Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2016

The Current Transcript for September 11, 2017

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

I think your day has come. The good thing is we have trained for this we have prepared for this. We are ready for this.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: The mayor of Tampa Bay, Florida before the fury of Irma reached his city and while the strength of that promise remains to be measured the level of devastation has already brought, has left other parts of the state reeling, while destruction on the islands of the Caribbean is overwhelming. In a moment we will hear from some of those who have been in Irma’s path and a man whose own work tracking hurricanes have taught him where planners fail. Also today:

SOUNDCLIP

What we're really doing is closing down loopholes that people are currently using and using and increasing pace to give themselves a lower tax rate.

AMT: Finance, Minister Bill Morneau, is unwavering in his view that certain tax deductions are unfair loopholes for the wealthy. His opponents say it is hurting the very middle class he claims to want to help. In half an hour we will hear from the finance minister as well as his critics. But we are starting with the fury the storm has wrought. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Currents.

Back To Top »

As the planet warms, 'we're going to see more hurricanes like Irma'

Guests: Johanne Perron, Deasie Beverly, Hugh Willoughby

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER 1: Just to show you what is happening out here, it is… The [unintelligible] force not even begin to describe it.

REPORTER 2: The ferocity of the wind feeling like needles on your face, that is exactly the way it feels here. Not a comfortable feeling.

REPORTER 3: We are still seeing bands of thunderstorms and hurricane force winds, even though the center is about 100 kilometers to our northwest.

REPORTER 4: … that Irma is literally just days after Harvey, right. The likely cost of the U.S. of these two storms almost defies comprehension.

AMT: OK well a medley of reporters there, standing in the middle of hurricane Irma's, some of them, yesterday in Florida. The storm thrashed the state's west coast. It first made landfall in Key West and made its way toward Naples and Tampa. And as you've been hearing on the news, there is destruction across Florida and also across the Caribbean. We're going to start in the Caribbean because as you're also hearing on the news, families of people who are stuck on certain islands - the French controlled island of St. Martin, the British Virgin Islands, and other British territories - are upset this morning that the Canadian government has been unable to get them out of the hurricane ravaged zones of the Caribbean. Johanne Perron is on the islands of Turks and Caicos and she joins us now. Hello.

JOHANNE PERRON: Hello. Hello, Annamaria. It's quite the honor to talk to you this morning.

AMT: Well, thank you, but I'm honored to talk to you. I just want to hear what's happening with you. You're trying to get out. Why have you not been able to?

JOHANNE PERRON: Well, many many reasons. If I may begin at the beginning, I would like to be very clear with my first point. I first believe that if you're a candidate and Club Med had agreed to repatriate us, before the hurricane hit, we would not be here in the situation today. Club Med from the very beginning told us that we were not evacuated before Irma because we had not received an evacuation notice. Yet, the office of the minister of tourism of Turks and Caicos published an article on their site demanding that all tourists evacuate the island before the arrival of Irma. So why we're still here is quite uncertain, why Club Med would not have communicated this information with us. But they were very good to reassure us, time after time after time that their buildings were built solid for a Category 5 hurricane.

AMT: And what happened, Joanne? How did the hurricane hit? What's it like around you what happened, as you went through that thing?

JOHANNE PERRON: Oh my good Lord! Well, we were coupled up in rooms. We were in with another couple. The lower level travelers were asked to go to the upper levels for inundation purposes. And so we all lived through it. We were curfewed. We were given sandwiches and necessities; water for the day and for the night because the curfew was at 2:00 p.m. We entered our rooms at 2:00 p.m. and it was blowing quite hard at that time. And it was more like perhaps a tropical storm or whatnot. And then at 9:00 p.m., that's when… Yes, 9:00 p.m. No, about 8:00 p.m.

AMT: Which day are we talking about?

JOHANNE PERRON: It was Thursday. It was Thursday. It was Thursday September 7th through to Friday during the night, like at about 3:00 a.m. It started going down quite a bit. And then we heard that it - We noticed the difference that was going away. The pressure in our ears was dwindling and it felt quite good at that time knowing that we had survived this tragedy.

AMT: Were the buildings intact? Was anybody hurt?

JOHANNE PERRON: No one here at the resort was injured. Just a couple of people I believe, the next morning who went out before the curfew was lifted and received a nail through their toes, or that kind of thing from the debris. But no one was really injured and no one was killed.

AMT: And do you have food and water where you are now, then?

JOHANNE PERRON: We have food, water. I think Club Med did a good job of getting this place up and going, the following day.

AMT: Can you stay put, then? I understand there is a plane on the ground but it can't take off. Is that correct?

JOHANNE PERRON: Yes that's exactly correct and it was published and I don't know what newspaper published it. I don't remember what media published it, but they also said that Air Canada was sending a humanitarian aid plane yesterday, which was landing here in Turks and Caicos and that we were going back on. So the resort received the list yesterday morning of 90 or 100 and so Air Canada passengers on this resort. And we were all told to go to the airport. And when we arrived at the airport the Turks and Caicos government did not want us to go back on that airplane for some political reasons. I have no idea. There was a meeting between the prime minister here, the Club Med manager and also the Air Canada authority there - a pilot or whoever - met with them. And we actually waited, Anna Maria, in scorching heat on very hot buses for about three hours. It was unbearable. And then we just came back to the hotel and we're told that the Turks and Caicos government would not let us go.

AMT: Okay.

JOHANNE PERRON: Quite upsetting after, you know, after a humanitarian aid aircraft landed to help out this country we were not allowed out, for some reason.

AMT: When did you arrive there?

JOHANNE PERRON: We arrived last Sunday, September 3^rd?

AMT: Okay. Did you think about not going, given that Harvey had just been through and you knew Irma was coming?

JOHANNE PERRON: So, knowing that the hurricane sometimes die down, or they slowdown in seas - in force, or knowing that they often change trajectory. We still came out, thinking, hoping for the best. On Monday it was an okay day and then we even talked about it. I think on Monday, “Do we leave? Do we stay?” And then, Tuesday morning is when we decided to leave because I think that's when we heard on TV that it was headed directly for Turks and Caicos.

AMT: And why couldn't you leave on Tuesday then?

JOHANNE PERRON: Oh goodness. Oh my gosh. Just all the trouble that we had to go through. You know we stayed up until 2:00, 3:00 o'clock in the morning Tuesday and Wednesday, trying to get a flight out of here before airport closure. Okay? We could not leave. Many people. We are about five or six Canadians representing this entire group. We were on line for hours for Air Canada and only to be told at the other end to check with our Club representative, connect with the AC representative on flight the following morning. And no representatives exist on this flight from any airline. So we were not given any answers whatsoever from Air Canada. We called Global Affairs. They could do nothing for us. Really nothing they could do. They said they could do nothing for us, Global Affairs.

AMT: Okay, let me just…

JOHANNE PERRON: There is good news, actually.

AMT: What's that?

