WHAT WENT DOWN WITH THE GORDIE HOWE BRIDGE

Hey there Midas Canada viewers, Resisters from all over, Charlie Angus here.Still trying to make sense of what went down this past week with the threat of extortion coming from Donald Trump over the Gordie Howe Bridge, the deal that Canada signed, the fact that Donald Trump is raving that he scored a big one over Canadians.On the other hand, all kinds of people online are saying, no, no, no, Canada showed that we were smarter.The podcasters are trying to give you the inside track, but the fact is is that none of us really knows because it's super complicated how you divide up the amateurized costs of tolls over 50 years and how much money will be in that regional development fund controlled by the United States.We don't know but there will be money in there and there may be significant money in there but what I wanted to do is to step out of that for a second and look at it from how it's seen at ground zero in Windsor at the Detroit border.I'm inviting on Brian Massey, the former member of parliament.

Brian Massey was a pitbull on the issue of the bridge for over 20 years in parliament.He's been involved in the fight over the bridge since the late 1990s, first as city councilor and then again as a parliamentarian.And the question I posed to Brian is what will it mean in the longterm for the region of Windsor, Detroit, the fact that we made this deal with Donald Trump?How will it affect development of the region and how will affect the development of relations with the United States in Canada in this age of constant extortion and threat?I think this is something you really want to see.So check this out.

Either Midas Canada viewers resist us from all over the globe.

So what the hell went down this past week with the Gordie Howe bridge?It's all over.all over every podcast.Everyone's got the inside track, they're telling you.I read a guy in the Winnipeg Free Press who said this was carny, master diplomacy.We really suck at the U .

S.while they're doing their raging.Campbell Clark in the Globe and Mail says this was a total shakedown.Derek Holt of the Bank of Nova Scotia wrote, perhaps Canada's willingness to pay a bribe was the correct thing to do in the short term, but signing long -term deals with the U .S.on anything has suffered an additional blow.

that on trade.So folks, my focus here is not to prove my initial views are right or wrong.I want to know what's in this and what does it mean for Canada.So for that, I had to call on Brian Massey.You know, for years in Parliament, Brian was the fearsome voice for the Windsor region, speaking up on the bridge issues.We were just down with Brian in Windsor in February.

at the bridge talking about these issues.So, Brian, welcome to Midas Canada.Hopefully, you can help make some sense of what just went down.

Thanks, Charlie.It's good to see you.And thanks for being, you know, many times you've seen the border down here.And, you know, just to start for the viewers and the listeners, you know, for us, this has been an adventure starting.My first public meeting was 1998 at Marlborough Public School to fight for a new border crossing.And for the wider, broader economics of this, it was to get redundancy and extra capacity on a border crossing that's jammed.

But for us, all these international trucks were on our city streets.They were causing harm, damage, death.And including at one point, we had children going to school with air monitoring equipment.in their backpack just to record the health concerns that people had.So a lot of this, you know, in the larger sense is about, you know, the economy and so forth.But for us down here, it's social justice on the environment, public safety and the rights of citizens.

Yeah.

You know, you've been involved in this bridge battle, as you say, since 1998.You've seen how it all went down, the fact that Canada put the offer on the table, a signed agreement that we would pay for the bridge, we would pay for the infrastructure on the American side.At the last minute, Trump stepped in, shut the bridge down.You know, we're going to talk about the oligarchs, the Maroon family and whether or not they had a role in it and Howard Lutnick and all the politics.But the fact that this was such an act of bad faith.But there are people who are saying that We needed to get the bridge open, so we had to pay up.

So what's the feeling in Windsor right now on this?

Yeah, there's relief that the border is going to be opened up.In that mix is about a $6 .4 billion bridge.I think the price tag will come in higher than that still.It's a P3 that has its own history, and we won't get into the full details right now, but it's worth the further examination.But I think it'll be a little bit higher.But it's also connected to about a $5 billion road to get the international trucks off city streets.

And we're seeing areas of the city that would get great relief.And that is so important.We're also going to have a pedestrian bike lane and crosswalk.We had to fight to get that.We're going to build this without it.But it also includes the TransCanada Trail that goes to Detroit, Michigan.

And so despite even Trump's ways of trying to wedge Canadians and Americans against each other, we still have friends, family, social connections that have also been transformed in this relationship, but they're still there.So there's a general set of relief, but there's also the acknowledgement that the Ambassador Bridge and the Maddy Maroon family and the powers that be have certainlyfound some nesting areas in the federal government when it comes to carnying the liberals, because there's concessions that really specifically help them.And, you know, the bottom line is, though, we're just happy that it's going to be open because we need to get our lives going.

