Monday’s opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge, presuming it finally happens, ought to mark a celebratory victory for two great nations.
Instead, the long-delayed bridge opens with a sigh of relief that it’s gotten this far.
And no wonder. The Michigan and U.S. side of this cross-border saga has done all it can over the years to delay, obstruct and even sabotage this amazing new piece of infrastructure. Canada gets the credit, the U.S. the shame.
Make no mistake: This bridge could have opened years ago, but for the Moroun family, owners of the rival Ambassador Bridge, doing all it could over two decades to stop construction.
Trying to protect its lucrative monopoly of tolls from the Ambassador Bridge, the Morouns engaged in lawsuits, political maneuvering and backroom deals to block the new bridge.
And for a very long time, it worked. The Morouns found willing allies in obstruction among Michigan legislators happy to take their campaign cash to block any attempt at using tax dollars for a new bridge.
Only in 2012 was then-Gov. Rick Snyder able to ink an unusual deal with Canada to have our northern neighbor pay for the new bridge in its entirety, even though the span will be jointly owned. Canada will be repaid through tolls over time.
That deal withstood challenges, and the bridge got built.
But the Morouns played one final card this spring, enlisting President Donald Trump in their obstruction. Giving $1 million to a Trump political committee led to Trump’s blocking the bridge opening, until a supposedly better deal on toll sharing for the U.S. emerged.
Trump himself is so petulant that in recent days he even used the Canadian wildfire smoke as an excuse to slap new tariffs on Canadian goods that, he ought to know, are essential to America’s economic prosperity.
And so our Canadian neighbors understandably scrubbed a joint ribbon-cutting ceremony on Friday. No need to make nice with people who have treated you so poorly. Opening the new bridge to traffic on Monday will be victory enough.
The new bridge has better capacity than the Ambassador
One searches in vain for some rationale to justify this prolonged and painful saga.
The new bridge offers so much better capacity than the century-old Ambassador, and such improved connections to expressways on each side of the border, that its advantages were obvious for years.
Yes, there were other delays along the way, including the COVID-19 pandemic, cost increases and the usual problems attending any major infrastructure work. Building a multi-billion-dollar span across an international border was never going to be an easy job.
But it’s hard not to conclude that the bridge saga illustrates the worst aspects of the American way of doing business.
There’s the outsized influence of millionaires’ cash, the corrupting of our politics, and the near impossibility of getting anything really big done in a timely matter. The Gordie Howe Bridge story shows all these in ugly detail.
Only because our Canadian neighbors viewed a new publicly owned span as so essential to their economy – and so fed up were they dealing with the Morouns over the years – that they shouldered the Gordie Howe project through to this point.
US owes Canada a ‘thank you’ and ‘we’re sorry’
I recall that back during the Iranian hostage ordeal in the 1970s, when it emerged that Canadian diplomats in Tehran had sheltered several Americans, we erected a huge sign at the border reading “Thank you, Canada.”
Today, we ought to hang another giant “Thank you, Canada” on a new bridge that will greatly enhance our cross-border prosperity.
But this time it ought to come with an apology, too. For doing all we could on our side of the border to screw this up.
John Gallagher was a reporter and columnist for the Free Press from 1987 to 2019. He continues to do freelance writing, public speaking, and book projects. His latest book is Rust Belt Reporter: A Memoir, published by Wayne State University Press. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters and we may publish it online or in print.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Gordie Howe bridge opens, despite Trump, Morouns and tariffs | Opinion
Reporting by John Gallagher, Contributing columnist / Detroit Free Press
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By John Gallagher, Contributing columnist | USA TODAY Network