JOHANNE PERRON: The plane that landed yesterday is still grounded here. The plane is still grounded, which is looking good for today.

AMT: Johanne, and before we go I just have to ask you then, if you could say one thing to government officials, briefly, what would you say?

JOHANNE PERRON: the Canadian officials?

AMT: Yes.

JOHANNE PERRON: I would say, well right now, the Air Canada flight is here. The plane is on the Terratarmac somewhere, at this airport. We send Canadian aid humanitarian aid and we want to go home today.

AMT: Our Global Affairs Canada says it is working to ensure the safety of Canadians and bring them home as soon as possible. That's a statement on its site. There are about 9000 Canadians in the storm affected region. Three hundred forty eight have requested assistance, out of those nine thousand. Deasie Beverly works for the Pinellas County Water Department where she was taking calls from desperate residents in Florida yesterday, people who could not get out, different circumstances. We've reached Deasie Beverly in St. Petersburg, Florida. Hello.

DEASIE BEVERLY: Hello.

AMT: How's the weather where you are right now?

DEASIE BEVERLY: Right now it's dark and it's just a steady low drizzle rain, still a little bit windy and there's debris all over the place. And the power is out.

AMT: And how long have you been home?

DEASIE BEVERLY: I've been home since I left the citizens’ [unintelligible] center, where I was helping the elderly yesterday, at 4:00 because there was a 5 o'clock curfew and I wanted to be home. So I'd been home yesterday since 5:00 p.m. The power went out at 8:30 p.m.

AMT: Okay. And you chose to go home you didn't evacuate to a shelter.

DEASIE BEVERLY: No I did not evacuate to a shelter because I felt like my home was secure. Its concrete block and it was mainly for residents in low lying beach areas and mobile homes. So I need to evacuate.

AMT: Okay. But you were at that call center until you had to leave. What kind of calls were you getting?

DEASIE BEVERLY: Oh. Yesterday I was getting calls from the elderly and special needs citizens who had not evacuated. They were the ones that were alone, were waiting on transport to shelters and they had not been picked up.

AMT: They must have been panicked.

DEASIE BEVERLY: They were panicked. Those were the types of calls I got yesterday and that was my position was to try to get them out of these mobile home. And that's where this story came up. Ms. Gilmore she was 95 years ago. She had completed paperwork to be picked up five days ago and no word had come and got her. I just stepped up to make sure that she was picked up because she was actually willing to walk to our shelter. And I just put everything in motion. And the minute I was in the center I made contact with a social worker that was in the center that was handling distress calls. I told her about Mrs. Gilmore. And she went and picked Mrs. Gilmore up from her mobile home and took her to a shelter.

AMT: So, she is okay.

DEASIE BEVERLY: Yes. It was just a lot of those types of calls; the elderly couldn't live alone. All their children are out of state and they were just sitting there waiting to - like sitting ducks - waiting to be picked up with nothing to do.

AMT: And you told me that the 95 year old woman was actually going to try to walk to a shelter if no one had come.

DEASIE BEVERLY: That's what she told me and I told her not to because the weather was bad and she was crying and she was underdressed. And that touched my heart and I couldn't leave until I made sure that she had made it to a shelter. So the social worker in the call center went and picked her up and then she came back and told me that she took her to the shelter and how grateful she was. If I hadn't put forth that extra effort, I'm convinced that she would have been still in her mobile home.

AMT: It's a reminder when they say that people should get out, not everyone is able to, or maybe would even hear those warnings.

DEASIE BEVERLY: Yes. She was very abreast of the warnings and the severity of the issue. But if you don't drive or have a lie and everyone is taking care their selves, what can you do? She told me her son was a firefighter in Miami and Timber Pines, which is another devastated area, and I was like “Oh my God! He's in Miami helping people. And his mother is here and no one's helping her.” That's the part that got to me.

AMT: Who else did you hear from yesterday, then?

DEASIE BEVERLY: Oh. I heard from, not only elderly, just regular residents there called at the eleventh hour “Oh I didn't really realize it was going to be this serious,” “I don't have a lot, it's all of us. Can you all come pick us up?” People waited too late. We were saying this a week ago. Come up with the plan.

AMT: Okay, well thanks for speaking with me today. I'll let you go. Thank you for bringing us up to date on what was happening with you.

DEASIE BEVERLY: Okay. Thank you so much and I appreciate your calling.

AMT: That is Deasie Beverly explaining how she managed to help a 95 year old woman who got stuck in Pinellas County around St. Petersburg, Florida. Hugh Willoughby has been watching hurricane Irma’s approach through two lenses; someone who lives in Miami and an hurricane expert. He's professor of meteorology in the Department of Earth and Environment at Florida International University. He's the former head of the Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the U.S. and Hugh Willoughby joins us now from Miami. Hello.

HUGH WILLOUGHBY: Good morning.

AMT: So, what stands out for you about this hurricane? What was expected versus what you saw?

HUGH WILLOUGHBY: Well I am very glad that worst of what we've feared - lose track of what day it was, I guess it was Friday and Saturday morning of Category 4 or 5 hurricane, going up either coast of Florida, speaking selfishly didn't want it to go up the East Coast of Florida where I live. But the west coast of Florida was actually a much more dangerous situation. And the fact that it's turned into sort of a generic 21st century hurricane landfall - I know it doesn't sound good, given the stories we've been hearing, but it could have been a lot worse. We could have had thousands of people killed. And there's going to be a lot of devastation. But it was conceivable that the whole west coast of Florida would have been essentially a wasteland and that didn't happen and not getting the worst news is actually good news.

AMT: Yes. What do we have to watch for now though, after the winds go away?

HUGH WILLOUGHBY: For the most part, it's going to be a mess there. I have no access to news reports. I'm sitting in the dark in our bedroom talking on a cell phone.

AMT: You're out of you're out of power obviously, right.

HUGH WILLOUGHBY: Right. And as soon as I'm done it's going to be cleaning up the debris in the yard. We came through very well. The canal behind our house rose to maybe eight inches below the floor level, but it does that. It gets that high and then it overtops the bank somewhere else. And you know better there than here, although not for the people who live there. But there are people who do the kind of work that I do. There's been a theoretical argument that as the ocean gets warmer and the planet forms, we're going to see more of hurricanes like Irma, and frankly like Sandy and Matthew when they were at their most ferocious. The party line from my colleagues is that we need to fear these huge wind storms that just flatten everything. Based upon the historical experience, I think this is what we should expect on a warmer globe. Storms that were horrendous in the Caribbean and then as they come towards us are much weaker but bigger and rainier and that maybe we shouldn't be fearing the winds so much as moving water. We know from history that moving water is what kills people. And the party line - that I talked about for years and used to promote budgets for a research program - is that we need to worry about the wind. It's not true that water kills people and wind destroys property, water does a pretty good job.

AMT: Well and we saw this Hurricane.

