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Florida: Too soon for homeowners to return to disaster zone

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PANAMA CITY, Fla. — Linda Marquardt rode out Hurricane Michael with her husband at their home in Mexico Beach. When their house filled with surging ocean water, they fled upstairs. Now their home is full of mud and everywhere they look there’s utter devastation in their Florida Panhandle community: fishing boats tossed like toys, roofs lifted off of buildings and pine trees snapped like matchsticks in 155 mph winds.

Row after row of beachfront homes were so obliterated by Michael’s surging seas and howling winds that only slabs of concrete in the sand remain, a testament that this was ground zero when the epic Category 4 hurricane slammed ashore at midweek. The destruction in this and other communities dotting the white-sand beaches is being called catastrophic — and it will need billions of dollars to rebuild.

“All of my furniture was floating,” said Marquardt, 67. “‘A river just started coming down the road. It was awful, and now there’s just nothing left.”

At least six deaths were blamed on Michael, the most powerful hurricane to hit the continental U.S. in over 50 years, and by early Friday it wasn’t over yet: a tropical storm long after Wednesday’s landfall, Michael stubbornly kept up its punch while barrelling up the Southeast, dumping heavy rains and spreading flash flooding misery as far away as Virginia.

High winds, downed trees, streets inundated by rising waters and multiple rescues of motorists from waterlogged cars played out in spots around Virginia and neighbouring North Carolina. And while forecasters said Michael was gradually losing its tropical traits, it was a new chapter would begin as an extratropical storm predicted to intensify with gale force winds once it starts cross out into the Atlantic.

In North Carolina’s mountains, motorists had to be rescued Thursday from cars trapped by high water. High winds toppled trees and power lines, leaving hundreds of thousands without power. Flash flooding also was reported in the big North Carolina cities of Charlotte and Raleigh. Similar scenes played out in parts of Virginia as the storm raced seaward.

All told, more than 900,000 homes and businesses in Florida, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas were without power.

Meanwhile, thousands of National Guard troops, law enforcement officers and rescue teams still had much to do in the hardest hit area: Florida’s Panhandle. Families living along the Panhandle are now faced with a struggle to survive in a perilous landscape of shattered homes and shopping centres, the storm debris spread far and wide.

In one community, Panama City, most homes were still standing, but no property was left undamaged. Downed power lines and twisted street signs lay all around. Aluminum siding was shredded and homes were split by fallen trees. Hundreds of cars had broken windows. The hurricane damaged hospitals and nursing homes in Panama City, and officials worked to evacuate hundreds of patients.

“So many lives have been changed forever. So many families have lost everything,” said Florida Gov. Rick Scott, calling it “unimaginable destruction.”

An insurance company that produces models for catastrophes estimated Michael caused about $8 billion in damage. Boston-based Karen Clark & Company released that estimate Thursday, which includes privately insured wind and storm surge damage to residential, commercial and industrial properties and vehicles. It doesn’t include losses covered by the National Flood Insurance Program.

And Michael also was deadly, both in Florida and beyond.

A man outside Tallahassee, Florida, was killed by a falling tree was the first of “4 storm-related fatalities” announced by the Gadsden County Sheriff’s office. An 11-year-old girl in Georgia died when Michael’s winds picked up a carport and dropped it through the roof of her grandparents’ home. A driver in North Carolina was killed when a tree fell on his car.

Some fear the toll can only rise as rescue teams get around storm debris blocking roads and reach isolated areas.

More than 375,000 people up and down the Gulf Coast were ordered or urged to clear out as Michael closed in. But emergency authorities lamented that many ignored the warnings.

The Coast Guard said it rescued at least 27 people before and after the hurricane’s landfall, mostly from coastal homes. Nine people had to be rescued by helicopter from a bathroom of a home in hard-hit Panama City after their roof collapsed, Petty Officer 3rd Class Ronald Hodges said.

In hard-hit Mexico Beach alone, state officials say, 285 people in Mexico Beach defied a mandatory evacuation order ahead of Michael. The task ahead: finding and hopefully safely accounting for all those who stayed behind.

National Guard troops made their way into the ground-zero town and found 20 survivors initially Wednesday night, and more rescue crews are arriving. But the fate of many residents was unknown.

