Your chronicler had an overwhelming first day at the CAAA Annual Conference. He was permitted to address the assembled multitudes at lunch which included him giving a very poor impression of “I’m backkkkkk!!!”

The point of the permitted address was to introduce Yves Gendron as the winner of the 2019 Haim Falk Award for Distinguished Accounting Thought! As one of the youngest to have known Haim in his prime, as CAR founding Editor, I could say with great certainty Haim would have approved. Maybe not understood some of Yves papers but understood many of them ( after all Haim published the first qualitative paper in CAR). Haim would definitely understood Yves approach to mentoring doctoral students/junior faculty and his devotion to editorial work!

In his acceptance speech Yves made three points.

1. Addressing those from la Francophonie at the lunch, he reminded them to contribute to French language accounting journals in addition to publishing in English! ( and did so en francais).

2. He talked about the secret of his success was being passionate! While he was trained in behavioural methods they verged to the experimental and positivist world view. Yves was passionate about lived experiences of accountants and others in the governance milieu leading him to pursue an unlikely path in North America as a qualitative researcher. A path only take by two brave souls before him – the rest were imports from Europe. As he said it could have been a grand failure but here he was getting one of the most prestigious accounting research awards in the world.

3. He talked about the importance of mentoring doctoral students and junior scholars! It is clear that this has driven Yves in many of his choices.

Bravo for ” let petit gars de Rimouski ” ( for the geographically challenged, Rimouski is a relatively isolated fishing and lumbering community in the Gaspe Bay region of Quebec Canada)!