Lubin’s 4.9%, Duffield’s 1988 living trust, and dual-class transit accounts: three mechanics that need a world you do not live in

The 5% threshold. There is no Schedule 13D for a company nobody else owns shares in. Dropping below a disclosure threshold is only valuable if you were above one. The transferable residue is not a structure but a habit: the documents a person is obliged to file are the only ones that explain purpose, and obligations end. When you read about someone’s holdings, check which filing regime they are still inside.

Duffield’s revocable living trust. A US revocable living trust is primarily a probate-avoidance device, and it does not map onto Ontario. A trust you can revoke generally does not remove assets from your estate for Canadian purposes, and the Ontario equivalents for probate planning — alter ego and joint partner trusts — are not available until age 65 and carry their own attribution and deemed-disposition consequences. Multiple wills are the more common Ontario tool for keeping private-company shares out of the estate administration tax calculation. None of this is the same device, and borrowing the American version would be actively wrong.

The Class A transit account. Dual-class conversion mechanics require a public listing and two share classes. You have neither. What does carry over is the reading discipline from “What Repeats”: when someone shows you a percentage change, ask what is in the denominator before you ask what the number means. That applies to a cap table, a customer-churn figure, and a Form 4 equally.