The Slip

by Mark Sampson

  Of course, I wasn’t thinking of any of this during the ride downtown. Instead I was thinking: What the fuck are we doing on Sunday? Grace had put the bug in my brain and I just couldn’t shake it. I knew it was something we had discussed, planned, maybe bickered over a little. But it was now hidden in the fog of my mind. What was it? What. Was. It?

  The Beck deposited me at the Canadian Broadcasting Centre — the CBC’s imposing Front Street edifice with its blue pillars and red-framed windows and larger-than-life photos of network personalities — and I marched through the doors and made my way to the atrium’s front desk. The receptionist paged Power Today’s producer, and within moments she came hustling out of the elevators toward me. I expected the first words out of her mouth to be, You’re late! but instead she said:

  “You’re not wearing a poppy.”

  “I know. It must have fallen off on my way over. I —”

  “I sent, like, four emails about it.”

  “I know, I’m sorry. Look, is there anywhere I can —”

  “No, there isn’t. And there’s no time, anyway.”

  She signed me in and then the elevator whisked us to the upper floors. I’d been on the show before but hadn’t met this particular producer. Her name was Lori, a whip-smart twentysomething with a look that balanced sporty with haggard: dark hair pulled into a tight ponytail; bags under her eyes from doing what would have been three people’s jobs twenty years ago; nice bum. We came out of the elevators and started Sorkining down a busy hallway as she explained the lineup to me.

  “You guys are up first. The ODS story is just too big not to lead with. We’re doing two eighters —”

  “Meaning?”

  “Two eight-minute segments. There’ll be a commercial break in between if you need to collect your thoughts.”

  “I won’t. Can’t speak for Cheryl, though.”

  “Sal was going to walk you through his intro and outro but there’s no time.”

  “How is Sal, anyway?”

  “There is. No. Time. Once we get you in the chair, I need you to —”

  “Philip Sharpe, you whiskey-swilling so-and-so!” I heard someone yell to me. I turned to see my friend Raj approach us through a nest of cubicles and camera stands. “You carpetbagging Maritimer! You salt-stained scallywag! How the hell are ya?” Raj was a freelance videographer, clearly on one of his intermittent contracts with the CBC. I had met him years ago, and would occasionally run into him while doing press chores for my books. Though roughly my age — fifty this year, gawd — Raj always struck me as younger, more vital, more unmoored. He was just as likely to be hanging off a cliff-face in Borneo with a camera on his shoulder as he was to be filming downtown Toronto biz-knobs with their jayus senses of humour for a corporate video. He and I weren’t particularly close. Yet in that moment, I was deeply relieved to spot his familiar face, and I hugged him clumsily when he came over.

  “It’s so good to see you,” I said.

  “Likewise — it’s been like, two years. I heard you were in the hot seat this afternoon.”

  “I am. They need an expert opinion on this ODS situation, plus Cheryl Sneed’s.”

  He laughed. “I hear that. You know, Rick Mercer was asking about you the other day.”

  “I know, I owe Rick an email. Do you know if he’s —”

  “Dr. Sharpe,” said Lori, “I really need you to come with me.”

  “You better do what she says,” Raj smirked, and whacked me on the shoulder. “We’ll talk later. Go eat ’em up. I’ll watch you from the booth.”

  Within minutes I was prepped for the stage: Lori clipped a microphone to my shirt like a prosthesis, then tucked its battery into the ass of my pants with completely non-sexual efficiency. Someone came by to give my brow and cheekbones a light dusting of powder. When finished, Lori shoved me out to the Power Today set.

  I staggered onto the rise, and there she was: stout, unsmiling Cheryl Sneed, already seated at the large glass table under the klieg lights. She wore a very blousy blouse, but had done something different — and dare I say appealing? — with her hair since I’d last seen her: a certain sensual swirl to her grey-blond locks, a truly noble attempt at attractiveness for a woman of her vintage. Above her left breast sat a pristinely fastened poppy.

  “Hello, Cheryl,” I said, sitting down in the chair a stagehand steered me into.

  “Philip.”

  “Good to see you.”

  Her eyes flashed to my tweed. “You not get the emails about the poppy?”

  “I lost mine on the way over.”

  “Understandable,” she said. “The things are engineered to fall off. It’s how the veterans make their money.”

  We were soon joined by Sal Porter, the impossibly handsome host of Power Today, who also wore a poppy. He shook my hand and took his seat at the end. “Running late today, Philip? We all missed you in the green room.”

