L&O season 2: Episode 6

[sabotabby]

As I anxiously hit REFRESH REFRESH REFRESH on CBC's live updates, I am distracting myself with what else? Kind of the perfect episode for our political moment.

There's a hardworking concierge at a luxury building whose son has run afoul of some enforcer types after racking up a massive gambling debt. The son is now minus a few fingers and the dad is desperate to help him pay off his debts. One of the owners is nasty to him for even allowing his son through the front door, but Jack, another owner, comes to his defence. Later, he violently assaults the asshole owner and pleads guilty to aggravated assault. In maximum security prison, he stabs another inmate—an accountant jailed for a relatively minor offence—to death.

I would not have guessed what this one was based on by that introduction and neither will you.



HOKAY so this is a financial crimes one, which is my favourite type of crime to learn about. I should just watch White Collar or something instead of this shit. It is very convoluted with a ton of characters: We have billionaire Jack and his philanthropist wife, Amelia, their failson Curtis, Curtis's friend Harry who runs a charity—

—okay now you know where this is going—

—and the victim, Allan, was the accountant for that charity.

So after a lot of back and forth, Jack had done shady shit in the past but was trying to go clean and signed a billionaire pledge to give away his money to charity. Curtis didn't like being left with no inheritance, so he recommended his friend's charity, which builds farms in South Sudan. Jack invested his money, but turns out that in the glossy pamphlets and posters, it's the same farmhouse Photoshopped into different settings. The money is actually going to Jack's tax shelter corporation in Ireland. Allan was going to inform on them, Amelia found out, and she always covers for her son's messes, so she hired the concierge to get himself arrested so that he could kill Allan, thus cleaning up Curtis's mess.

Got all that?

I hate to tell you, this is not nearly as convoluted as the actual WE scandal, and it is not nearly as fun. This is the problem; whenever they do a case I like, it always turns out that the real, non-murder version is vastly more entertaining than the story they make about it. If you don't know about the WE scandal, let me know and I'll give you an abbreviated version (as much as it can be abbreviated) because it's really quite fun.

There are also shades of Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel in Jack and Amelia, so it's even a twofer for me. The problem is, you can't make a character based on either of them on TV* because they are too cartoonishly evil and it comes off as unrealistic. It's also a problem that Amelia is British and in the process of becoming a peer, but famously, you cannot be a Canadian citizen and accept British titles. So she'd have to renounce her citizenship like Conrad Black did. It was a whole thing.

All in all, this episode was pretty entertaining, but it suffers from not being as good as either of the real stories it's based on.

Plot: *** (Would have been higher were I not extremely familiar with all of the details of the WE scandal, and Curtis and Harry are not nearly as fun villains as Mark and Craig Kielburger)

Characters: *** (Some people on Reddit thought it was corny but Graff goes on an Epic The Reason You Suck Speech and quotes Chaucer and Graham Greene and lambasts rich people. ACAB but it's very hard to dislike Graff in this.)

Toronto: ** (The locations are pretty vague, though not implausible. What do I know? I don't know anyone that rich. The headquarters for the charity isn't bad; that was about how WE headquarters looked, although a little more professionalized than the actual place was. The prison isn't as crowded as you'd expect, though part of that is the practicalities of shooting the scene.)

Murder count: According to the Toronto Police data site, we are now up to 11 murders this year (I didn't hear about any murders in the news, but presumably they know something I don't). So the show is covering 64% of all murders in Toronto.

* Unhinged fantasy novels are another story.

Comments

[kore]

Tell me about the WE scandal!

Nyt dot com had a Canada elections page all set up and I rushed over but it was blank, lol.

[sabotabby]

It is way tighter than it should be so far I am losing my shit.

Okay so

Student activism was a Thing when I was in high school, we went to protests, had our politically themed clubs, etc., with minimal teaching involvement. And I was particularly involved in anti-globalization/anti-sweatshop stuff. All of a sudden, there was this tiny child, Craig Kielburger, clogging all the headlines, going on about the horrors of child labour. He was from an extremely wealthy family and he was being interviewed all over the place. He and his older brother, Mark, founded an organization called Free the Children that theoretically raised awareness about the issue.

Despite many, many activists taking this up with boycotts and direct action and sneaking videos of maquiladoras and so on, Free the Children really caught on for some reason, completely coincidental to the fact that the Kielburger parents were rich and the organization didn't advocate anything that threatened capitalism or the companies doing the exploitation. No boycotts or messy protests, just bake sales, and the Kielburgers became celebrities.

Suddenly, Free the Children was a franchise group in every single school. Teacher-advisors would get a big binder full of activities to do with kids to fundraise, with the money going to the organization. They developed a for-profit company, Me to We, that ostensibly sold fair trade trinkets and eventually trips for rich kids to go dig wells in Africa. This is the point at which I became suspicious that they were up to no good, but they were very litigious and immediately buried any investigation.

By the time I started teaching, they had bought housing for their employees and it was basically a cult. There were annual WE Days where kids would go to the stadium for these massive star-studded rallies and hear about how they were "being the change." There was no longer any student-directed activism; social justice minded kids could pad their resumes with this instead.

Independent investigations found a number of irregularities, like a complete lack of separation between the charity and the for-profit business. One donor's son had died, and they supposedly built a school in his honour, but he found out that they also dedicated the same school to someone else's memory. Whistleblowers got threatened. Eventually, they got a sweet sweet contract from the federal government during covid (Sophie and Margaret Trudeau were both WE Day speakers and closely tied to the organization) and the whole thing blew up in both Justin and the Kielburgers' faces and it was glorious.

[kore]

Damn!

(Is there good election news??)

[sabotabby]

Not yet. The Liberals are in the lead but they've mainly counted Atlantic Canada, which leans more left. Ontario and Quebec have to have a decent showing to counter the prairie provinces, which always go Tory.

*

[minoanmiss]

*reads in wonder*

this is totally the kind of plot that would work for White Collar, sending a character undercover, to be circular.

Re: *

[sabotabby]

I should give White Collar a shot sometime. It's just that I don't normally go back and watch older shows.

Re: *

[minoanmiss]

On the plus side: NYC, polyamorous cuteness, Diahnn Carroll, flip phones On the not so plus side: season 5 went ddownhill

Meanwhile, I'm contemplating [re]-watching Leverage for sociopolitical reasons, ahahaha.

Re: *

[sabotabby]

That's what I've heard. Leverage is great though, and hits a lot of the same buttons.