In June 2012, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Michigan Governor Rick Snyder strolled outside the elegant former headquarters of Hiram Walker on the Detroit River waterfront of Windsor, Ontario, beaming for photographers. They were there to publicly announce the long-awaited agreement to construct a new six-lane bridge to the U.S. auto-manufacturing capital. Harper didn't hesitate to put his reputation on the line. "This is the single most important piece of infrastructure our government will complete while I am prime minister," he declared.
Casting a shadow over the proceedings (metaphorically if not literally) was the almost century-old Ambassador Bridge that crosses the river a few miles to the west. The four-lane span is a lifeline of binational trade, carrying a quarter of all merchandise transported between Canada and the United States. Harper vowed that the new bridge, along with support facilities on both sides of the river, would reduce traffic congestion and create jobs. He also sent a warning whose meaning was perfectly clear to locals in both cities: "Make no mistake—whatever battles lie ahead, this bridge is going to get done."
Harper's target was a tenacious nonagenarian Detroit trucking billionaire named Manuel "Matty" Moroun. In 1979, Moroun bought the Ambassador Bridge, making it the only major span between the two countries that's in private hands. He's been ferociously defending his monopoly against assaults from governments, local residents and the media ever since, even spending a night in jail for contempt of court. His actions led Forbes magazine to brand him "the troll under the bridge."
Throughout the decades-long conflict, Ottawa has been Moroun's most formidable opponent. When the Canadian government began floating proposals for a rival bridge in the 2000s, Moroun countered with a plan to build a new crossing of his own—a six-lane replacement for the Ambassador Bridge right next to the original. Ottawa, backed by regional governments on both sides of the border, has long appeared to have the upper hand. But in early September, there was a dramatic reversal when the Trudeau government granted Moroun a permit to build his bridge. Meanwhile, the government-backed project—facing repeated delays and cost-estimate hikes—looks iffier by the day. With traffic volume down significantly since the saga began, some wonder if the whole idea shouldn't be scrapped.
Moroun, who at 90 still puts in six days a week at the office, avoids journalists—he's been burned too many times—leaving nosy questions to his top lieutenant, Dan Stamper. The 67-year-old president of the Detroit International Bridge Co. (DIBC), who has been by Moroun's side for 30 years, can't hide his satisfaction at the latest turn of events. "We finally see some light at the end of the tunnel," he says with a smile, seated in his office at the company's headquarters in a former school just outside Detroit. As Stamper gripes about government interference in private enterprise, Moroun himself suddenly appears at the door. Stooped but sprightly and wearing a dark dress shirt and high-waisted pleated blue pants, all he does is say hello and shake hands, then asks Stamper to come see him.
When Stamper returns from his conference with the boss, he picks up where he left off. The government-proposed bridge "is just a way to take away our franchise," he says, shaking his head. He adds, "There's just something fundamentally wrong."
On that last point, residents, businesses and taxpayers would probably agree.
Mike Cardinal, whose family owns a retirement home near the Ambassador Bridge, has seen his Windsor neighbourhood of Olde Sandwich Towne damaged and demoralized by the unending bridge drama. Moroun bought up more than 100 houses here, but after the city denied him demolition permits, many have been boarded up and left to rot. "This was a slum imposed by a billionaire," says Cardinal.
Like many Sandwich residents and business owners, Cardinal was appalled when the federal government granted Moroun the go-ahead, but not surprised. "Trudeau made a deal with the devil," he says. "While the bureaucrats play checkers, Matty plays chess."
Moroun has been a controversial figure for much of his career. As a youth, he pumped gas at his father's two filling stations in Detroit. His dad later bought a small bus company, and after Moroun graduated from university, father and son expanded into trucking. The son assumed full control in the 1970s and built what is now called CenTra Inc. into one of the largest trucking and logistics providers on the continent, with 10,000 trucks on the road each day in the United States, Mexico and Canada.
As a regular toll-paying customer of the Ambassador Bridge, Moroun became intrigued by its investment potential. In 1972, he began buying shares in DIBC, then a publicly traded company in which Warren Buffett once held a 25% stake. But Buffett was worried the Canadian government would assert ownership and in 1979 sold his shares to Moroun, who proceeded to take the company private.
From the start, Moroun insisted that DIBC owned not just the Ambassador Bridge but a government-sanctioned monopoly. The bridge had been built by private financiers in the 1920s, and Moroun's lawyers have argued that a congressional act authorizing its construction gave the company a "perpetual and exclusive right" to operate a bridge across the Detroit River.
Ottawa didn't see it that way. In the 1970s and 1980s, the federal government launched a series of legal actions trying to assert its right to appropriate the Canadian half of the bridge. But as negotiations for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) heated up, the federal government relented, dropping the lawsuits and, in 1992, settling for Moroun agreeing to make improvements to the bridge and the Canadian customs plaza.
As automotive trade between Ontario and Michigan boomed in NAFTA's wake, the Ambassador Bridge became an increasingly intolerable bottleneck. Traffic across the bridge was climbing by about 10% a year, with 33,000 cars and trucks traversing it each day by 1999. With no other nearby access to Highway 401, Ontario's main commercial artery, trucks had to grind through downtown Windsor and were often lined up for hours at the bridge. "In a business that relies on just-in-time inventory, this was a killer," says Alfie Morgan, a retired University of Windsor business professor and long-time follower of the skirmishes between Moroun and Ottawa.
When a 2004 study by Ottawa, Washington, D.C., Ontario and Michigan concluded that the bridge needed to be expanded or replaced, Moroun moved to ward off potential competition by filing a proposal to build a new bridge. But Ottawa had had enough of Moroun and began developing its own plans for a bridge with the three other governments, with the cost pegged at $2.1 billion (U.S.).
So began the war of two bridges, which Moroun fuelled with expensive legal, lobbying and PR offensives. When Rick Snyder was elected Michigan's governor in 2010 and promptly sent a proposal for the government-backed bridge to the state legislature, Moroun funded a $5-million (U.S.) TV campaign claiming that "special interests and contractors" had cooked up the plan. He also founded a political pressure group, The People Should Decide, which gathered 600,000 signatures on a petition for a state constitutional amendment requiring a referendum on any proposed bridge.
Moroun's efforts succeeded in stalling the government plans. Meanwhile, he bought dozens of properties in Detroit along the route of the proposed bridge—in effect, hedging his bets, as the government would have to buy the properties from him to proceed with its project. To further signal his displeasure, he stopped work on a contract with the Michigan government improving ramps and highway access to the Ambassador Bridge. After DIBC ignored several court orders to complete the work, Moroun and Stamper were jailed for 30 hours—although they were allowed to order dinner from the swanky Detroit Athletic Club.
Perhaps Moroun's time in the slammer cooled some of his indignation. Since then, he has been less brazen, opting to lobby and plod ahead with court cases instead of waging incendiary PR battles. But neither Moroun nor his executives have relented in their outrage at the idea that governments would spend billions of dollars to set up a subsidized competitor right next door to a successful private company's franchise. As Moroun's wife, Nora, put it in a rare interview with the Detroit News in 2010, "They want to destroy our family business and [have] government take it over. My husband is battling two countries and two governments: Is this the end of the American dream?"
