The head of the dragon hereLet's not forget the cocoon surrounding our own City Hall. When exactly was it the City switched from "Schwartz or nothing" to "tunneling or nothing" ? The first mention any residents received of tunneling from the City was Councillor Marra's long deferred notice of motion. With all the fanfare and chest thumping surrounding the Schwartz Report (and a price tag to match), it certainly died a quick albeit quiet death.
If only the folks cocooned in government towers in Toronto and Ottawa could understand this. If only they could see that spending a few billion dollars on world-class border infrastructure here -- including a tunnelled route to a new bridge -- is a drop in the bucket compared with the potential dividends over decades.
The same arguments can be made for funding an intermodal freight terminal at underutilized Windsor Airport and for a new state-of-the-art downtown University of Windsor engineering school.
We need visionaries. Sadly, we're stuck with self-serving senior politicians and petty-minded provincial and federal bureaucrats.
The Downtown engineering school? How many plans have been announced for this site? How much have we spent on studies over the years? I shudder to think of the cost. Windsor seems to be in love with whatever plan is the flavour of the month. We just never know what the flavour is until after the fact.
Inter-modal freight terminal? Does the City think that the senior levels of government are just going to show up with a wheelbarrow of money and start shoveling on demand? We're so busy running our golf courses, marinas and our latest business, a tunnel, that we can't see the forest for the trees.
Successive Federal and Provincial governments have a lot to answer for, but Windsor isn't exactly in the position to be casting the first stone. Not by a long shot.