HUGH WILLOUGHBY: Exactly. Exactly. This is what we should be worried about. And it's difficult to do statistics and say: “Oh. Hurricanes have gotten worse because the planet's getting warmer.” But we do know, because we have a lot more measurement, that in the US when it rains in the summertime – hard conductive rain - it rains harder and there's a longer dry spells between wet spells. And you see that in the news the fires on the West Coast, that's the way you go from Forest grass land.

AMT: Can I ask you? We saw the largest evacuation, as in seven million people shifted some to shelters, some to other places. We just heard somebody in the Caribbean who thought they could go and get away from the storm. What do you worry about when these warnings come out in terms of how people listen to these warnings and calculate their own risk?

HUGH WILLOUGHBY: The problem is they don't calculate. I was involved in aircraft operations in the Caribbean and I can recall landing at a place that had been hit by the hurricane and managed to get a hotel room, but not being sure we'd be able to take off because there was no electricity to pump fuel for the airplane. And so I'm kind of used to playing fast and loose with this sort of thing and taking calculated risks. But if you're having a tropical vacation, that's not what you go to the EILETS for [chuckles]. Actually Barbados has a pretty good place because it's mostly south of the storm tracks. But for people here, there were many people, people who I know who were people of character and intelligence and foresight who just got in their cars and left, when they had a perfectly sound house to ride the storm out. And when I was mostly gone during hurricane season, we have a pretty good plan for securing the house in a short amount of time.

AMT: Right. Hugh, I'm going to have to stop you there because you're out of time but that raises another discussion we're going to have to have at a later date and that is somehow people ride out a storm, whether they do need to flee or not but we'll leave it there. Thanks for talking to me. Glad to hear you're safe. That is Hugh Willoughby hurricane expert, professor of meteorology in the Department of Earth and Environment at Florida International University. We'll be talking more about how Florida deals with rising waters later. Right after the news Bill Morneau is here, the finance minister. Stay with us. This is The Current.

Back To Top »

'A system that works for all Canadians': Finance Minister Bill Morneau defends tax plan

Guests: Bill Morneau, Alexandre Boulerice, Lisa Raitt

AMT: Hello I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: We have more coverage of Hurricane Irma coming up. We'll hear from someone who talks about how Florida has been engineered to be a sparkling gem on the water but the water has its own ideas. We'll hear from people who chose not to evacuate, waking up to survey the damage of last night's powerful winds. But first we're talking taxes.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: In July the Finance Minister Bill Morneau announced his government plans to close what he calls tax loopholes. And as the summer turns into fall those proposed changes have been getting a lot of attention from Canadians. They come as part of the Liberals election promise to make taxes fairer and prevent wealthy individuals who set up private corporations from paying a lower tax rate. But opposition has been mounting from all sorts of Canadians from doctors and lawyers to farmers and shop owners. The finance minister is with me now to talk about those concerns before we get started I want to quickly outline the three specific changes being proposed. The first is income sprinkling which refers to business owners who distribute income to family members, who may or may not be involved in the business, but who earn less, allowing income to be taxed at a lower rate. The second change would restrict the use of private corporations to make passive investments in things such as stocks and real estate that are unrelated to the business. And the third main reform would limit a business owners ability to convert income into capital gains which are taxed at rates lower than regular salaries. Okay, so let's start with some of that welcome Bill Morneau. Mr. Morneau Finance Minister welcome to The Current.

BILL MORNEAU: Thanks very much, Anna Maria. I'm really happy to be here this morning.

AMT: And I just don't want to ambush you. You're here to talk finance. We do have people today on the news saying they want the Canadian government to move faster to get them out of some areas of the Caribbean. There are nine thousand Canadians there. There are 360 some who are asking for assistance. Is that something your department gets involved in?

BILL MORNEAU: No, clearly the finance minister, the Department of Finance isn't engaged directly in those efforts but we are as in whole of government concerned with the huge challenges facing so many people. So we are working to coordinate government efforts to make sure that we are doing our best to help people in a time of real need. And that will be a continuing effort. I'll be part of the team in terms of making sure that we're doing everything we can to help people in this challenge.

AMT: Okay. Mr. Morneau let's talk taxes. What are you trying to fix by closing these so-called tax loopholes?

BILL MORNEAU: Our overall goal is to make sure that our system is working, that it's fair, that we don't have tax advantages that are going to the wealthiest among us, that we consider issues that will make allow us to have the system that is more fair down the line, by dealing with tax advantages that to only a few.

AMT: How many businesses are using these structures right now, these loopholes?

BILL MORNEAU: There's three different things we're looking at. And it's important to know that in many many cases it's not about businesses it's about professionals incorporating themselves to get advantages. We've seen a threefold increase in the number of professionals that are incorporating selves over the last 15 years. So that number is growing. And of course wealthy individuals, the most wealthy in our society, sometimes use these structures in order to reduce their tax rate. So it's a significant number and it's a growing number. That's really what we're trying to get out.

AMT: But if they incorporate they are technically a small business then, are they not?

BILL MORNEAU: If people incorporate that's I guess what you might want to call them, but in many cases it's a professional incorporating or it's someone who's using that structure in order to create a tax advantage. What we see here is that - that's what we're trying to go after the small business that's investing in their business to help grow our economy. It's not about that. It's really about making sure that we don't have tax advantages for the wealthiest.

AMT: And how do you define the wealthiest?

BILL MORNEAU: In this case what we're looking at is people that are wealthy enough that they can make use of these advantages. So no small business or no professional really is going to get advantage from passive investment income, if they're not earning over $150000. So that's a starting point. But of course the benefits grow as you have more income. A good way to think about it would be that you know the average Canadian earns $49000. And if you're a $300000 a year professional, and you are able to sprinkle some income among your family members, you might be able to save forty eight thousand dollars in taxes. So it just gives you a context for what the opportunity is here. We want to make sure that those professionals have the ability to incorporate themselves but that there aren't advantages that just can't go to other Canadians because of the level of income.

AMT: How much tax revenue do you estimate the government will bring in by making these changes?

BILL MORNEAU: We've made some estimates. So on the income sprinkling our estimate that we put out was about $250 billion. But importantly we're still in a consultation phase. That phase is not over rather until October, which means that we haven't determined all of the exact details around some of the measures we'd like to move forward on. And therefore we don't have completely accurate information to answer that question.

AMT: But you know the kind of person who you think is using these - what you call loopholes - for an unfair advantage, like who are they?

BILL MORNEAU: It might be that it's somebody who's incorporated in order to invest half a million dollars over the course of each year, in order to defer that from paying immediate tax. So that would be someone who's quite wealthy in our society. It might be a successful professional that is incorporating because they happen to have children between 18 and 24 and they're able to - if those children aren't in their business - they might still be giving some income to those children to lower their taxes. And that would be people that are you know earning in the higher echelons of Canadian earnings.

AMT: I have some tape I'd like you to hear. Last week I spoke to some small business owners who are very upset with your tax plan. And this is Mark Wales he's a vegetable farmer from Aylmer, Ontario.

