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For once, Claude Brochu is on the right side of a slide in the Canadian dollar.

Mr. Brochu spent years struggling against a low loonie, when he was president, and eventually part owner, of the Montreal Expos from 1986 through 1999. Baseball fans in Montreal paid for tickets in Canadian dollars; the Expos paid players in U.S. greenbacks. So Mr. Brochu fielded not the team he wanted, but the team his poor, devalued loonies could afford.

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“It’s the kind of thing that got me in a lot of trouble from a fan perspective,” Mr. Brochu recalls. “I didn’t want to go in the hole, so I wasn’t too popular.”

In 1999, Mr. Brochu sold his Expos stake to Jeffrey Loria, a New York art dealer, for $18 million. Mr. Loria threatened to move the Expos unless the Quebec government bought him a new ballpark. The province said no. They hated Mr. Loria sold the team; at the end of 2004 the Expos became the Washington Nationals.

Mr. Brochu, meanwhile, made a purchase that now looks prescient: property in Florida.