Yeah, that's I think that's really important.But in terms of the question about what we gave up, I mean, I've got people telling me there's going to be no money to them because it's all has to be paid back.And everybody's reading into a very complex contract that none of us have seen.And that's the reality.haven't seen, I haven't seen it.But what I'm seeing from the Toronto Start and other sources is saying, yeah, people are very pleased, you know, Flavio Volpe talking about what it's going to mean in auto, but how the bridge gets paid back in the long term is a question.

So with the money that is supposed to be put in the Regional Development Fund, how is that looking in terms of people in Windsor seeing this?

for it.So here's the danger that we're in, is that the U .S.we already know is assertively going after manufacturing and many manufacturers, including those that have, you know, represented by Fabio Volpe, have indicated that they might move some operations or partial operations or all operations to the United States because of the tariff and whatnot.And so the concern is, is that Detroit will, and that region will have a fund that they'll be able to draw upon to get jobs and they can either repurpose or jobs that are currently existing.It could be new jobs and economic growth and this is different.

than what's taking place right now as we built the bridge.We had community benefits that we fought for tooth and nail, as you know, Charlie, to help people during the construction and the changes here.And those were equally shared on the Canadian side and the American side.So Canadian dollars went on the American side to help for community benefits, whether it be fixing the I -75 highway or preventing some more devastation to the community by having community projects that would be led by them in Millions of dollars went over there and it was split 50 -50 on both sides.And so, you know, if we could be made whole on that part of the equation, then it actually could be a benefit.But, you know, we're not seeing any evidence of that.

It's just basically, well, let's see what happens and we'll go from there.And that's just not good enough because people make economic decisions on where they're going to invest in manufacturing years in advance.And what they know now is the Gordy's open and they're going to have money in the Detroit region to attract investment.And Windsor is turning out empty pockets.

that's, you know...Realistically, there's going to be money in that fund.It's not going to be zero.How many millions?Who knows.But if it's controlled by the U .

S.for economic development on the Detroit side, again, after Canada paid for everything, it puts us at a disadvantage, particularly now with this looming trade war.So do you think that there could be pressure put on Carney to establish a proper economic development fund?Or we've just been told, well, hey, love the deal, guys.it as it is while they get to have that economic development fund exclusively for the U .

S.?I hope so.And I always remain an optimist on these things to, you know, bring some basically common sense here is make us whole by using one of the tools that's there.The Southwestern Economic Development Fund is already established.And so some seed money in there would do well.

Do an approach to the Americans where we look at doing regional economic development to attract jobs from basically overseas and other places, as opposed to trying to cannibalize each other on both sides of thefor manufacturing.That's what we used to be really good at along the North -South corridor is being able to actually fight to get some of those jobs that we lost overseas to markets that were using exploitation for environment and labor.And that's what we should be doing.I just don't know if there's enough wherewithal and trust in the Kearney government to do that because we know that he's very much a micromanager on many things and you need to have confidence in your team to go out there and develop those relationships and pull them together.So if we don't, Detroit has basically an advantage over Ontario in that region with some funds that basically, ironically, a good portion of them will come from Canadians as we divide the tolls at the end of the day.

If it's zero, it's zero, but if it's more, it's more, but we don't know.So sitting on our hands and feeling sorry for ourself isn't going to help anybody.Yeah.

You know, I wanted to ask you, because it hasn't received much attention, but one of the things that Trump really seemed to want to do was to be able to have a veto power over setting the toll rates.And we know that the Ambassador Bridges jacked tolls up relentlessly.But the fact that the Trump regime now has a veto over whether Canada can, what we can set the toll rates.Is that something we should be paying attention to?

Absolutely, because that's our competitive way to get international trucks off city streets, which was the whole point of a lot of this to begin with.We didn't twin the Ambassador Bridge because it went through the middle of a city and was just not good economics and also not good planning for redundancy.And so that's going to put a constraint on us.And we have to go on bended knee to the United States to deal with tolling at the end of the day when it goes past the 10 percent threshold.So, you know, to me, you know, the Maroon family also enjoys from the Justin toand other types of material that has been there for years.

And for those that don't know what an order in council is, basically the prime minister, you know, decrees a law with cabinet and it doesn't go through parliament and the Senate.So they still have this plum position from Carney that allows them to expand a plaza without parliament or without Senate on the Canadian side to examine.And, you know, that's a good way that we could actually, you know, return the favour to the ambassador bridges, make them go through the normal process, not a privileged process if they do want to expand operations.But the lack of political will is has been befuddling to me because they still hold that card.