SOUNDCLIP

Frustratingly for us, is there are over 220000 farm families farming in Canada and those are not the wealthiest of Canadians. And yet this is supposed to be about taxing the 1%. I wish someone would actually define who the 1% are.

AMT: Okay, so he is part of the middle class. He says he's not a one percenter. This is a big sticking point that a lot of people are saying: “We're not one percenters, we don't make a lot of money and you're going after us.”

BILL MORNEAU: We're not going to go after people on farms. The concerns I think are that family members work on family farms and nothing that we're doing will in any way stop people from being able to work on their family farm. They'll still be able to have those people earn money as family members on the farm. Nothing that we're going to do is going to change the million dollar lifetime capital gains exemption that farmers have, so they can pass their business from one generation to the next. I do think that there's some concerns that aren't related to what we're talking about, because the Canadian Federation of Independent Business put out that 66% of small businesses earn 73000 dollars or less. Well those businesses they really don't need to be worried about anything we're talking about because none of these tax advantages, in fact advantage small businesses in that category. We're really talking about looking at wealthy individuals who have some advantages that they get as they get wealthier, and making sure that the system works as it as it should and that people aren't taking advantage of things that aren't available to others.

AMT: And yet we keep hearing from people who say they don't make that kind of money. And what they have used in a tax structure they say is not a loophole. It's a way of allowing their business to grow and that they will be hit.

BILL MORNEAU: We don't see that there'll be people at that lower income level hit. But let me give you an example. I mean we're hearing from some people that the they like the idea of sprinkling income to their children that are in the business. But the way that works is that if you were a female single professional and you had children that were 12 and 14, you would actually have a higher tax rate than a married female professional with children that are 19 and 20. So that doesn't really strike me as being inherently sensible and certainly not fair. So we're trying to make sure that if children work in a business that they can be paid, but if they don't they aren't. And that just seems fair. What we're trying to make sure is that you know our retirement system works that people have the opportunity to save for retirement but that we don't disproportionately advantaged the wealthiest with the greater ability to save for retirement than other Canadians.

AMT: We're talking about a reasonable test in that case. How does that work?

BILL MORNEAU: The first issue around whether the children are actually working the business is just that we want to make sure that there's actually some sort of way to show that they're in the business. So we will figure out a method to allow the tax payer to put on their form that in fact their family members are working in the business. It's something that's been done in the past. We think it's workable. You know we are in a listening phase. So if people come forward with ideas, it's our goal right now to make sure that we're getting the implementation right, that the that the way we move forward is administratively effective. Those are challenges that we will face with the input that we get over the course of - that we've been receiving - and that we'll get over the course of the next month.

AMT: Last week I also spoke to a doctor upset about the proposed changes. And I want you to hear her. Her name is Michelle Cohen she's a family physician in Brighton, Ontario and she had a question for you.

SOUNDCLIP

I think it's ironic to be talking about the wealthiest Canadians when the liberals campaigned on a platform of progressive tax reform that included targeting the tax loophole used by the point 1% of super wealthy, the so-called stock options loophole. Bill Morneau very quick and once in office decided to drop that one and instead has been hitting small business owners against employees to try to present a facade of progressive tax reform. So I would be interested to ask the government why in particular they feel this is part of progressive tax reform when they're pretty much ignoring the three quarters of a billion dollars that could potentially be making if they close the stock options loophole that only the super wealthy have access to?

AMT: Okay. she's talking about your campaign promise to fully tax individual stock option gains over one hundred thousand dollars. A promise you did back away from. What do you say to her?

BILL MORNEAU: To be clear that that issue is not something that we've backed away from. It's just not something we've moved forward on. And like these measures, we're considering how we can make sure that the tax system is fair. What we're attacking right now is what we see as the biggest challenge that we're facing in the tax system. We have advantages going to the wealthy few. And that is creating some real differences in potential opportunities. So as we look at these it is about saying if we've gone from you know 1.2 million to 1.8 million incorporated professionals over 15 years, that could get bigger and bigger, if we're seeing more opportunity for the wealthiest to use these advantages than other Canadians that presents a large opportunity for tax saving for a few.

AMT: Your critics though say that that by not changing the individual stock option gained issue you're really you're really protecting the tech sector and you're protecting the tech sector over family physicians and others.

BILL MORNEAU: We are focused on what we're trying to achieve right now which of course will impact any wealthy individual that has those opportunities to incorporate that has opportunities to save within a privately held corporation. What you'll see is, if you look at the statistics, you'll find that about two thirds of the 0.1% in this country have a privately Canadian controlled private corporation that they can use for some tax advantages. So we see this as an important initiative for us to move forward to make that objective of the tax system being more fair real. And you know we're going to listen to people along the way to make sure that we don't have consequences that we didn't expect. That's the process we're in right now and we are hearing some things that that will enable us to make sure that the overall objective is met but met in a way that you know respects the issues that we might find.

AMT: What might you change?

BILL MORNEAU: We're not finished yet so I can't say what the exact issues are that will change. We need to continue to listen. But when you're implementing tax changes there's a lot of complexity and people who are coming forward with ways they've arranged their affairs in the past that we need to consider. We aren't going to do anything that's going to impact something that happened before the date we make changes.

AMT: What do you say - I'm just going to interrupt for a second - What do you say to family physicians and other doctors who actually have been told this is how you bring forward a business, this is how you pay off your student loans, this is how you know you don't have a pension, this is your business plan and others as well who looked at this as a business plan and now it's gone and they say if I had known I might not have done the business this way, what do you what do you say to those people?

BILL MORNEAU: First I say we'll only make changes prospectively. So we won't change anything that's happened in the past. So if people have saved money within their corporation, we won't change that situation. We won't in any way tax what's already there or the earnings off that money. So they're protected in terms of what they've already done. What we'll also say though is that we don't create a tax system so that we can deal with the compensation of any particular group of professionals. That's not the way you arrange the system. We're trying to make sure that the system is fair, that it doesn't provide advantages only to a select few, and that were organized for the for the long term. The fact that people have arranged themselves in a certain way in the past doesn't mean that they won't be able to change. We have a retirement system that allows all Canadians to put money into a registered retirement savings plan and that's something that professionals will be able to use as they arrange themselves to do so. So we want to create a sense of fairness and do it in a way that doesn't impact what people have done in the past.

AMT: How do you respond to your critics who say you're creating class warfare?

BILL MORNEAU: We respond to those critics by saying that we're out to achieve a system that works for all Canadians as we focus on how we grow the economy which has gone very well. We've really seen over the last year we've had growth that's been better than we've seen in a decade, a huge amount of job growth. It's not good enough if all Canadians don't get access to that. So if we're creating advantages only for a few, it actually isn't going to help the overall economy because we're not going to engage everybody in the success story so that we can get better and better down the road. So we just think it's the right thing to do to make sure our system works.

