.” The couple married in 1970 and, seeking adventure, took the Canadian Pacific transcontinental train, camping at various locations before ending up in Vancouver, where they realized it was time to seek employment. 

“We saw an ad in the Vancouver Sun for the Alert Bay Student Residence. We had no idea what that was, but we took our knapsacks, flew up there in a float plane and got a job at what turned out to be the former St. Michael’s Indian Residential School,” says Rubenstein. 

What the couple saw there disturbed them to the core. 

“I said, ‘What is going down here? These children are totally alone. Why are they separated from their families?’ They were so sad and vulnerable. It was hard for them to see their siblings in the school. They had nobody to trust, nobody to talk to,” he recalls. 

The couple tried to reach out to Indigenous leaders in the community and assist a local minister with a petition urging government officials to investigate what was happening in the school. But he said nothing was done to look into their complaints.  

“This school is an instrument of cultural genocide,” Rubenstein says he told the school’s administrator.  He was fired on the spot, and he and Nancy left the community and moved to Sointula, B.C. 

He spent the next few years working in tree planting and fishing, but by 1973, he was a landed immigrant. With a one-year-old son, Ari, he realized he needed a steady profession to support his family. He enrolled in a business program at Malaspina College in Nanaimo, where he was encouraged by a professor to become a chartered accountant. Rubenstein took this advice, got on the CA track, and began working for a private firm. He passed the uniform final exam in 1977. 

“Once I got my ticket in 1977, I was proud to join the Institute of B.C. (now Vancouver Island University). Then I moved from the private to the public sector to work for B.C. Buildings Corporation, a Crown corporation. It was an interesting job because we had to set up brand new accounting and general ledger systems,” he recalls. 

Rubenstein left B.C. Buildings to join Touche Ross Canada in their national office in Toronto in 1979, where he says he “had a chance to work with some of the most brilliant, gifted professionals. I really saw what a creative profession accountancy was and how it was at the heart of big business.” 

However, his family, which had expanded with the arrival of daughter Elizabeth in 1974 and son Joshua in 1977, did not like living in a big city, and Rubenstein accepted a transfer to the firm’s Ottawa office. 

In 1983, he was hired by the Office of the Auditor General of Canada, where he thrived. “As a member of the Auditor General of Canada, you are a servant of Parliament. That is a really honourable profession. There’s something sacred about the Canadian Parliament, and I found a real calling in that. This was something that I could really believe in, helping Parliamentarians do their job to hold government to account.” 

Moreover, by this time Rubenstein had discovered that “I was really a social activist at heart. I was much more concerned about the public good—the public welfare–than making money,” he says. 

After becoming a Principal with the Auditor General, he reignited “a latent desire to write” and began contributing articles to CA Magazine. His first article,  “Black Oil, Red Ink,” was about the Exxon Valdez oil tanker which struck a reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. 

That event had a profound impact on him. “Images of that oil destroying all of that wildlife, and all of that pristine nature and the ocean—it dawned on me, looking at that, that there was no accounting for ecological natural capital in our double-entry system. 

“I had to do something about it,” he adds.

Rubenstein, who had been gaining a reputation as an expert in the fledgling field of environmental accounting, was offered a grant by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development to study a large section of the boreal forest and write a report incorporating emerging concepts of the value of natural capital. That resulted in a book, Environmental Accounting for the Sustainable Corporation, published in 1994. The book discussed establishing satellite accounts for the natural capital upon which a company is economically dependent, using the boreal forest as an example.  

In 1994, the Office of the Auditor General established the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development branch. Rubenstein worked there for seven years, eventually retiring in 2007.  

Rubenstein and his wife have co-written two books in recent years, including Railway of Courage, a novel about the underground railroad that provided escape for former slaves. They also wrote St. Michael’s Residential School: Lament and Legacy, published in 2021, based on what they witnessed a half-century earlier.  

Rubenstein remembers attending Truth and Reconciliation hearings in Ottawa in 2015 and listening to the raw emotions of survivors. “We in Canada have an opportunity to move from reconciliation talk to reconciliation action, and the CPA profession in Canada has a vital role to play in this because Indigenous groups will be moving to increased sovereignty and increased self-government.  

“There will be a huge demand for Indigenous CPAs,” he explains. 

He notes that every cause needs money to survive and must exercise strong financial and fiduciary control.  

CPAs instinctively understand good governance and good financial management, and so “our skills are always in demand. There is an inexhaustible demand for CPAs and volunteering,” says Rubenstein. “And it is so rewarding.”