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