AMT: Bill Morneau, thank you for coming on.

BILL MORNEAU: Thanks very much.

AMT: Bill Morneau, Canada's minister of finance with me in our Toronto studio. Two opposition MP have been listening in. Lisa Raitt, is the deputy leader of the Conservative Party. We have reached her in Milton Ontario and Alexandre Boulerice is the finance critic for the NDP. He is in Montreal. Hello to you both.

LISA RAITT: Good morning.

ALEXANDRE BOULERICE: Good morning.

AMT: Well let's start with you Lisa Ray. What do you make of what you just heard from the finance minister?

LISA RAITT: This to me is a case where they spent the money and now they have to figure out how to get that from the Canadian public. And this is the tax measures that they're putting in and they're going after small business. The other interesting thing I heard was everybody who thinks that they ‘d escaped the tax associated with dividends or stock options, I wouldn't relax if I were you because it sounds like they're coming back. We haven't backed away from it. They just put it on hold for a moment. So it's just more ways for the Liberals to continue to tax with massive effects both on small business professional farmers. It's very distressing.

AMT: Alexander Boulerice So what's your take on what you just heard from the finance minister?

ALEXANDRE BOULERICE: As a neo Democrat of course by principle we will welcome any measure that will make our tax system fairer and more equitable. But what is quite interesting right now is that the liberals are targeting small businesses and professionals. And they are doing nothing with the 1%, the super rich. And it was quite funny to hear Mr. Monreau seeing that about the stock option loophole. He was not backing down he was not just pushing it forward, which is quite frankly ludicrous and proved that they are not targeting the friends of Bay Street and the big CEOs of this country.

AMT: Lisa do you want him to get rid of that tax option, structure?

LISA RAITT: No I just found it interesting when he brought it up. I mean clearly we are on the side of insuring… We want lower taxes and that’s what we want. We think that lower taxes make the economy grow. We believe in innovation and we fought the fight already on the tax office and we were on the other side from Alexander on it, there is no question. But what matters is what is happening now to small businesses. When the minister of finance tries to tell Canadians that this is only going after the wealthy professionals, that is incorrect. If you take a look at revenues, tax revenues from small businesses only 12% of it comes from all the professions put together. 88% of the small business revenue that’s being a tax, has to do with people other than doctors and lawyers and accountants. And I don’t know why he is focusing on that group as if they need to get more money up. And that is the only justification. 80% of this revenues coming from people who don't expect it and have planned [unintelligible]. And it and it's very very, as they said, [unintelligible].

AMT: What about his point that there RRSPs for people to invest their money in and that they are not looking at any one profession when they make a tax change?

LISA RAITT: I find it interesting he wants to always send it into institutional borrowing, that this has been wrong. I think a lot of people utilize them but no one has passed investment. I'll give you an example in Nova Scotia. Lots of small places are funded and are actually invested in by people who have these professional corporations and it gets small businesses going and you can self invest in your own company as well. So you know he just wants to narrow it down. It is as if the government is saying there's only one way to save for retirement. And the last thing I would say is RRSPs are not going to be extremely helpful to people when they're not just only talking about saving for retirement, but talking saving for the saving for a maternity leave, saving for a caregiver leave, when he has to look after somebody. Those things do not work in those cases as well.

AMT: Alexander Boulerice, do you think the government's proposed changes will improve fairness?

ALEXANDRE BOULERICE: It might. We still have to see what will be the legislation because right now we're talking about a working document. It's true that if you look at the hardworking average Canadian who was getting paid every two weeks, it might seem unfair that you know a professional can incorporate themselves or a small business can do a sprinkling with children two to divide his revenue and pay less taxes. That's right and we have to examine that. But let's be clear. If you're serious about tax evasion in this country, what Morneau is targeting right now is really quite the tip of the iceberg. Because the super rich, the CEOs, the wealthy corporations are avoiding paying their fair share of taxes for many years. And look at tax havens. We are losing billions of dollars every year because of tax havens, and the liberals are just signing new fiscal convention with new tax havens like the Cook Island recently. So are not really… They don't really want to hurt that kind of system that is hurting our public health care, our universities, our roads, etc. So what is interesting is that maybe not what is on the table right now but what the liberals don't want to talk about.

AMT: Well let me just ask Lisa right about that as well. The issue of tax havens, Isle of Man that happened under your government as well, the Conservative government. What do you say to those people who say why has no Canadian government clamped down on the people who do the tax havens stuff?

LISA RAITT: I think it's an excellent question. And you know how this could have been addressed? If the Liberals had done what they're doing on every other file they have, which is a much longer consultation, if we want to tackle a tax fairness. And this country is ready to talk about tax fairness. I saw that myself on the leadership race. If you want to talk about it let's have what we had four years ago; a two year process. Everything comes to the table. The stuff that Alexander is talking about comes to the table. The stuff that we're talking about - keeping taxes low and making it more simple for Canadians across the country - come to the table and we go through a longer process. This is incredibly rushed. They want to get it in place for January 1st payday and that's why 75 days is very difficult. And Anna Maria, and I would just say anyone in the Milton area who is listening, Milton, Oakville, Burlington who wants to come out and learn a little bit more about these changes, there's a town hall in Milton Ontario today that they can come out to between five and seven. We've got professionals coming in to explain it all. That is a real problem. People don't understand.

AMT: Now Lisa right, in 2006 and again in 2008 your government cut the GST by a total of two points. That's like $14 billion worth a year. Should the GST come back?

LISA RAITT: No. I think what we have to… You know, Anna Maria, what I'm hearing from Canadians and small business people is the fundamental truth which is it's better to have the money in our pockets than it is to send to Ottawa, for somebody else to spend on your behalf. I said at the very beginning, the problem the Liberal government has is a spending problem. Now they have to pack in order to come back to balance. And taking money out of the treasury, is it a bad thing, quite frankly. If you can manage it and you can manage how you administer the government. And we came to a balanced budget that we put forth the Canadians. So no I am not in favor of increasing taxes just to make up for the deficits that the liberals are running up. And secondly, I would say as before, if we talk about tax fairness and academics want to weigh in and accountants want to battle on spread sheet, let's have it in a longer process where everybody understands, and its complexity is very important and that we move forward after that. But they seem to want to rush everything.

AMT: Okay, we have to leave it there. Thank you both for your ideas today.

LISA RAITT: Much appreciated.

ALEXANDRE BOULERICE: No problem. Have a good day.

