Harley Finkelstein(@harleyf):Great WSJ piece on Alvin Segal. He started on a factory floor in Montreal and built Peerless into the largest men’s suit maker in North America. The reason he showed up in NAFTA: Peerless could bring Italian cloth into Canada duty-free, make the suits here, and sell them in the US. American factories paid a tariff on the same fabric. That advantage was big enough to hold up the whole deal for months. In public they called it the textile issue. The negotiators called it the Segal issue. I got to meet him early in my career. I was selling t-shirts. He was already one of the great Jewish Canadian entrepreneurs. An incredible builder.

2026.09.03 12:10

Great WSJ piece on Alvin Segal. He started on a factory floor in Montreal and built Peerless into the largest men’s suit maker in North America. The reason he showed up in NAFTA: Peerless could bring Italian cloth into Canada duty-free, make the suits here, and sell them in the US. American factories paid a tariff on the same fabric. That advantage was big enough to hold up the whole deal for months. In public they called it the textile issue. The negotiators called it the Segal issue. I got to meet him early in my career. I was selling t-shirts. He was already one of the great Jewish Canadian entrepreneurs. An incredible builder.

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