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Fire that destroyed popular N.B. restaurant has local business owners feeling uneasy – New Brunswick

The cause of the fire that burned down the Aboiteau Seafood Paradise restaurant and Aboiteau Fisheries fish market at the Aboiteau Wharf in Cap-Pelé, N.B., on Sunday is still under investigation.

The restaurant was a popular tourist destination and community gathering place, according to Anthony Azard, the CEO of Cap Acadie’s Chamber of Commerce.

“It’s a total loss for the business but also the whole community,” he said in an interview on Wednesday.

Cap-Acadie fire Chief Ronald Cormier told Global News that firefighters fought the blaze from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday.

He said no one was injured as the restaurant was closed for the season.

Between 2019 and 2022, the Cap-Acadie region, which includes Cap-Pelé, saw several businesses burned down due to arson.

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These included Chez Camille, another seafood restaurant in Cap-Pelé that burned down in the spring of 2022, as well as M&M Cormier Fisheries’ smokehouse in 2021.

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Mario Cormier, the president of M&M Cormier Fisheries, said he had to lay off half of his employees as a result of the fire.

The smokehouse had been built just five years prior, and was built primarily to modernize his business.

He said the fire on the Aboiteau wharf stirred up painful memories, but he’s hopeful the cause of the fire wasn’t criminal.

“When a fire happens, people say, ‘Well, is it going to start again?’” he said.

“It’s on the back of everyone’s minds that it might happen again,” he said of the rash of fires.

Azard said one of the chamber’s main messages to the community was that “there is no need to panic.”

“I don’t want to connect (the Aboiteau wharf fire) to the past fires,” he said.

He said that when the original rash of fires occured, the chamber advised businesses to reinforce their security measures, saying many businesses installed security measures.

He said it was also important to check the structural integrity of the building to prepare for possible accidental fires.

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“Whether it was criminal or not, whether it was accidental or not, we will have an adequate response to that. For now, I am sending

US business leaders are pushing back against years of corporate diversity efforts

By Elizabeth BennettFeatures correspondent

Getty Images

Bill Ackman, chief executive officer of Pershing Square Capital Management LP, pushed back on DEI policies in an X post (Credit: Getty Images)

Diversity, equity and inclusion policies have become the norm at many companies. As some notable corporate leaders reject the approach, is a DEI backlash brewing?

Elon Musk used his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, on 3 January to tell his 168 million followers that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) was “just another word for racism”. Musk added his comments in a retweet of American hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, who had posted a long criticism of DEI policies, following his successful calls for the resignation of Claudine Gay, Harvard University’s first black and female president.

In the same week, Chip Wilson, founder of activewear brand Lululemon, made headlines in a Forbes profile when he spoke out about the “whole diversity and inclusion thing”. The former CEO (Wilson left the company in 2013 but still remains a major shareholder), criticised Lululemon for wanting to be “everything to everybody”, and called the brand’s inclusive advertising imagery “unhealthy”, “sickly” and “not inspirational”.

For the past several decades, corporate DEI policies have become an increasing priority, embraced by leaders of major businesses. Katleen De Stobbeleir, professor of leadership at Vlerick Business School, Belgium, says DEI has been a prominent theme since the 1960s, but the focus has amplified in the past decade. “It used to be a ‘nice to have’, and something for the more advanced companies. But today it has become a qualifying minimum and a topic that has received more attention from the C-suite.”

Yet some of the same kinds of high-profile leaders who embraced the inclusive policies are now publicly critical of them.

Alamy

Chip Wilson, founder of activewear brand Lululemon, criticised the brand for its inclusive advertising imagery, calling it “not inspirational” (Credit: Alamy)

Sankalp Chaturvedi, professor of organisational behaviour and leadership, and associate dean of equity, diversity and inclusion at London’s Imperial College Business School, says extensive research has shown “when gender, ethnicity or any form of the diversity are on the table, quality of discussions and decision-making is better, creativity is improved and the performance of the organisation and its culture is stronger”.

Yet despite this, these programmes are increasingly landing in corporate crosshairs.

Chaturvedi says the current public pushback is

Man faces fraud charges after bilking Orillia business: OPP

Investigators believe there may be other victims and encourage them to reach out to police

NEWS RELEASE

ONTARIO PROVINCIAL POLICE

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The Central Region Fraud Unit and the Huron County Crime Unit of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) has arrested and charged a suspect in relation to multiple fraud investigations.

In April 2023, the Orillia Detachment received a report from a local business identifying a breach to their email system. A fraud occurred where cheques were redirected from the intended business to the suspect in Guelph, incurring a loss of $6,954. The case was turned over to the Central Region Fraud Unit, and further investigation led to the identification of a suspect.

In June 2023, Huron County Detachment of the OPP entered a separate fraud investigation which was turned over to the Huron County Crime Unit. Similar to the fraud investigation in Orillia, the identified suspect had funds redirected from a local business to their own account in the form of e-transfers totalling $27,181.

Investigators from the Central Region Fraud Unit and Huron County Crime Unit collaborated, and on Dec. 19, 2023, David Cooper, a 78-year-old from Guelph, was arrested and charged in Rockwood, Ont.