Mishelle McPherson and her ex-husband searched for the elderly mother of a friend. The woman lived in a small cinderblock house about 150 yards (meters) from the Gulf and thought she would be OK. The home was found smashed, with no sign of the woman.

“Do you think her body would be here? Do you think it would have floated away?” McPherson asked.

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Associated Press writers Tamara Lush in St. Petersburg, Florida; Gary Fineout in Tallahassee, Florida; Terry Spencer in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Jennifer Kay and Freida Frisaro in Miami; Brendan Farrington in St. Marks, Florida; Russ Bynum in Keaton Beach, Florida; Jonathan Drew in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Seth Borenstein in Kensington, Maryland, contributed to this story.

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For the latest on Hurricane Michael, visit https://www.apnews.com/tag/Hurricanes

Jay Reeves And Brendan Farrington, The Associated Press

























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What is ‘productivity’ and how can we improve it

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From the Fraser Institute

By Jock Finlayson

Earlier this year, a senior Bank of Canada official caused a stir by describing Canada’s pattern of declining productivity as an “emergency,” confirming that the issue of productivity is now in the spotlight. That’s encouraging. Boosting productivity is the only way to improve living standards, particularly in the long term. Today, Canada ranks 18th globally on the most common measure of productivity, with our position dropping steadily over the last several years.

Productivity is the amount of gross domestic product (GDP) or “output” the economy produces using a given quantity and mix of “inputs.” Labour is a key input in the production process, and most discussions of productivity focus on labour productivity. Productivity can be estimated for the entire economy or for individual industries.

In 2023, labour productivity in Canada was $63.60 per hour (in 2017 dollars). Industries with above average productivity include mining, oil and gas, pipelines, utilities, most parts of manufacturing, and telecommunications. Those with comparatively low productivity levels include accommodation and food services, construction, retail trade, personal and household services, and much of the government sector. Due to the lack of market-determined prices, it’s difficult to gauge productivity in the government and non-profit sectors. Instead, analysts often estimate productivity in these parts of the economy by valuing the inputs they use, of which labour is the most important one.

Within the private sector, there’s a positive linkage between productivity and employee wages and benefits. The most productive industries (on average) pay their workers more. As noted in a February 2024 RBC Economics report, productivity growth is “essentially the only way that business profits and worker wages can sustainably rise at the same time.”

Since the early 2000s, Canada has been losing ground vis-à-vis the United States and other advanced economies on productivity. By 2022, our labour productivity stood at just 70 per cent of the U.S. benchmark. What does this mean for Canadians?

Chronically lagging productivity acts as a drag on the growth of inflation-adjusted wages and incomes. According to a recent study, after adjusting for differences in the purchasing power of a dollar of income in the two countries, GDP per person (an indicator of incomes and living standards) in Canada was only 72 per cent of the U.S. level in 2022, down from 80 per cent a decade earlier. Our performance has continued to deteriorate since 2022. Mainly because of the widening cross-border productivity gap, GDP per person in the U.S. is now $22,000 higher than in Canada.

Addressing Canada’s “productivity crisis” should be a top priority for policymakers and business leaders. While there’s no short-term fix, the following steps can help to put the country on a better productivity growth path.

  • Increase business investment in productive assets and activities. Canada scores poorly compared to peer economies in investment in machinery, equipment, advanced technology products and intellectual property. We also must invest more in trade-enabling infrastructure such as ports, highways and other transportation assets that link Canada with global markets and facilitate the movement of goods and services within the country.
  • Overhaul federal and provincial tax policies to strengthen incentives for capital formation, innovation, entrepreneurship and business growth.
  • Streamline and reduce the cost and complexity of government regulation affecting all sectors of the economy.
  • Foster greater competition in local markets and scale back government monopolies and government-sanctioned oligopolies.
  • Eliminate interprovincial barriers to trade, investment and labour mobility to bolster Canada’s common market.
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COP29 was a waste of time

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From Canadians For Affordable Energy

Dan McTeague

Written By Dan McTeague

The twenty-ninth edition of the U.N. Climate Change Committee’s annual “Conference of the Parties,” also known as COP29, wrapped up recently, and I must say, it seemed a much gloomier affair than the previous twenty-eight. It’s hard to imagine a more downcast gathering of elitists and activists. You almost felt sorry for them.

