the motley fool canada — 1 country that suits the title

the motley fool canada is, by the look of it, a polite branch of a polite order. snow, gentleness, an apology pre-attached to every quote. maggie lives in a small country and runs a small company. i picture canada similarly. the title fits the climate. the order, allegedly, expands.

9:47 on a friday, parked at the workstation, half a paper cup of coffee already cold beside the keyboard. the boss is two floors up at a procurement meeting rescheduled three times this month. nobody has emailed me anything urgent since wednesday. i have, generously, the next forty minutes to think about a country i have never visited and a costume that suits its weather.

so. the motley fool canada. four words that describe a regional offshoot of the noble fool tradition i have written about elsewhere, transplanted into a country that already speaks the language of polite acknowledgment of failure. canada apologizes when you bump into it. the throne-room fool apologized for nothing and named the truth anyway. the splice is, in fact, the post.

the motley fool canada: the motley fool canada is the canadian branch of the financial-media operation commonly known as the motley fool. it provides stock research, paid newsletters, and member content tailored to canadian markets and tickers. the regional branch operates under the same costume — the licensed truth-teller in patchwork — with prices in canadian dollars and a slightly cooler climate.

A POLITE COUNTRY. A POLITE FOOL. THE FIT. IS. STRUCTURAL.

1. the motley fool canada, the regional branch, briefly

the regional branch is a small, separate doorway on the website of a larger company. you click the maple-leaf flag, or the site quietly figures out where your IP lives, and you are routed to a version of the order that quotes prices in loonies and recommends tickers traded on the exchange in toronto. the same products. the same costume. a thinner accent on the e-mails.

the branch publishes its own newsletters and has its own analysts. it argues, in its own footnotes, about whether a railway is undervalued or whether a mining concern is, on inspection, a story dressed as a balance sheet. it is the order, abroad. abroad, in this case, is a country that ends in eh. the fool, in canada, wears the same patchwork — only slightly damper.

the brenda dead plant on the windowsill, dry since february, has views on this. brenda has been dead ninety-one days and looks, at a respectful distance, exactly like a small piece of canadian wilderness. i have not watered her. i have, in some sense, naturalized her.

2. why canada is, on inspection, a deeply fool-tolerant nation

the deeper question is climate. why does the costume fit the country.

i’m aware this is the kind of take a man holds when he has, in his life, met three canadians and seen one snow globe. the take is, therefore, suspect. it is also, by the small private logic of this desk, correct.

3. maggie runs a small business now, payroll, etcetera

maggie was a person i had three coffees with in 2019, in a cafe that no longer exists, in a season i remember mostly through the lens of a coat. maggie now runs a small business in a country that is not this one — small, cold, polite, with a flag that has a leaf on it or possibly a horse. she has, last i heard, employees with payroll. she has, by the standards of the dinner-party metric, made it.

maggie does not, to my knowledge, subscribe to the weekly missives the order in patchwork sends to paying subscribers. maggie reads spreadsheets — the polite cousin of the patchwork, same family, less performance. i picture her opening a tab, glancing at a recommendation, closing the tab, and going back to payroll. that is, anywhere, the senior version of the relationship.

the receipt wallet in my back pocket, currently containing seven slips from the bulk place and one from a bar i cannot remember entering, is the junior version. maggie has a ledger. i have a wallet of receipts. canada is, structurally, full of both kinds of person.

4. the ikea i visited had a canadian section, i did not buy

exhibit B is the ikea visit. i went, sometime in march, to the blue-and-yellow store everybody calls by its first name, in search of a small bookshelf and a cheap floor lamp. i found the bookshelf. i did not assemble the bookshelf — it now leans against the wall in the dining nook. the floor lamp was, in the lighting aisle, swapped for a lampshade that does not fit the lamp i already own.

the ikea had, by the registers, a small display labeled nordic comforts with a photograph of a cabin, a kettle, and what i think was a moose. the moose may have been a chair. the prices were in two currencies. the display was the closest thing to a canadian section the store had decided to admit. i stood there for four minutes. i bought, instead, a bag of frozen meatballs and a candle. the candle, three months later, is still wrapped.

the connection is that the ikea understood something the rest of the building did not. the canadian aesthetic is not loud. it does not advertise. it lives in a small section by the door, with a kettle and a moose-or-chair and a polite flag. the order in patchwork, in canada, does the same thing — it puts up a small page and says, in cheerful lowercase, this is the canadian doorway. the rest of the order is the same. only the temperature is different. the fit is, again, structural.

5. the tie i own would not survive a canadian winter

the tie i own — singular, dark blue, last knotted at tom’s wedding, currently rolled into a tense lump in the top drawer of the desk at home — is exhibit C. silk. opinions about temperature. would not, by my honest reckoning, survive a canadian winter outside a coat.

this matters because every paid annual relationship with a financial-media company i have considered has had a moment where a man in a tie appears in a webinar and says something about “long-term thinking”. the man, in my screen, is in a heated room. the tie is fine. if the man were broadcasting from saskatoon in february, the tie would be the wrong instrument — a small uniform of a country that does not snow.

i hold HT6 on a related question. coffee is achievement. tea is wet leaves. canada drinks both — undecided, on this metric. the order in patchwork sits on the coffee side, shipping its newsletters in a tone of caffeinated caution, which is the closest a financial-media company gets to honesty. i cite the take. i do not, today, defend it.

in “strange brew”, the 1983 bob and doug mckenzie film, the canadian costume is two flannel shirts and a tuque, and the truth, when it gets told, is told over a beer in a parking lot. the costume in patchwork is older. the parking lot is the same.

6. verdict — the regional branch tracks the regional climate

so. the verdict, before the procurement meeting upstairs ends.

the motley fool canada is not a separate animal. it is the same order, in the same costume, in a colder building. that is the entire pitch. the regional branch tracks the regional climate. the country apologizes pre-emptively. the costume admits, in advance, that nobody in the room is winning forever. the marriage is honest. the prices are in loonies.

i am not qualified to subscribe. i do not hold canadian tickers. the page exists as a small piece of evidence that the costume travels. it traveled, in this case, north — to a country full of people willing to listen to a man in patchwork. that is, by every metric available to a man at a desk on a friday at 9:47, a structurally correct country for the order to expand into.

the deeper question — whether the three-letter compression of the same name works as well in canada as at home — is above this desk’s pay grade. the abbreviation is climate-agnostic. three letters do not freeze.

10:18, the cold coffee finished, brenda still dead, the procurement meeting still allegedly upstairs. the post is done.

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