Maple Leaf

Fifty years later, Jacques St-Cyr—who designed that single-leaf concept and now national icon—may finally get his due

The story of how the Canadian magazine solved its 90-year-old branding problem

I wonder if any of the other Macbloggers have been straining at their imaginations trying to find a PG-rated way to talk about the name change over at Canada’s second-oldest magazine. It took me a while to remember that General Semantics has an answer for this. So: The Beaver, now to become Canada’s History, was named in 1920 for what we’ll call beaver1, the rodent Castor canadensis. The periodical was obliged to make the change because of jokes about and search-engine confusion with beaver2, a colloquialism for an anatomical neighbourhood in the human female.

Judging from this footage, the Liberals have taken the important step of acquiring a large Canadian flag to use as a backdrop to Mr. Ignatieff. This, obviously, to counter Stephen Harper’s very large flag.

One of the most successful strategies for investing is to buy companies when they’re trading for less than they’re really worth, and wait until the price rises to the company’s “true value” (it’s often called “value investing”). Value investors often wait until a good company gets hit by an unforeseen disaster, which temporarily decimates the share price, then they scoop up a truckload of stock and wait for the disaster to pass.

All this chatter about meat recalls brought a waft of sudsy, luke warm nostalgia through the Maclean’s Montreal offices this morning. It wasn’t last night’s Mojitos, either – though if you can beat those at La Distillerie on Ontario street, I’ll eat my socks. No, Maple Leaf’s gigantic recall of its products after several deaths brought to mind a formally fabled Montreal staple: Dow Beer. And there are certain similarities between the struggling purveyor of deli meats and the long gone Montreal brewery.