Oh, there was all the usual nutty Net-Zero-by-2050 proposals, which would make life harder and more expensive in developed countries, and be absolutely disastrous for developing countries, if they were even partially implemented. But a lot of the roughly 65,000 attendees seemed to realize they were just spewing hot air.

Why were they so down? It couldn’t be that they were feeling guilty about their own hypocrisy, since they had flown in, many aboard private jets, to the Middle Eastern petrostate of Azerbaijan, where fossil fuels count for two-thirds of national GDP and 90% of export revenues, to lecture the world on the evils of flying in planes and prospering from the extraction of oil and natural gas. Afterall, they did the same last year in Dubai and there was no noticeable pang of guilt there.

It’s likely that Donald Trump’s recent reelection had a lot to do with it. Living as they do in a media bubble, our governing class was completely blindsided by the American people’s decision to return their 45th president to the White House. And the fact that he won the popular vote this time made it harder to deny his legitimacy. (Note that they’ve never questioned the legitimacy of Justin Trudeau, even though his party has lost the popular vote in the past two federal elections. What’s the saying about the modern Left? “If they didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all.”)

Come January, Trump is committed to (once again) pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accords, to rolling back the Biden Administration’s anti-fracking and pro-EV regulations, and to giving oil companies the green light to extract as much “liquid gold” (his phrase) as possible, with an eye towards making energy more affordable for American consumers and businesses alike. The chance that they’ll be able to leech billions in taxpayer dollars from the U.S. Treasury while he’s running the show is basically zero.

But it wasn’t just the return of Trump which has gotten the climate brigade down. After a few years on top, environmentalists have been having one setback after another. Green parties saw a huge drop off in support in the E.U. parliament’s elections this past June, losing one-third of their seats in Brussels.

And wherever they’ve actually been in government, in Germany and Ireland for instance, the Greens have dragged down the popularity of the coalitions they were part of. That’s largely because their policies have been like an arrow to the heart of those nations’ economies – see the former industrial titan Germany, where major companies like Volkswagen, Siemens, and the chemical giant BASF are frantically shifting production to China and the U.S. to escape high energy costs.

But while voters around the world are kicking climate ideologues to the curb, there are still a few places where they’re managing to cling to power for dear life.

Here in Canada, for instance, Justin Trudeau and Steven Guilbeault steadfastly refuse to consider revisiting their ruinous Net Zero policies, from their ever-increasing Carbon Tax, to their huge investments in Electric Vehicles and the mandates which will force all of us to buy pricey, unreliable EVs in just over a decade, and to the emissions caps which seek to strangle the natural resource sector on which our economy depends.

Minister Guilbeault was all-in on COP29, heading the Canadian delegation, which “hosted 65 events showcasing Canada’s leadership on climate action, nature-based solutions, sustainable finance, and Canadian clean technologies—while discussing gender equality, youth perspectives, and the critical role of Indigenous knowledge and climate leadership” and stood up for Canadian values such as “2SLGBTQI+” and “gender inclusivity.” Once again, in Azerbaijan, which has been denounced for its human rights abuses.

And no word yet on the cost of all of this – for last year’s COP28 the government – or should I say the taxpayers – spent $1.4M on travel and accommodations alone for the 633 member delegation. That number, not counting the above mentioned events, are sure to be higher, as Azerbaijan is much less of a travel destination than Dubai, and so has fewer flights in and available hotel rooms.

At the same time all of this was going on, Trudeau was 12,000 kms away in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,  telling an audience that carbon taxation is a “moral obligation” which is more important than the cost of living: “It’s really, really easy when you’re in a short-term survive, [to say] I gotta be able to pay the rent this month, I’ve gotta be able to buy groceries for my kids, to say, OK, let’s put climate change as a slightly lower priority.”

This is madness, and it underscores how tone-deaf the prime minister is, and also why current polling looks so good for the Conservatives that Pierre Poilievre might as well start measuring the drapes at the PMO.

He has the Trudeau Liberals’ obsessive pursuit of Net Zero policies in large part to thank for that.

The world is waking up to the true cost of the Net Zero ideology, and leaving it behind. That doesn’t mean the fight is over – the activists and their allies in government are going to squeeze as many tax dollars out of this as they possibly can. But the writing is on the wall, and their window is rapidly closing.

Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.

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