Clarkson Gordon & Co

Clarkson Gordon (also known as Clarkson Gordon & Co) was a national Canadian accounting and receivership business founded in Toronto, Upper Canada in 1864 by Thomas Clarkson and operated for 125 years until the partnership elected to merge with the EY network of firms in 1989 following the merger between Ernst & Whinney and Arthur Young & Co.

The firm was considered a finishing school for Canadian business elite and was known as the pedigreed accounting firm, whose reputation for creating a "Clarkson Man" was that of creating "a gentleman who had been taught from birth if he were lucky, or during his apprenticeship with the firm if he were less so, how things worked in the Canadian elite. Clarkson Men masked their aggressive, innovative energies behind an acceptably circumspect façade of unrelenting hard work, iron-willed self-control, and unerring good manners". Those matters of being a gentleman; what the Globe described as the difference between an accountant and a "Clarkson Man" differed in its description over the years, the Globe's 1965 description was eventually expanded to include: a quiet self-confidence, a willingness to work weekends and holidays and above all, to be willing to lose—or perhaps more aptly leave—a client if the financial data underpinning an audit was misleading.