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.