AMT: I have been speaking with Lisa Raitt deputy leader of the Conservative Party. She's in Milton, Ontario. Alexandra Boulerice is the finance critic for the NDP. He's in Montreal. We do want to hear from you on this. Send us an email about what you've heard. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent, click on Contact. Go to our Facebook page. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC and we'll share some of your letters on tomorrow's edition of The Current. Stay with us in our next half hour. Residents in Florida who did not leave their homes are just starting to take in the damage of the night before. We will hear their first impressions, in about 90 seconds. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

[Music Theme]

Back To Top »

Now a tourist attraction, history shows Florida as 'a place that people avoided': author

Guests: Rick Hirsch, Steve Coons, Rick Hirsch, Michael Grunwald

AMT: Hello I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and this is The Current. We're back to talking about that hurricane that has battered so much of the Caribbean and then Florida. And Steve Coons is on the line. Fe stayed at his home in Fort Myers, Florida, about 200 kilometers south of Tampa, despite the evacuation order. Hello Mr. Coons.

STEVE COONS: Hello.

AMT: How are you doing.

STEVE COONS: Extremely exhausted but we're walking around and that's awesome. You know I'm just praying everybody else is okay. You know we don't get any news here. We have no electricity and just relying on a generator for our phones and stuff like that. I hope you can hear me I'm outside and we've been walking around our neighborhood and trying to pick up tree debris that's blocking the road. It’s like a tornado…

AMT: So what do you see?

STEVE COONS: Well it's just debris everywhere, trees, big trees uprooted. Luckily some of these big trees fell the opposite way, there are a couple on houses on another street. But just a lot of debris and, you know, fences down and doors ripped off like, you know garbage bins and stuff like that. Are you still there?

AMT: Yes. Are there like electrical wires down? You have you have to be careful where you walk don't you?

STEVE COONS: Yes, actually electrical wires are all up thank goodness. And I don't know how they can stay up like that. And you have these trees that are gigantic that are just knocked down like they were toothpicks you know right by them. But thank God there's no wires down and we walked about, you know like the end of our community. There are four communities back here. I went and checked on my daughter's house and make sure there was no tree on it. They're [unintelligible] at the shelter. But they looked out but there was a lot of houses around there. I mean that you know the whole patios and the fences and stuff are just completely ripped off and they actually been working as a community now for a year and a half, just redoing everything and a lot of it's ruined, you know, again. But hey they are going to begin to repair that. You know what I mean?

AMT: Are you the only one out there this morning? Do you see anybody of your neighbours?

STEVE COONS: Just my fiancé, myself and we have there's about a handful of neighbors. You know we're just trying to pick up debris, so everybody can get down the road. Just trees and leaves and sticks and it just stuff and we are just stalling everywhere. So I'm headed back to get shovels like and like kind of use something like that push this stuff off the road, because the one main road to get in here is covered with trees that kind of looks like Sherwood Forest and now looks like Sherwood forest with a bomb thrown in there. So we have to get a lot of trees move down there. That's the main way in here.

AMT: So what was it like last night? What did it sound like? What did you see and hear?

STEVE COONS: It was insane. I've been through a tornado, being from Youngstown, Ohio is where I'm born and raised. And I lived in L.A. for 17 years and felt the ground shake. I've never experienced anything like this and you know the category dropped down thank God. But I'm telling you what, it sounded like the roar of… A nonstop roar of like four tornadoes at once. It was just frightening and it was just scary. But it was… It was unbelievable. I'm surprised my phone's working today. It's you know kind of waterlogged but I want to get as much footage as possible to show people what Mother Nature can do, like being right in the middle of it. I did do everything I could just to hold on and my phone. [Unintelligible] to suck the phone right out of my hand. It was insane.

AMT: So Steve did you question your own wisdom last night as this thing raged over you?

STEVE COONS: Oh yes. We've been questioning you that all week. You know what I mean and you know once it starts like that and you're, our house , whoever built this house for the hurricane. I tell you what. We tested it out everybody in our building left. We stayed there along with you know several other people in the same kind of buildings. There is five condos to our building. We were in the middle and. And I would go upstairs to try to make a video of the front of the house. And I'm inside and you couldn't even hear, you couldn't even hear the wind roaring. That's how good they had to Windows. You go down back there are whole glass doors are closed. You can hear it roaring through that but it's just like we were in a tank. And then even our lanai you can go out there, and it could be crazy wind flying by 100 miles an hour whatever it is and you can be in the corner of that lanai and there's like no wind. So I mean you know it was safe kind of. I went outside a couple of times just because I want to just to get you know whatever I could in the middle of that stuff. But I was looking around to make sure it was no trees or anything going to fly and hit me. But you know take a chance. I know you worry about everything but it is what it is. I'm in a car garage right now and all but the roof is like the underneath of it, all the paneling sitting on top of cars and kind of smash down on to that. And again I have a surprise when they come back to that, it didn't hold up too good. But you know we're walking around and I hope everybody else is through. You know that's all you can do.

AMT: Yes. So what do you think? You know that people were told to get out of there, you were told to get out. Do you think that the evacuation orders were too rigid, then? Do you think most of your neighbors stayed as you did? Talk to me about what you think of your choices and other people's choices when the officials say get out.

STEVE COONS: Well, they say get out but you know a lot of people, you know, you really don't have places to go. You know I could have went up to my sister's house in Punta Gorda but they were staying there. So I mean really what's the difference if you're staying in your own house or there. And I try to get him to come down here because our house, I was told, you know it was built for this after Charley. They decide to stay in their home. You have your possessions, you have these things, and your animals and stuff and there's just really no place to go. The shelters are kind of completely packed. I mean it goes through your head, you want to do that and you get really scared like at the last minute but it's already been too late way before that anyways. I mean so we just tuck down in your house and just pray and hope for the best. I mean they told you that they will leave and they do the best they can. But where can you really go? I mean where is really safe? I I mean so what's really the difference? I mean if you're in a water area and they're telling you a surge can happen and you're going to one story house and you're real close. I mean that could be really scary and I think you would have to find somebody with a second story. We had two stories and we were completely set up upstairs with a kitchen you know like a premade kitchen just so we enough there to go in case we did get this surge. Thank God we did not. We never got.

AMT: Well let me ask you. Are you sure, like could you not still get surge? Are they saying that's not a possibility?

STEVE COONS: Well the thing is we have not been able to really find out anything in the news and our neighbors haven't either because we have no internet and no nothing no power. So we heard last night that a surge could happen later today like three. But I mean you hear like 15 different stories from family members and friends that are you know living all over the place and you know you believe until you really watch it. I mean we're definitely you know keeping an eye on for that. You know it's not going to be like rushing water that is going to take you away.

AMT: So you're but you're not out of the water yet, though?

STEVE COONS: No. I mean I heard that when the water - which is this amazing, I saw a few pictures. It got sucked out of the waterways. And my dad and Pearl they live right in Cape Coral and they have a boat right on one of those waterways and they all dried out. And like a lot of boats are sitting in the mud in the dirt. And I had a buddy call me from California last night. He was on the news and he said that the water went out - I don't know this is true I'm just being told that - the water went out and left all those boats and everything and they were still sitting in the mud and everything long after the hurricane went by. And he was: “Like where did that water go? Where did it distribute and when is it going to come back?” That's a scary thing.

