Let’s be glad of Wynne’s $20M bequest to city

There are acts of desperation and then there’s the $20 million the dying Kathleen Wynne regime dumped in Windsor’s lap for a downtown law school in a frantic, last-minute bid to buy a Liberal seat down here.

You could call it a crass, self-serving exercise from a worn-out government whose electionyear modus operandi has been to bribe us with our own money or, more accurately, that of our children and grandchildren who’ll be dog paddling in provincial red ink for the rest of their days.

A more charitable interpretation would see the $20 million as an act of contrition, deathbed repentance from a government that knows it has treated Windsor shabbily for the last four years and wants to leave us a little something — hey, no hard feelings buddy — before it expires on June 7.

What do you do when you find out you’re included in the will of a reckless, spendthrift and sometimes downright mean relative who never gave you the time of day? You take the money and run.

That’s what Mayor Drew Dilkens and departing University of Windsor president Alan Wildeman are doing. The same day they learned that their long-denied request had, out of the blue, received provincial approval, they started lobbying the Justin Trudeau government to make a significant federal cash contribution in addition to donating the building. What a difference an election year makes. Last September, the university pulled the plug on its plan to transform the 85-year-old Paul Martin Building on Ouellette Avenue into a classy law school after reaching the painful conclusion that the Wynne government wouldn’t assist with funding.

A government that had billions of ( borrowed) dollars for grandiose urban transit projects in Hamilton, Kitchener and Mississauga told Windsor, flat-out, that it couldn’t spare a comparatively measly $20 million for an initiative that could help lift our downtown.

I wrote at the time that the Bank of Wynne was closed in Windsor because the money was needed for cities that “know better than to kick out a sitting cabinet minister and elect only New Democrats in the vain hope that a socialist nirvana is around the corner.”

You could kill a lot of trees lamenting the stupidity of a government that chose to leave this project twisting in the wind as a political lesson to Windsor. Imagine where we would be today if that approval had come a year or two ago. With Wildeman, the greatest campus builder and image rehabilitator in the university’s history at the helm, work could be underway at the Paul Martin Building. Instead, there’s a mad dash to make something concrete happen before he departs at the end of June and momentum slows with an extended transition to new leadership that might have different priorities.

Anyone who has seen what the university achieved with the former Windsor Star building and the Armouries — both drop-dead gorgeous restoration projects — can only salivate at the prospect of it transforming the art deco former post office into a structure worthy of the No. 5 ranked law school in all of Canada. As Dilkens put it, this project ticks all the right boxes: downtown redevelopment, heritage building conservation, university modernization and, hopefully, environmentally advanced building methods.

We have come so far from the days when folks like me were labelling U of W an “academic ghetto” huddling in the shadow of Ambassador Bridge and divorced from the rest of the city. It is now almost fully integrated and the law school would cap that process.

An idea that formed five years ago with a pitch from then-mayor Eddie Francis to Wildeman, followed by stealth visits to the sadly deteriorating structure, has now experienced two Lazarus-like recoveries in four years. It wants to live.

This might be hard for some to believe. But there’s more to downtown than alley lights and safe injection sites. There’s strong evidence of an investment turnaround that could soon reach a tipping point.

It would be sweet to see the Paul Martin Building, now a blight on the landscape, become the jewel of that revival.

Would a muffled “thank you” to Wynne for her parting gift be in order? No? OK. Sorry for bringing it up.