Canderel Building ‘wasn’t perfect’
Candidate Marchand defends his record under mayor Hurst
The Canderel Building “wasn’t perfect,” admits mayoral candidate Matt Marchand, a key adviser to former mayor Mike Hurst when the deal that became a debacle was struck almost 20 years ago.
But, he said this week, “there were tremendous successes in the Hurst years. You have to look at someone’s record in its totality, and Mike Hurst’s record is an excellent record. I’m happy to stand with my old boss on that.” It was the first time Marchand addressed in detail his job as a policy assistant in the mayor’s office from 1992 to 2003.
The city panicked in 1999 when Chrysler Canada considered moving its headquarters, adjacent to its minivan plant at Walker and Tecumseh roads, out of Windsor. Then, Marchand recounted, Yves Landry, the company’s former chairman, president and CEO and a Windsor booster, sent a representative to Hurst’s office. Chrysler proposed building a new headquarters in the heart of downtown.
What do you think? Hurst was asked.
“Yves Landry was a very influential senior executive in the auto sector and well regarded not just in Canada but globally,” Marchand said. “I think anybody would say if Yves Landry came to you and said I want to put my headquarters in downtown Windsor, what do you want to do, the answer is, ‘How do we make it happen?’
“It was a very, very important message that a Fortune 500 company has the confidence in our downtown to put their headquarters there.”
But the city, which agreed to pay $25.7 million, ended up paying $49.8 million. It also had to pay millions to lease two floors and operate a money-losing parking garage. And it expropriated and demolished an entire block of heritage buildings for the project. For this, it got an ordinary 14-storey building — not the planned 32-storey building.
“The execution wasn’t perfect,” admitted Marchand.
But, he said, “we got the job done. Certainly it was more expensive than anticipated, but the prestige of having the Chrysler headquarters in downtown Windsor was very, very important for our community.” Incumbent Drew Dilkens stood in front of the building, now called One Riverside Drive West, last week and declared during a campaign news conference that “this building … is a perfect example of not putting taxpayers’ interests first.”
That wasn’t what he said last year when he announced that the city had finally extricated itself from the leases and parking garage.
“I truly don’t want to play Monday morning quarterback,” he said then. The building was expensive, he said, but “I can’t say it was a bad deal.”
He didn’t know what he’d do if the city’s largest employer considered moving its main office out of the city, he said.
That was the fair response. But that was before the campaign began.
Dilkens has also raised the MFP leasing scandal that happened under Hurst. The city and county leased an array of items including buses that were supposed to cost $91 million but ended up costing $314 million. “There were many communities across Ontario that were caught up in that,” said Marchand, including Toronto and Kitchener.
“Had we had an auditor general, that might have been caught earlier,” he said, turning the tables on Dilkens, who has opposed hiring an auditor general. “The reason I’m calling for an auditor general is to ensure that any mistakes in the past can’t be repeated in the future.
“Part of being a leader,” he said, “is understanding what you did right and areas you can improve on.”
Marchand went on to cite Hurst’s biggest accomplishments — completing the 4.7-kilometre waterfront park from the Ambassador Bridge to Hiram Walker and bringing the casino to Windsor. There were other failures — no new arena, no new border route. And there were other successes — the emergence of a research and development sector in the auto industry, the courthouse, art gallery, hospital and cancer centre. Hurst was involved in all that. “If you want to point your finger and say, ‘Yeah, this one wasn’t great,’ look at the rest of them,” said Marchand.
He also cited Hurst’s four straight election wins with 62 to 82 per cent of the vote.
“You don’t get those kinds of numbers without having community support,” he said.
It’s hard to think of another mayor who has done that. If Hurst was that bad, how did he do it?
At his campaign launch in June, Marchand declared, “I have 12 years of experience in the mayor’s office. I have more experience that anyone else (in the campaign).”
He has also called himself an “outsider.” You can’t say both. Marchand wasn’t the mayor, but he was a key adviser to Hurst for four terms, when power was concentrated in the mayor’s office. You can’t tout that and not accept responsibility for the good and the bad. Now, Marchand has addressed that.
Dilkens is trying to paint Marchand as a relic from the past, neutralizing his pitch for a “new direction.” But when you’ve been out of city hall for 20 years, most people don’t even know your name. This campaign is about the future.
“If people want to talk about stuff from 20 years ago, we’ll talk,” said Marchand. But, he said, “people want to hear where I’m going to take the community.”