Well, when we were down in Windsor, we saw what a bad neighbor having an oligarch is down in that Sandwich Town neighborhood, the abandoned houses, the houses they bought up, a beautiful neighborhood, destroyed the houses, left basically looks like garbage everywhere.It looks like a crack neighborhood.And yet they've also interfered with the development of the Gordie Howe Bridge with the lawsuits, I'm told, because that's helped jack up the prices that Canadians had to pay.They've been apparently involved through their, you know, all the million they gave to Trump and the super PAC.Oh, and they did give money to Pete Hoogster as well.They don't seem to be our good neighbors, and yet they're still being treated with kit gloves.

How are the maroon oligarchs seen in Windsor and in Detroit?

Well, I always remember my friend, he's now retired, but he was a Democrat in Michigan, Steve Tabachman.He always said the saying, the border should not be a burden.And that's what it was with Matty Maroon and the Avasta Bridge.So you go to Sarnia, which is close to us, and they have a public park under the bridge.And they have a spot where kids jump off the bridge infrastructure into the river, float downstream and do it again as part of their fun.Over here, we have girders, we have gravel, we have equipment.

This is on the blight on the Windsor Detroit, you know, economic and also visual park gem being the parkland.So all those things are just terrible for us to have to deal with.

You know, I want to now switch sort of to the big picture.And this is what I was trying to talk about on Midas Canada, about what it means in terms of trust with the United States.Bob Ray was writing in the Globe and Mailer, you know, former premier and former ambassador to the UN.And Bob Ray said that what we see from the Gordie Howe Bridge deal is that Donald Trump looks to Canada the way Vladimir Putin looks to Belarus, that it wasn't about getting an economic deal for Detroit.It was about showing that he can interfere in $130 billion worth of trade.He could shake us down.

He could force us to cough something up and put us in that subservient position.Then that's what he will do again and he will do it again and again.What do you think in terms of the level of intimidation that Trump used and Howard Lutnick and Pete I mean, the whole lot of them targeting their number one trading partner in the world.

Hard to take for us because it's a little personal down here.We look across the river and we see our friends, family.And we know that when, say, for example, we build a vehicle in Windsor, it can cross the border several times.And we want to sell that vehicle all across the globe to be successful and have good paying jobs for families to be able to prosper.And that's, you know, the bottom line, what we all want at the end of the day, when we get up and we provide for our families.And you see that, you know, basically, you know, my disappointment was that they didn't have to really come up with a big strategy for this on how to actually, you know, maneuver our government.

And our response was, you know, very much muted by not having a strategy to deal with the situation.Part of this comes because the Carney took on what Stephen Harper said before, And that was that Canada's paying for this bridge.But really, at the end of the day, you know, that is the fact that the funds will come from Canada, but it comes from the tolling, which is a mixed Canada, Americans, whoever crosses that bridge is actually paying for it.And so they took big offense to that.And we never did the work that was done in the past.It's going to Congress, going to states, pushing the issue, making sure this is known as a very

much economically important bridge, not about who gets paid, who doesn't get paid, but we're actually going to create jobs with it.And so that's been lost.But, you know, the bottom line is the Maroon family has tentacles.They go into the elected democracies of both Canada and the United States, and it's up to governments to cut those tentacles back if they have the political will and strength to do so.But unfortunately, this has been a story that I've been, you know, representing the rest for residents since 1997 to most recent.and in the last year.

And it's the same thing as the political powers that be have not had the strength and conviction.And you noted the houses of the to the viewers, you know, out there, there's basically wonderful, you know, houses that were single family homes where people raised children and went to school and all that.They're all boarded up for years.And we have a housing crisis, as most people do.And to see that and lose schools and lose public services because the population depleted, you know, this is blockbusting at its best.

You know, Brian, in all the years I sat with you in Parliament, and they were some great years, you were always in the U .S.You were always on the Michigan side.You knew everybody, it seemed, on the Michigan side in Congress, the Senate.You were always going down.I remember in the summers going down for meetings.

So I want to pick up on your thing about us not selling and building those relationships like we paid for the bridge.We all know what we did.But I'm getting a sense, even from Democrats, they don't really pay much attention.Even now, at the height of this trade war, we're an afterthought.They don't seem to get the threat that's against us, they sort of take it, well, whatever, we've got bigger things to deal with.But these are existential issues for us.

Do you feel that we maybe drop the ball and just assume that since we paid for the bridge, since it was obvious we put all the money up, that we'd get a good deal in an age of Trump?Or do you feel that we really need to be doing that behind the scenes?scenes, constant, constant, constant conversation to get those Democrat and Republican Congress folk and Senate folks to actually understand what's at stake here?

Yeah, well, I think, you know, as best when, you know, we were working and advocating for miners and for other workers is it's the grind that wins the day.It's not the, you know, the trophy.It's being there all the time and pushing back and also unplugging misconceptions of what's taking place.And so when I was doing that work with the Canada US Inter -Parliamentary Association, I didn't go to Taiwan or I didn't go to Israel for those trips or whatever.I went to like Whitefish, Montana or someplace in Idaho or whatever to meet with governors to push the project.So they understood the connection.

