Raise stink over bridge permit, former MP says

From hiking in the Rockies to canoeing in glacier lakes, the great adventure Jeff Watson and his family embraced when they packed up and moved west last fall has more than met expectations.

There are powerful feelings of renewal in turning the page, and that seems particularly true with the 46-year-old former Conservative MP for Essex who moved his family, including six kids, to Calgary where the great outdoors is tantalizingly close and can-do optimism, even in down times, is baked into the local DNA. Oh, and where free enterprise is not yet a dirty word.

There are a few things Watson misses from his old life, including Colasanti’s cinnamon doughnuts, the butterscotch sundaes at the Dairy Freez just north of Cottam and Essex County’s unrivalled sweet corn, but there’s much he’s happy to leave behind. “I don’t miss the unions and I suspect they don’t miss me either,” the former autoworker said of his rocky relationship with the labour movement.

Watson, with 11 years of parliamentary experience, is building a consulting business, Issachar Strategies, whose current clients include an organization supporting former federal minister Jason Kenney’s bid to lead Alberta’s new United Conservative Party.

But, even with that Alberta focus, he hasn’t lost sight of events back home.

He still gives a damn, which is why he’s appalled at how the Justin Trudeau Liberals have bushwhacked Windsor in handing the Ambassador Bridge company a permit for a sixlane bridge while botching preparations for the downriver Gordie Howe bridge.

Watson, sensibly, doesn’t buy the conspiracy theory that the Trudeau regime wants the Gordie Howe snuffed out because it was a top priority of former prime minister Stephen Harper and anything associated with him is headed for the dumpster.

“I don’t buy that. There’s no personal animus. They don’t wake up thinking how do we not be Stephen Harper.” He puts it down, instead, to sheer incompetence. “This is a government that doesn’t know what its priorities are and how to drive projects to conclusion.”

Watson, a former parliamentary secretary, said this government’s style is to defer to its civil servants, who like taking their sweet time, and that’s a formula for endless delays.

“This is a government on cruise control on a number of files and this is just one of them,” charged Watson. He said the Trudeau team is great at symbolism but has failed to deliver on issues ranging from clean water on reserves to the rollout of stimulus infrastructure projects.

He said Harper, who didn’t care whether he was liked, enraged the civil servants when he came to Windsor and announced that the Howe bridge, which he viewed as both an economic umbilical cord and critical national security asset, would be built by 2020. “The bureaucrats were fighting like hell against that.”

He said former transport minister Lisa Raitt also ran into fierce opposition from civil servants who loathe deadlines but she was an aggressive minister, a “push person,” who wouldn’t allow inertia to rule.

Now they’re gone and the project is spinning its wheels. And it will surely be going even slower once Matty Moroun’s new bridge is up and running. Watson said the Harper government knew the Moroun bridge would proceed at some point but had no intention of helping them. He said explicit orders were issued blocking company lobbyists from meeting with senior civil servants. And now it gets its permit on a platter. Watson can’t fathom why Windsor isn’t raising hell over this betrayal. Where’s the public anger? Where’s the fury out of city hall?

“The community is going to have to raise a stink over this. Somebody’s got to get the PM’s rear end down here and on the record, no weasel words, and tell us when the Gordie Howe is going to be built,” insisted Watson.

Instead we sleepwalk while a $4-billion infrastructure project, with the bulk of the money to be spent in Canada, slips through our fingers.

This is a government that doesn’t know what its priorities are.