The Slip. Mark Sampson
Of course. I was taking my stepdaughter to a dance recital. Grace wanted me to —
The room filled with electric guitar and synthesized trumpets, and a camera came swinging toward us on a crane.
“It’s Monday, November 2, 2015, and you’re watching Power Today,” Sal said. “I’m your host, Sal Porter. On this program: evidence is mounting that last month’s bus disaster in Italy was in fact an act of terrorism. We’ll be on the line with an official in Rome with the latest. Also: Canada’s new foreign affairs minister is here to discuss Vladimir Putin and the worsening situation in Ukraine. But first: there’s only one story that every Canadian is talking about and that is last Friday’s collapse of ODS Financial Group. Its sixty-five hundred employees are out of work, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. With so many directly managed pensions and other financial assets vanishing overnight, the impact on Bay Street — as well as Main Street — could be enormous. To discuss the issue, we’re joined by two guests:
“Cheryl Sneed is a long-time columnist with the Toronto Times who’s been covering the ODS situation for months. She won a national newspaper award earlier this year for her profile of ODS’s chief financial officer, Glenda Harkins-Smith. Cheryl has just published her first book, entitled How Feminism Fails Women. Cheryl, thanks for joining us.”
“Thank you for having me.”
“And, making his eleventh appearance on our show, Dr. Philip Sharpe. Philip is a professor of philosophy and economics at the University of Toronto and the author of ten books. His latest is called Under the Guidance of Secret Motives: Corporate Canada Today. Philip, welcome.”
“Yes, thanks,” I muttered.
“Philip, I want to start with you because you dedicate a large portion of your latest book to profiling ODS, and how a toxic corporate culture there contributed to its problems. In fact, you spent part of your last sabbatical working undercover in its communications department.”
“That’s not entirely true,” I said. “They knew I was there; granted me several interviews with the C-suite, in fact. They just didn’t care. But I want to correct something from your intro, Sal: you said the impact of Friday’s announcement could be enormous. I would change ‘could’ to ‘will,’ and by ‘enormous’ we mean ‘cataclysmic.’”
“There’s no evidence of that,” Cheryl excreted.
“Look —”
“No, Philip. You and others have been arguing that this is 2008 all over again, and it’s just not true. Most of ODS’s assets were either shielded by new federal regulations — regulations brought in by your bogeyman, Stephen Harper, I should point out — or they were insured. Only a small sliver was tied up with the securities foreclosed on Friday.”
“Cheryl, 37.8 billion dollars is about to vanish from the Canadian economy. I wouldn’t call that a ‘sliver.’”
“Where are you getting that number from, Philip? Because every economist on Bay Street disputes it. And I mean every economist.”
“Of course they dispute it. They’re not exactly inde —”
“Okay, okay,” Sal said. “Let’s back up here.” As he provided a bit more background for his audience and lobbed a couple of questions at Cheryl, I glanced out briefly beyond the cameras and spotted Raj in the control booth. His hands were on his hips but he was still smiling — a good sign that I was doing well. I wondered in that moment if Grace had bothered to turn on the TV at home to watch me. Or was she still seething about the tub faucet or that I couldn’t bloody remember what we were doing next Sunday? What was it? Goddamn it, what was it?
“Now Philip, you’re coming at these issues as a philosopher,” Sal went on. “I mean, it’s well-documented that your area of specialty is moral duty — a kind of categorical sense of right and wrong. So in that context, what was it about ODS that piqued your interest to start with?”
“Well, it comes right back to corporate culture,” I said. “The firm began a century ago as one of these genteel and cautious fund managers. But like a lot of corporate entities — law firms and professional services companies and such — it became plagued with an ideology of internal competition, starting around the turn of the millennium. Suddenly everyone was slitting everyone else’s throat — within the organization — to elevate themselves and squeeze a bit more bonus out. From the senior leadership downward, backstabbing practically became a requirement for everyone who worked there. So I grew fascinated by how quickly ODS would betray or even reverse its own business plans, not to mention mission statements or ‘core values.’ By the end, purge-style coups d’état at the senior management level were a weekly occurrence. In the short time I was there, I witnessed whole careers expunged overnight from its corporate history. It was like something out of Stalinist Russia.”
“God, I can’t believe the melodrama you get away with!” Cheryl piped up.
“It’s not melodrama,” I said. “It’s fact. The —”
“If I could just interject here —” Sal attempted.
“It is. You know, Philip, your book is so typical of left-wing myopia. You went in to ODS with a thesis statement already calcified in your brain and then you cherry-picked the ‘facts’ that verified it, ignoring everything else.”
“That is not true.”
“It is.”
“Look, Cheryl —”
“No, it is. You went in there convinced that ODS was pure and unmitigated evil. A soulless multinational so driven by short-term profits that it lost any sense of a moral compass. So let me ask you this: in two hundred and seventy-eight pages, why did you make no mention of its Briefcase Moms program?”
I looked at her. “I don’t see how that is relevant to Friday’s —”
“You make no mention of Briefcase Moms — an initiative that Harkins-Smith herself was a direct beneficiary of. Why did you not mention that ODS has been a major sponsor of amateur athletics in Canada? Or that it’s been a platinum sponsor of the LGBT community’s Out On Bay Street conference? Or that it had work-life balance policies that a daily journalist would kill for?”
“Okay,” Sal jumped in, “maybe we should switch gears and —”
“Look,” I said, unwilling to let him rescue me. “We can talk about all the smokescreens the company threw up to hide its true nature —”
“Oh please.”
“— but the truth is. No, Cheryl, the truth is: sixty-five hundred people are out of work, billions have been vaporized from the economy, and the C-suite has made off like criminals. We’re talking eight-figure payouts, each. Money sheltered using complex financial instruments and a level of obscurantism unseen in the history of corporate Canada.”
“Well I know from your book, Philip,” Cheryl said, “that you interviewed the firm’s chief lawyer. What would he say now? Did the senior leadership do anything illegal?”
“That’s not the point.”
“It is the point.”
“Okay, we need to —” Sal said.
“Answer the question, Philip: Did they do anything illegal?”
“Cheryl —”
“Because you’re the one calling them criminals.”
“I said they were like criminals.”
“So answer the question: Did they do anything illegal?”
“They walked off with millions while leaving an economic catastrophe in their wake.”
“Did they do anything illegal?”
I turned away from her then. This grilling infused me with a sense of déjà vu from earlier. In fact, it felt as if Grace, not