AMT: Okay. We don't know what's real and what's not in those cases, yet so. Well I'll leave it there with you. I'm glad you're safe. Take care it's not over. Thanks Steve.

STEVE COONS: Yes. [Unintelligible] help and try to move [unintelligible] so people can get in and out that's all.

AMT: Okay. Take care.

STEVE COONS: I appreciate it and hope everybody is okay. Thank you very much. Okay. Bye bye.

AMT: Steve Kuhn's rode out Hurricane Irma last night in Fort Myers, Florida. And that's where we reached him. The Miami Herald newsroom has been busy in more ways than usual because of Hurricane Wilma. Rick Hirsch is its managing editor. He's in Doral, Florida. Hello.

RICK HIRSCH: Good morning.

AMT: What does the Herald newsroom look like right now?

RICK HIRSCH: Well it's a little bit of a mix of a newsroom and a shelter. We have the normal mess that you'd see in a newsroom after a normal after a big story. Bags of food scattered places. Papers everywhere. And the special added attraction, I suppose, is air beds in various corners with lumps of people on them.

AMT: And who's who are the lumps? You've got families there.

RICK HIRSCH: We do. We have probably 40 to 50 newsroom staffers who came in. Some who specifically had to work, some who worked and had to come in because they live in an evacuation zone. And those who couldn't find a suitable place for their family or their kids brought them. And so we probably have 20 spouses, children, maybe 25 in various places in the building.

AMT: What about pets?

RICK HIRSCH: Well our policy is that we are not a pet shelter and so people were told they weren't supposed to bring pets. And if they wanted to talk about pets, I told them I just didn't want to know about it.

AMT: Okay. What you not know, you don't see. It's okay.

RICK HIRSCH: It's a hurricane.

AMT: So how was the night? How bad did it get around you?

RICK HIRSCH: It was surprisingly, I say surprisingly intense. In Miami as this thing wobbled along thought we were going to be hit with a Cat 5 hurricane which is frankly terrifying. And there are a number of us who have been through this drill many times and had a pretty good idea of what we were potentially going to experience. And as the storm shifted west, I think people – I do not want to say they let their guard down, but their expectations changed maybe a little bit too much. So yesterday, even from Saturday night through eight or nine o'clock yesterday, we had incredibly strong winds and rain all day long unrelenting. You could hear things shifting on the roof. So it was it was difficult. It was nothing like what we thought we might have. So we're grateful for that.

AMT: And what about for you? You lived through Andrew, didn’t you? You were there for Andrew in 1992.

RICK HIRSCH: Yes I was the city editor during Andrew in 1992. I spent the night at the Herald building. It was a different building and lived in South Miami-Dade County. And Andrew - The storms are always unpredictable. Andrew was supposed to go a little bit to the north of downtown Miami. It went to the south of downtown Miami and really destroyed about a third of Miami-Dade County, by destroyed devastated houses. There are a hundred thousand people who didn't have places to live. I was one of those. So it pretty much flattened my house which fortunately I wasn't in because I was working but it was a very difficult thing. It took a year to rebuild. So as this - I think anyone who went through that has a little bit of hurricane PTSD when they see something this big coming.

AMT: Hmm. And when you hear it I guess. What does that sound like?

RICK HIRSCH: I'm going to tell you that we are in a great place now. Our new building is the former headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command. We have RPG proof windows, ballistic grade windows and they take a lot of the sound out of the experience. You can hear the rain on the roof but at least yesterday we did not hear those swirling winds and the cracking of trees like I remember from Hurricane Andrew.

AMT: So you have a newsroom full of reporters hunkered down. What will you be focusing on today? How will your reporters be tackling what's going on?

RICK HIRSCH: Well really three things. The first is recovery and how bad is the damage. So first light this morning we're going to try to do an assessment of what the damage is, where it is, try to figure out how long it will take for people to get power back. How long will people need to be in shelters and how long it will take for them to get back in their homes? We also have reporters in the Florida Keys and we really don't know how hard the middle Keys were hit. There were some reports that, in a couple of small areas, there could have been loss of life. We haven't been able to confirm that yet but there's a great deal of concern. There are areas where the storm surge just washed over islands there. And there are people who refuse to evacuate. And then we'll also be sending reporters to the west coast, which is about two hours away, to look at the Naples area which was hit pretty hard both with wind and storm surge.

AMT: I guess it's worth remembering that even though the winds pass over it is not over.

RICK HIRSCH: No. And when one of these events happens it takes literally years to recover. Personally the year after Hurricane Andrew, 25 years ago, end of August. I mean it was the hardest year of my life. It was like having two full time jobs and that's something I would ever look forward to going through again.

AMT: Well thanks for speaking to us. I'll let you get back to work. I'm sure that it's just nonstop for you so I'll let you go. Thank you.

RICK HIRSCH: Okay. Thank you much.

AMT: Rick Hirsch managing editor of The Miami Herald. He is in Doral which is a suburb right next to the city of Miami. Hurricane Irma has prompted massive evacuations across the state. According to my next guest there is some irony to that because Mother Nature never intended for humans to live there in the first place. Michael Grunwald is a senior staff writer at Politico and the author of The Swamp: The Everglades Florida and the Politics of Paradise. And Michael Grunwald lives in Miami. He joins us today from Orlando. Hello.

MICHAEL GRUNWALD: Hey how are you doing?

AMT: So you did get out of the way?

MICHAEL GRUNWALD: I did. I'm looking out the window. My mother in law's house where there are branches strewn all over the place. Yes. I passed over like two in the morning and I slept right through it.

AMT: Well there you go. Okay so let's talk. Let's go back a little bit. Michael, tell us what Florida looked like before it became the densely populated paradise that it is today.

MICHAEL GRUNWALD: Well it's funny. We know a lot about sort of early south Florida from the letters and diaries of the U.S. Army soldiers who kind of chased the Seminole Indians there through to the swamps of the 1830s and. And mostly what we know is that it was awful. They described it as the hideous, abominable, godforsaken wasteland. And they were mostly pretty mystified that their bosses in Washington thought it was worth fighting for Florida rather than just leaving it to the Indians and the mosquitoes.

AMT: In fact they said that it was like the enemy was the water, huh?

MICHAEL GRUNWALD: Well that's right. I mean you know people forget now that it's this incredible megalopolis with eight million people and 100 million annual tourists, and no god knows how many golf courses, and Jiffy Lubes and Taco Bell's souvenir shops. But South Florida was really America's final frontier. You know in 1880 when they were already more than a million people living in Manhattan. The entire population of South Florida was 257 whitemen. So this is really a place that people avoided. And I people talk about air conditioning, and bug spray and Social Security is what brought people to Florida, but what made it possible was water control. Before water control it was just too wet for agriculture and development and it was too vulnerable to floods and storms.

AMT: So it's really been engineered into existence in South Florida.