  “Sorry, I was waylaid by …” What to say? An annoyed wife. Domestic trifles. A yearning vagina. A lapse in memory. What were we doing on Sunday, goddamn it? “… stuff at home,” I said. Yes, yes. Stuff at home. By now Simone would’ve gotten in the door from school, and Grace would be asking about her day, verifying homework assignments and partaking in other bits of motherwork before dinner. Wait, what had she wanted me to do with Simone on Wednesday night? Oh shit, I’d already forgotten. What was it? What was it?

  The final preparatory rituals for live TV unfurled around us — countdowns and cameramen call-outs and such. Lori popped by with a small metallic claw and pried the empty staples out of my lapel without bothering to ask how they’d gotten there. It seemed an overly finicky act, considering she did nothing about the strand of comb-over that was (I would learn later) standing almost completely vertically off my head.

  “Are we ready?” Sal asked.

  A dance recital! I nearly yelled out. That’s what it was! I ran a hand over my bushy red beard. 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 Cheryl, was sitting there at the Power Today desk, administering this third degree to me — making that horrific dig about my sexual prowess and then dragging me over the coals about forgetting what we were doing on Sunday. What was it? God, I wish I could remember.

  “Okay,” Sal said, “we’re just coming up to our first commercial break, and when we come back we should discuss …” and he read a few lines from his outro. But as I turned toward them again, I saw the gesture that Cheryl made at me. I’m not even sure the cameras caught it. It was that exact same jiggle of the head, that I guess I made my point flap of her hair, that Grace had made at me earlier. The exact same one. I felt the bile rise up in me.

  “What they did should be made illegal,” I said.

  Sal stopped suddenly, and he and Cheryl just sort of stared at me.

  “I beg your pardon?” she said.

  “What they did should be made illegal.” The words blundered out of me again before I could stop them. And so did these: “The government should pass a law making what happened on Friday illegal.”

  Cheryl let out a smug, choky guffaw. “You can’t be serio —”

  “I am dead serious,” I said. It was like a fever had overtaken my brain, burning behind my eyes and clouding everything around me. “The scope of the catastrophe is such that the government needs to take tough and — dare I say it? — punitive action.”

  “Really?” Cheryl said, twisting her girth around in her chair. “Really, Philip? You honestly think —”

  “All right, guys, we do need to go to —” Sal tried to interject.

  “You honestly think that would be the moral thing to do? Really? Okay, so the government takes months or even years passing new laws to make what they did illegal. And then what? What happens to your diabolical C-suite?”

  “And then they should be charged retroactively.”

  “Oh my God,” she said, swaying in her chair like a buoy.

  “I’m serious,” I retorted. “The magnitude of this is —”

  “Is what?” she barked. “Enough to override centuries of judicial law? I mean, this is really beyond the pale, Philip — even for you.”

  And just like that, the fever broke and I came out of it. My eyes passed back to the control booth, and I could see Raj through the window. He was no longer
smiling. His own eyes were wide, his cheeks sunken. And in that instant, I was convinced that Grace was watching me on the television. She and the kids. And also my faculty colleagues at the university. And my students. Everyone.

  Oh God — what did I just say? Did I just imply that people should be arrested for breaking a law that does not yet exist? Did I just undermine centuries of enlightened liberal values, values that I had been teaching — and defending, against the barbarism of both the Right and the Left — for more than twenty years, all for the sake of sending a handful of corporate types to jail? Did I just do that — on national television?

  “Look,” I sputtered, “what I’m trying to say is —”

  “Okay, we have to go to commercial,” Sal said. “We’ll be back, we’ll be back.”

  “Well,” Cheryl huffed as we faded out, “talk about Stalinist Russia …”

  Odious

  I hope you’ll indulge me, dear reader, if I backtrack now and provide some context around my chthonic journey into the hive of Canada’s finance sector. Yes, for three months in the fall of 2012 I joined the workaday masses that streamed through St. Andrew Station in downtown Toronto and up into the charcoal towers at King and York, into commerce’s everlasting orgasm at the low end of Bay Street. This was not, as certain faculty colleagues accused me of, some shallow act of anthropology on my part. I took this sabbatical not to specimen-ize a society, but to bear witness to the practical application of ideas I’d been grappling with since my Oxford days, ideas that culminated into my successfully defended D.Phil. dissertation in 1993 and its subsequent publication as my first book (Decanting Kant: The Categorical Imperative in the Age of Neo-liberalism, OUP, 1995). What to say: I was and still am an unapologetic deontologist; and I wanted to see how Bay Street’s increasingly unfettered cupidity affected real people at the level of their morals, their sense of duty to themselves and each other. ODS’s chicanery had been making headlines for half a decade by 2012, and the company seemed a fitting target for my experiment. But perhaps Cheryl Sneed was right: when I showed up for the first day of my entry-level position on their national Comms team, I was fully expecting a cruel, cutthroat environment.