Editor’s Letter: Your workplace is watching you

At the upper reaches of Canadian banking, anyone who climbs high enough has to sign a contract vowing to stay on their best behaviour lest they sully the corporation’s reputation. When it works, the deal is mutually beneficial: in exchange for keeping the brand image spotless, the employee receives bonuses, stock options and other perks. When things go wrong, however, it’s an unholy mess. That’s because in the fragile world of high finance, even a whiff of bad news can be cataclysmic.

Last March, a crisis arrived at RBC’s gilded downtown aerie in the form of an anonymous tip alleging that the bank’s prized CFO, Nadine Ahn, had been spotted amorously exiting the elevator at the Royal York hotel with an RBC vice-president named Ken Mason. The problem wasn’t really the suggestion of an affair, which both of them would deny, but the possibility that Mason’s recent and rapid ascent was somehow due to Ahn playing favourites.

If ever there was a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency scenario, this was it. RBC’s thousands of investors—and their trillions of dollars—were betting on, among other things, the impartiality of Ahn’s management decisions and the soundness of her judgment. Up to that point, both had proven spectacularly good: Ahn had led the $13.5-billion acquisition of HSBC, and RBC had just posted profits of nearly $15 billion.

The allegation was as inopportune as it was impossible to ignore. With the approval of CEO Dave McKay, RBC dispatched investigators to covertly scrutinize more than a decade’s worth of correspondence between Ahn and Mason.

These days, anyone hired anywhere is told that communications made on work devices or servers are the property of the company. In other words, the boss can read everything you write. But that’s easy to forget, especially the longer the job goes on. How many of us have typed something over Slack, WhatsApp or email that we wouldn’t want our bosses to see?

On April 5, Ahn and Mason were summoned into separate meetings and confronted with heart-stopping accusations: they’d been carrying on an “undisclosed close personal ­relationship”—RBC stopped short of calling it romantic—for years. Even worse, RBC suggested, Ahn had engineered Mason’s rise. Both employees were asked to read texts and emails they’d exchanged, some signed with “I love you” and others bearing affectionate nicknames (“Prickly Pear” for her, “KD” for him). RBC trotted out evidence of “anniversaries” they’d observed, “liquidity meetings” at Canoe, plans to attend a Bills game and fantasies of reading in bed together. There was poetry. There was something called a LoveBook. Then, the kicker: a strategy document Mason titled “Project Ken” that laid out his plan to improve his position and increase his compensation.

Their resultant firing became the talk of Bay Street. Beyond the lurid fascination, insiders were chilled by the power of the all-seeing corporate eye and by what happens when contractual fine print is enforced. Yet the saga was only beginning. Ahn sued for wrongful dismissal, claiming a staggering $49 million in damages, and Mason did too. Both argued that there was far more to the story than RBC’s tight narrative. Then RBC doubled down and countersued. In her piece, “The Scandal, the Firing and the Fallout,” Sarah Treleaven unravels the story and situates it in the context of a post-privacy corporate world where the rules of engagement have never been more ruthless.

Malcolm Johnston is the editor of Toronto Life. He can be reached via email at editor@torontolife.com.