The accused was charged by the Central Region Fraud Unit for the following:

   •   Use, deals, acts on forged document

   •   Fraud over $5,000

   •   Possession property obtained by crime over $5,000

The accused was charged by the Huron County Crime Unit for the following:

• Fraud over $5,000

• Possession property obtained by crime

The accused was released and is scheduled to appear before the Ontario Court of Justice in Goderich on Feb. 5, 2024, and the Ontario Court of Justice in Orillia on Feb. 13, 2024.

Investigators believe there may be more victims and would encourage them to reach out and report any fraud to their local OPP Detachment or Municipal Police Service.

Members of the OPP are committed to public safety, delivering proactive and innovative policing in partnership with our communities. Officers value your contribution to building safe communities. If you have information about suspected unlawful activity, please contact the OPP at 1-888-310-1122 or Crime Stoppers to remain anonymous at 1-800-222-8477 (TIPS) or online.

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Block Got Its Start Selling Payment-Processing Hardware, but That’s Now Less Than 1% of the Business. You’ll Never Believe What Its Top Revenue Stream Is Now.

When financial technology (fintech) company Block (SQ -1.39%)went public in 2015, back when it was known as Square, it explained its business in its registration documents like this: “We started Square in February 2009 to enable anyone with a mobile device to accept card payments, anywhere, anytime.” The company had a square-shaped credit card reader that plugged right into smartphones and tablets.

Block has more hardware devices today, and many people think of these devices when thinking about the company. However, through the first three quarters of 2023, the company has only generated $125 million in hardware revenue. This means that hardware sales are a measly 0.7% of its $16.1 billion year-to-date revenue.

On the other end of the spectrum, revenue generated from Bitcoin (BTC -0.91%) accounted for 43% of Block’s year-to-date revenue — its largest revenue source. But surprisingly, the purpose of this Bitcoin revenue stream isn’t dissimilar to its hardware revenue stream, as I’ll explain.

How are fintech hardware and Bitcoin alike?

Gross profit compares the cost of an item against its sales price. Let’s say someone makes a pizza with $5 of ingredients. If they sell that pizza for $10, their gross profit is $5.

For Block’s hardware, it has a negative gross margin — the hardware costs more to make than the sales price. The company’s 2% gross margin for Bitcoin is better, but it’s still not a big money-maker.

Why go to all the effort of making hardware and processing Bitcoin transactions if you aren’t going to make money off of it?

Block views fintech hardware as a way to expand its merchant customer base with its Square ecosystem, and it views Bitcoin as a way to increase its consumer customer base with its Cash App ecosystem. It’s not uncommon for companies to willingly lose money on customer-acquisition strategies in order to make money down the line from something else. That’s what’s happening here.

For both Square and Cash App, Block generates transaction-based revenue, as well as subscription and services revenue. And these are higher-margin propositions.

For transaction-based revenue, Block’s gross margin is about 42% — not too shabby.

For revenue from subscriptions and services, Block’s gross margin is even better, at 81%. And what’s exciting is that, through the first three quarters of 2023, this revenue segment rose an impressive 33% from the same period of 2022, making it Block’s fastest-growing

Bidenomics Puts Business, Not Workers, First

Before the war in Gaza — before Joe Biden sank his reputation by enabling Israeli brutality — there was a debate about something called “Bidenomics.” Despite everything that’s upstaged it, it’s still worth a look.

Bidenomics never got much love. Interest peaked in July, according to Google Trends, and is down three-quarters since. It probably would be hard to find someone who could define it. For the Right, it’s practically Bolshevism. The president himself defines it as “building the economy from the middle out and bottom up — not the top down.” It rests, as things so often do, on three pillars: “First, making smart investments in America. Second, educating and empowering American workers to grow the middle class. And third, promoting competition to lower costs and help small businesses.”

How’s all that stand up to reality?

By the conventional indicators, especially measures of the labor market, the economy is strong, though perhaps a little past its peak. Reported evaluations are far less sunny than the official stats, however. Most people tell pollsters the economy stinks.

After extraordinary rates of growth in 2021 and 2022 as the economy recovered from the COVID shock, job growth is now slightly below its long-term average. The unemployment rate in October was 3.9 percent, very low by historical standards, though up 0.4 from April’s trough (which was the lowest rate since 1969). That’s the official rate, aka U-3, which has a fairly restrictive definition of unemployment. By the broader measure, U-6, which captures more people at the margins of the labor force, it was 7.2 percent. That’s up from December’s 2022 low of 6.5 percent, which was the lowest in that measure’s history.

Workers look strong in the labor market — the official count of unfilled job openings, a measure of employer frustration, though off its highs of spring 2022, is still high by historical standards, and similar could be said of the quit rate, a measure of worker confidence. Here too it looks like the worker’s labor market power has peaked but isn’t collapsing.

Add to this big union victories, from riveters to writers, and the US working class looks to be in its best shape in decades — which isn’t saying much given the standards of our history, but still, it’s better than nothing. Strike activity, which was more discursive than actual over the last couple of years, is finally showing