Organization’s President & CEO explains why she and her team chose these awards to trumpet their message
FP Canada is on a mission to promote the virtues and impacts that come with access to financial planning. They’ll educate advisors and the general public. They’ll advocate to government and the country’s largest institutions. They’ll highlight the challenges that Canada faces from a dearth of plans and planning, and they’ll show how better access to plans can create a virtuous cycle. In service to their mission, they’ll celebrate too.
FP Canada is one of the longstanding sponsors returning to the 2026 Wealth Professional awards, putting their name behind the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. Tashia Batstone, President & CEO of FP Canada, explained why her organization sees celebration as part of their advocacy work and how she and her team plan to use the awards as a platform to further a message they believe the whole industry needs to hear.
“I think it's important to recognize the value that financial planning brings, the people who provide that service, and to celebrate this commitment of financial planning professionals to high quality support for their clients, for Canadians,” Batstone says. “It’s an opportunity to raise the profile of a profession that is serving the public interest, that’s focused on helping people and acknowledging the people who do it well.”
The choice to support the lifetime achievement award in particular, Batstone explains, comes from an acknowledgement of the commitment made by the professional honoured. Batstone acknowledges that financial planning, as a profession, is relatively new. FP Canada is only in its 31st year as an organization. A lifetime commitment to financial planning would have begun in a time when the industry was more focused around sales and product than service and support. Batstone believes that those acknowledged by this award have served as the leading edge for planning as a profession.
While planning has become a core part of what the wealth management industry now provides to Canadians, Batstone believes there is still more work to do. She notes the recent study of Canadians’ retirement readiness published by the National Institute on Ageing, showing just how important access to a plan can be for Canadians approaching retirement, no matter their income bracket. The WP awards, she notes, offer a number of opportunities to celebrate advisors for their commitment to making those improvements in peoples’ lives.
The awards also give Batstone and her FP Canada colleagues a chance to mix, mingle, and chat with advisors and industry leaders. They can connect over the notion of holistic planning and discuss how essential providing these services is for their clients. She knows that while planning is gaining traction, not every person in the room will be a planner. Getting to speak to other wealth management professionals from other experiences and backgrounds allows Batstone and FP Canada to advance their mission and learn about what other professionals want.
Planners, Batstone says, can help solve a number of issues plaguing Canadians. The first, as she sees it, is in the ongoing push to improve financial literacy and turn that growing literacy into what she calls “financial impact.” It can be relatively straightforward to explain the theory behind a financial tool or concept. It’s something else to show someone how that tool of concept can be integrated into their life. Turning financial education into financial impact, Batstone explains, can lend itself to solutions to the other core issue: retirement readiness.
Batstone notes how much has changed in recent years around Canadians’ expectation that they cover for their own retirement, often in lieu of an employer-sponsored pension plan. While that can be done, it requires an understanding of the hard choices that may be required of people. It requires advice that goes beyond investment product and returns, too. It requires advisors who can understand what a client needs based on what they already have. Planning, Batstone argues, can help make that difference.
FP Canada will be at the WP awards in June to help affect that positive change, to encourage more advisors to communicate, in any way they can, that planning can help Canada and Canadians.
“This is such an important issue that there need to be more voices communicating this out to Canadians. It can't just be FP Canada,” Batstone says. “The reality is that consumers have built relationships with all of these advisors and they trust them. And if they trust these advisors, they're going to listen to them. We can help advisors see how important it is to be able to provide those holistic services to their clients, to help build their resiliency, to build their financial wellness.”
Nominations for the WP awards close on Friday February 13th, nominate yourself or a deserving party here.
