Personally I feel bad about the merger too. After all these costly campaigns against granting public practice rights for CMAs and CGAs in Quebec and Ontario why do we have to support unification now? The fact is, things have changed drastically over the last 4 or 5 years.
When I joined the financial services industry about 20 years ago most of the senior finance jobs (CFO, VP etc) were held by CAs. At that time the next tier (managers, directors, AVPs etc) below the senior levels were also held by CAs. 20 years later, I still see the senior jobs being monopolized by CAs, however, the next level is mostly held by CGAs and CMAs now. It is just a matter of time before they move up the ladder as they gain more experience.
What really happened was, CMA and CGA programs have improved a fair bit over the years. Plus, most of the CGAs and CMAs you meet at the senior levels have MBAs or other credentials such as CFA in addition to their designations. (I believe CMAs and CGAs have arrangements with universities for MBA programs and a lot of their members are taking advantage of it. We, on the other hand, are in our comfort zones taking pride of our articleship.)
At the same time, in two of the largest provinces, Ontario and Quebec, we lost the fight to keep CMAs and CGAs off public practice. (My understanding is that CMAs still don't have the right to issue public practice licenses in Ontario yet.) The Ontario leadership made a strategic blunder to prosecute a CGA who did someone's tax filing! The next few years CGAs spent enormous amounts of money and effort to lobby Ontario politicians to change the licensing regime. Clearly they won. Look at the price we are paying for our leaders' arrogance, shortsightedness and overconfidence!
This doesn't mean the merger will go through. Young CAs in Ontario have taken up the fight in earnest. You can see their passion here:
http://www.facebook.com/groups/158690004197791/
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/...ignatures.html