Viewed from one perspective, the president's latest outburst is actually kind of funny. Donald Trump, current occupant of the White House, erupted on his social media account Monday night about the Gordie Howe Bridge between Windsor and Detroit, slated to finally open to traffic this year after decades of construction and haggling between numerous governments.
“I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them, and also, importantly, Canada treats the United States with the Fairness and Respect that we deserve,” Trump said, with a brief parenthetical about Canada's policy of supply management. “With all that we have given them, we should own, perhaps, at least one half of this asset.”
This is one of those occasions where there's so many falsehoods crammed into a single statement that it's not so much wrong as existing in an entirely different universe, but, if we must, let's go through a brief history of this bridge and why it matters.
A huge fraction of U.S.-Canada trade crosses the border between North America's twin motor cities on precisely two links: the Ambassador Bridge and, to a lesser extent, the Detroit-Windsor tunnel. The hitch (from Canada's perspective) is that the Ambassador Bridge is privately owned by Michigan’s Moroun family, putting a vital trade link in private hands and creating (from Canadian eyes) a crucial economic vulnerability.
By the early 21st century, most observers had concluded a new link between Ontario and Michigan was needed; agreeing on how and who should pay for it was more contentious. The Morouns, no fools, see a publicly owned and operated bridge as an existential threat to their domination of U.S.-Canada traffic. They spent much of the 2000s and 2010s arguing that if a new bridge must be built, they should be the ones to own and operate it. This was intolerable to Canadian policymakers, but the political dysfunction of the U.S. Congress made it impossible to get U.S. money on the table.
So, Canada has paid the entire $3.8 billion cost of the bridge itself, and will recoup those costs with tolls. (Ontario has, separately, spent an additional $1.4 billion on the Herb Gray Parkway to connect the 401 to the new bridge.) Despite paying zero dollars for it, the state of Michigan has been magnanimously given half of the ownership of the bridge.
The Moroun family and its political allies in Michigan politics have fought the construction of the bridge at nearly every turn, with attempts to stop it both in court and in more obscure administrative forums. Numerous federal permits were required from both countries to finalize its construction, since it crosses the international border and a navigable body of water; despite everything, both the Obama and (amusingly) the Trump administration have continued to issue the necessary paperwork — including regulatory decisions taken just days before Trump’s latest bout of madness.
The president is nothing if not mercurial. This latest tantrum may pass like his outrage about the Super Bowl halftime show. But the threat to obstruct the bridge’s opening is real and a reminder, if one was needed, about the country’s economic vulnerability in a year when we’re supposed to be renegotiating the successor to NAFTA.
Federal Conservatives have tried to pin the lack of progress in these negotiations on Prime Minister Mark Carney, but Trump’s actions are facts — they are things that are actually happening, and we’re allowed to draw conclusions about the things that everyone with eyes can see: the obstacle to a reasonable settlement of trade rules between our two countries is in Washington, not Ottawa. Reasonable people can disagree, for example, about Canada’s dairy trade rules. But America doesn’t get to steal a bridge Canadian taxpayers paid for because the president’s poll numbers are in the sewer.
If there’s any lasting relevance to this incident may depend on whether the rumours emanating from Parliament Hill (that the Carney Liberals want to call a snap election this year to capitalize on their even-higher polls) end up being proven correct. The potential combination of shenanigans in an Alberta separatist referendum and continuing outbursts from Trump are almost tailor-made for Carney to run on the need for “a strong, stable majority to defend Canada both at home and abroad,” the kind of soundbite even a politically-attuned toddler could see coming. If Carney needed any more luck, the namesake of the bridge Trump covets was literally the man who inspired the phrase “elbows up,” co-opted by the Liberals last year as a kind of nationalist shibboleth.
So how is any of this funny, as I said at the outset? Well, there’s just this: a year that began with the president asserting his right to all of Greenland by violent conquest has, by early February, seen his ambitions reduced to demanding a share of a toll bridge — a vital piece of infrastructure for Canada, but hardly the kind of map-changing acquisition that cements one’s place on Mount Rushmore. At this rate, by April he’ll be trying and failing to shake down the concessions in D.C.’s parks. A deeply unpopular president isn’t just failing, he’s flailing. The problem for all of us is that there’s still real danger in these incidents, between the laughter.