MICHAEL GRUNWALD: Yeah that's right. I mean we'd have 2000 miles of levees and canals pumps so powerful that the engines had to be cannibalized from nuclear submarines. And essentially what we've done is we've created this artificial paradise, where just about every drop of rain that falls on South Florida is kind of whisked out to sea. So you know we call animal control and there's an alligator in our backyard and it doesn't really occur to us that we're in the alligator's backyard. We have created this place that's incredibly nice except on the rare occasions when it isn't.

AMT: And in Florida they really did pardon the phrase drain the swamp. But what made them want to look at all that swamp land and drain it at all? Why go to the trouble?

MICHAEL GRUNWALD: Well, they thought it would be easy for one thing and they were wrong about that, which is why South Florida remains so empty and so unpleasant for so long. But they thought that they could - Correctly thought that they could turn it into this paradise. They saw the beautiful sun. They thought beautiful soil and they said: “Hey this could be America's Winter Garden. It could be America's winter escape.” And for many years these were sort of lies that came true. I mean they you know they would take people into the swamp in the wintertime when it was dry and they say look here buy this land. And then in the summer it would flood again and it was a big scam and it made Florida into this national real estate punchline. But eventually we did drain the swamp and it turns out that drained swamp is almost always a very nice place to be.

AMT: Is that where that old joke about ‘I bet I've got some swamp land to sell you’, is that where it started?

MICHAEL GRUNWALD: Exactly. Well that's what South Florida was. It was some of the most incredible real estate scams in human history. And in fact in 1926 people still teach the Miami bubble in economics classes, that along with the Dutch tulips and the sort of classic example of just the sort of frenzy like the sort of thing we saw in real estate before the great recession, where you had these binder boys walking down the streets of Miami and they'd sell a lot and it would change hands three times in a day. There was just such an incredible demand for Miami real estate because this was going to be this was going to be the next paradise. And then in 1926 in the summer a hurricane came and wiped out the boom. Really, it didn't start up again until after World War II. And since then we've had one of the most spectacular development boom booms in human history. And Florida was the 27th state and population in the late 1940s. And today it's third.

AMT: How many people live in Florida?

MICHAEL GRUNWALD: We now have more than 20 million people and an awful lot of them are in harm's way. And so look something like Irma happens and most of us we're pretty lucky. You know, in 1928 there was a hurricane that blasted Lake Okeechobee through its dike and killed twenty five hundred people that were living in the Everglades, which is still the second deadliest natural disaster in American history. But now there are about 100 times more people living in the path of that 1928 storm than there were then. So you can just imagine when the big one really does hit it's going to be ugly for a lot of us who have made this place our really awesome home.

AMT: So how developed is Florida today?

MICHAEL GRUNWALD: Well it's you know it's not a coincidence that that the New York Times had a Florida real estate section for us for a long time. I mean it's incredibly developed. Half of the Everglades is gone. And the other half is kind of an ecological mess. And you know look that's not going to change. Irma's not going to change that. We have this incredible collective in amnesia, and in fairness, South Florida is a lot nicer than Buffalo or Boston or Cleveland. And no offense, even Toronto, in the winter. And then and then for different reasons, it's a lot better than Caracas or Havana or Port de France, all year long. So people are going to keep flocking to Florida. We're doing a slightly better job of putting them in slightly less vulnerable places but it's an incredibly low lying and flood plain and this thing about flood plains is it's plains and they flood.

AMT: Well I was just reading yesterday that Tampa Bay is the largest estuary in the United States. I didn't know that.

MICHAEL GRUNWALD: No it's not. Look I mean the most bio diverse estuary in the United States is on the other side of South Florida, around Stuart and the Treasure Coast. And last year because of essentially because of this water management mess that we've engineered to try to make the peninsula safer, eight million eight million people south of Orlando. It was covered in this clog that smelled like a sewer and looked like guacamole and that kind of nature out of whack stuff is really a constant feature of our lives here in South Florida. But we don't really think about it that way. It's just become a sort of feature of our artificial landscape. And you know we go on because in January it's a really nice place to be.

AMT: Is that why you live there?

MICHAEL GRUNWALD: Yes. I get to play tennis outside like five times a week and it's nice. You know if you can be a writer anywhere why not be where it's sunny?

AMT: And you're making light of it all? And you talk about the big one you thought this one was going to be the big one. What are again some of the unintended consequences then of putting all of this stuff over that place that was once miles and miles of wetlands?

MICHAEL GRUNWALD: Well again like I said we see the environmental consequences all the time. I mean my book is about the Everglades which was for most of human history was seen as this uninhabitable disgusting wasteland, but now we've come to realize that it's this ecological Jen and we've essentially destroyed it to make room for our civilization down here. We're spending $20 billion, the largest ecological restoration project in the history of the planet, to try to restore some semblance of its natural function. But again and the problems of the Everglades have become problems of ours as well. The same squall that messing up the swamp is also creating sort of overcrowded schools and underfunded services and runaway growth in ways that clearly doesn't pay for itself. And is in some ways sort of destroying the kind of natural beauty that made Florida Florida. Right it's like we didn't move here to try to you know - We didn't we wanted paradise. We didn't want like the New Jersey Turnpike with better weather. So there are definitely consequences in our everyday life. But you know most people don't think about these consequences. They just live you know and so it's like something like Irma it's really hard to imagine that it's going to persuade very many people to go live somewhere else a in a less vulnerable place that that might not have Florida's natural features.

AMT: Well in fact we just heard a guy who said you know he weathered it or he got through it and you know there's a point of pride I guess whether it should be. How so how, the history of engineering, away the environmental problems and creating this, how has that affected the preparedness for this storm?

MICHAEL GRUNWALD: Well look I mean the honest answer is that it's the engineering is great. And it's for the most obvious example is that the engineers were able to keep the lake Okeechobee low before the storm, so that when the storm hit it didn't blast like the lake through its dike and killed tens of thousands of people living behind it. You know they engineer the best they can. But you know the old farmer saying right about you know 10 pounds of crap in a five pound bag. We don't have enough storage for all of south Florida's water. And when something like Irma comes we just have to cross our fingers and hope that the water doesn't go in places that they can't hold it, because you're going to see some places can be flooded for months. And with sea level rise, when I was living in Miami Beach we would have flooding even on sunny days where were Biscayne Bay would start coming through our storm drains at high tide. Again it's an unsustainable paradise. I try to remind people not forget the paradise part but also the unsustainable part.

AMT: Okay. Well it's interesting to get your perspective and to hear that on a day like today. Thanks a lot, Michael.

MICHAEL GRUNWALD: Anytime.

AMT: Michael Grunwald, senior staff writer at Politico, author of The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida and the politics of Paradise. He joined us from Orlando because he got out of Miami. That's our program for today. With radio one for q Columbian Canadian songwriter Jessie Reyez in the studio for a chat and a performance. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

Back To Top »

Provide Transcript Feedback

CBC would like to acknowledge the support of the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund.

September 11, 2017 Full Episode Transcript

More Stories Like This