And we in Washington, when we meet with Congress and Senate and we would break down how the border affects and Canadian trade affects their districts and their actual employers in their districts.So we can say X amount of jobs are related to this.That work has all dried up for the most part.I think Carney, you know, basically doesn't understand that there needs to be an all party presence.And I even remember the Bloc Quebecois going down to Washington, D .C.

to promote Canada.So these are the things that you need to do on the door to door, step by step.Do the best you can and put Canada first, not your partisanship.That has been lost.And I think that especially since the NDP is out of Parliament, you just basically have a red blue one where they're after each other on so many different petty things.And that leaks over to even some of the international work that we need to do to show that Canada really, when you leave the country, you're all together.

But again, there's only the forward path we can do right now, and that's be prepared for, as we struck this new deal, the weaknesses in it that we can do on our own side, outside of the US deciding what to do for us, that we need to be prepared for.That's got to be the key for going forward.

OK, listen, Brian, thanks so much for this.This is super, super helpful.And I agree with you.And I've been saying this at one of the it's falling to ordinary citizens to become the political conscience, the political opposition, the ones asking questions, because Pierre Poliev is off.I don't know.They call him Lethbridge Liberace with his latest white outfit.

I just got to keep pointing that out.It's so ridiculous.But I mean, they're fighting amongst themselves.They're also picking dumb fights with the government.But we don't have we don't have new Democrats sitting at the committees at finance at trade at industry where we had people before to ask those questions.So without that.

you know, it's falling to the platosphere, it's falling to ordinary people going online.It's not the best way to maintain a democracy, but right now it's what we've got.So your information, I think, is super helpful.So I want to really thank you for this, Brian.

Thank you for having me.And you're absolutely correct.And it does make a difference.I see it, even though we're not in those chambers at the moment, people are in their own state and they're doing a lot of the work that needs to be done.And I appreciate that because it does make a difference.It doesn't go away because people are talking and they're listening.

Okay, thanks so much for that.We're going to keep on this.on how to make sense of what's happening in this age of the gangsters.We're not here to ride the rage algorithm.We're trying to build a conversation on democracy.So if you like what you see, please hit subscribe.

Help us to get to 300 ,000 subscribers.What we talk about on Midas Canada is influencing so much of the online world in Canada because we're building this conversation and because we're building the audience.If you like what you see, also consider supporting the Charlie Angus Resistance sub stack, it's free.We go into much deeper detail, more essays, more thoughts onthe times that we're in, and you have the opportunity there, if you want, to subscribe so that we then have some of the resources to get out on the ground.That's what made it possible for us to get to Windsor, to see for ourselves the Gordie Howe Bridge, the Ambassador Bridge, the situation on the ground, and then we bring that back to you.

Speaking of being on the ground, August 13th with Laura Babcock.The other member of the dynamic duo of democracy for a town hall we're hosting at Niagara West Secondary School called Fascism and Other F -bombs.This is with the Niagara Sunflower Festival for Ukrainian Relief.We're raising money for Ukraine and to fight the Cuban blockade.So go online, get your tickets.The Summer Institute 2026 in Prince Edward Island, August 21st.

I will be there.It's the Institute for Bioregional Studies and the PEI Farm Center Association.That's going to be a really great opportunity to talk about development and democracy.And man, getting back to Prince Edward Island.September 17th, St. John's, Newfoundland, Midas Canada Town Hall with the awesome MLA from St. John's, Kitty Vitty, Sheila O 'Leary.This is going to be a good night, folks.

Get your tickets.It's going to sell out.September 19th, I'll be in Orillia.Again, Midas Canada Town Hall.If you want a Midas Canada Town Hall in your community, contact us.We need teams on the ground.

Our recent Town Hall in Halton raised money for Community Development Halton.So if you want to get working with Midas Canada, contact us.I will be doing a History of Punk Rock in Toronto with the awesome Kingy Carpenter at her place, Peach Berserk on Queen Street.with punk rock historian Liz Wirth on September 13th.My band Grievous Angels are playing the Jazz Room in Waterloo, an event with Strummer Fest of August 14th.We're back in Hamilton.

at the Corktown on the 15th of August for a matinee.Going to be at Hotel Wolf Island.We love Hotel Wolf Island near Kingston.It's easy to get to.Just cross over on the ferry on September 5th.And back to Motel Chelsea in Gatineau, Quebec on September 6th.

Keep kicking at the darkness my friends.It is bleeding daylight.Thank you.Merci.and Miigwetch.