This is the week’s one genuinely portable idea. Dines did the irreversible thing — converting away permanent voting rights — five weeks before anyone had a reason to look, and at a moment when it cost him nothing visible. The Canadian analogue is the estate freeze: exchange your common shares in the operating company for fixed-value preferred shares under section 85 or section 86 of the Income Tax Act, and issue new common shares to a family trust or a holding company, so that all future growth accrues outside your own estate.

Like the conversion, it is effectively one-way, and like the conversion its whole value depends on doing it before the growth it is meant to redirect. A freeze done after a valuation inflection redirects much less.