We Built It 🇨🇦. They Billed Us 🇺🇸
Canada financed the Gordie Howe bridge, then paid Trump for permission to open it. The paper trail runs straight through a MAGA donor's toll booth
The Verdict: You cannot script irony this good. Canada on Friday celebrated the opening of a C$6.4-billion bridge named after Mr. Hockey - days after Washington slapped tariffs on, among other things, hockey sticks. The Americans weren’t invited to the party. They disinvited themselves. And lurking behind the whole saga: a billionaire bridge owner with a chequebook and a direct line to the White House.
The Gordie Howe International Bridge - the new span linking Windsor and Detroit, one of the busiest commercial crossings on the continent - opens to traffic as early as noon Monday, cyclists and pedestrians on August 5. It was supposed to be a binational moment: a bridge named for a Saskatchewan farm boy who became a Detroit Red Wings legend, the living metaphor for a relationship that survived everything the twentieth century threw at it.
Instead, Ottawa pulled the plug on the joint ceremony after Trump signed proclamations Monday imposing additional 50 per cent tariffs on a range of Canadian goods - effective August 19, invoked under Section 338 of the 1930 Tariff Act, a statute so obscure it has essentially never been used - citing “discriminatory treatment” on dairy, autos and alcohol. A senior administration official confirmed the target list runs from wine to hockey sticks to cement. “In light of trade action threatened by the United States earlier this week, it would be inappropriate to proceed with a celebratory event between the two countries,” said a spokesperson for Infrastructure Minister Gregor Robertson. Translation: we’ll open the bridge, but we’re not clinking glasses with you.
Trump, for his part, couldn't stay away even from a party he wasn't invited to. As the ceremony unfolded in Windsor, he took to social media to shrug off the snub - Canada disinviting the U.S. was "fine," he wrote, "considering they are paying substantial TARIFFS to the United States" - and to gloat about the outcome, declaring the original 2012 agreement signed under Barack Obama "terribly negotiated" and boasting that he'd rewritten the terms so America now pockets half the profit. Read that again: the President of the United States, in his own words, describing the shakedown as the achievement.
Follow the money. Just two kilometres upriver sits the Ambassador Bridge - a creaking, nearly century-old private toll span controlled by the billionaire Moroun family since 1979, worth upwards of $60 million a year in toll revenue - for whom the gleaming new competitor down the river is an existential threat. The family has fought the Gordie Howe project since its inception. And the timeline reads like a case study in pay-to-play: Matthew Moroun wrote a $1-million cheque to the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. on January 16, then the family lobbied the administration - including a sit-down with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick just hours before Trump erupted on social media on February 10, vowing the bridge would not open until America was “fully compensated.” Add to that at least $250,000 in lobbying through Ballard Partners - the firm whose Washington office was once run by Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Trump obliged his donor, held the bridge hostage for months, and extracted his ransom. House Oversight Democrats called it what it is: “flatly unacceptable and undeniably corrupt for a wealthy donor to dictate our foreign and economic policy in order to protect their own personal business interests.”
From the Field: I know that creaking old span better than I'd like. As a young freelance contributor for the Globe and Mail, I covered the Windsor-Detroit beat - which meant traversing the Ambassador Bridge, and the cars-only tunnel beneath the river, more times than I care to remember. What that era taught me is how profoundly co-dependent these two cities are: back then, the crisis du jour was an incinerator on the American side that had Windsor in a full panic about what would drift across the river. I got to know both mayors, including Detroit's flamboyant Coleman Young, whose final stretch in office was shadowed by, among other things, a paternity suit. Between assignments, the reward was chomping on the most succulent wings in the region at Tunnel Bar-B-Q on the Canadian side - gone now, like so much of that era. The bridges and tunnels were never just infrastructure here; they were the circulatory system of two cities that breathe the same air, for better and worse.
Which makes the ransom note all the more galling. Canada financed this bridge- nearly all of it, C$6.4 billion, or close to US$5 billion - with tolls meant to pay Canadians back. The price of admission, per the agreement posted this week: Canada keeps 50 per cent of net toll revenue for the first 15 years; the other half flows to an economic development fund “solely controlled” by the U.S. Ottawa paid for the bridge, then paid again for permission to open it.
Friday brought a second salvo: new tariffs of 10 to 12.5 per cent on goods from 60 trading partners - Canada included - over allegedly lax enforcement of forced-labour import bans, the administration’s legally sturdier rebuild of the tariff wall the Supreme Court demolished in February. Even Michigan’s governor isn’t pretending: Gretchen Whitmer called the tariff policy “capricious” and said her state is bearing more of the pain than most.
Why it matters: This is the Trump doctrine in miniature: a donor writes a cheque, a president manufactures a crisis, an ally pays the toll and the current occupant of the White House calls it a win. The bridge will carry trucks either way. But the two countries that built the world’s longest undefended border can no longer stand on the same span and smile for cameras. Gordie Howe was famous for his hat trick - a goal, an assist, and a fight. This week delivered only the fight.
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News Briefs
The Trump administration rolled out a fresh batch of tariffs that took effect when a prior round lapsed at midnight, effectively replacing the global levies the Supreme Court struck down earlier this year with permanent duties related to forced labor. President Donald Trump imposed the expiring tariffs following the February ruling, but the levies had a 150-day time limit that ran out Friday. The latest tariffs, which officials teased in June, will indefinitely apply to 59 countries and the European Union following investigations under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. Countries that have implemented bans on forced labor will be tariffed at 10%, while those that have not will be tariffed at 12.5%. Senior administration officials pushed back on the idea the new levies were crafted explicitly to replace earlier tariffs, distinguishing them from a universal, global rate - Semafor
French authorities have ordered the evacuation of the entirety of the Cap Ferret peninsula on the south-west coast, with hundreds of people escaping by boat. Tens of thousands of people are being evacuated from the tourist spot west of Bordeaux, as firefighters continue to battle what the local prefect described as an “XXL fire” in the Gironde region. The fires, which began on Tuesday, have burned for days, with officials saying 10,000 hectares (almost 25,000 acres) had been consumed by flames. Meanwhile, Spain’s government has declared a national emergency after wildfires burnt out of control in several areas close to the capital Madrid, prompting the evacuation of more than 19,000 people. Responding to the spread of fires, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, Madrid’s regional president, said it was: “The worst fire in the history of the region.” Speaking at an emergency command post in the southwestern municipality of Cenicientos, she said the area was facing a “perfect storm” with high temperatures, relentless wind and several fire fronts merging - BBC
At least 15 people have been killed in Russian attacks on Ukraine, including 10 dead in ballistic missile strikes on an exhibition near Kyiv showcasing drone technology. Writing on social media, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said some 100 people had been injured in the daytime attack on the exhibition, attended by prominent members of the defence sector. This is at least the third time since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 that an exhibition of this kind has been hit. There has been widespread outrage that a public event of this kind was being held at all and had, apparently, been widely advertised. President Zelensky said the incident was being investigated, while Ukraine’s prosecutor-general said efforts were under way to establish who decided to hold the event and what safety measures were in place - BBC
President Donald Trump appears to have hitched his wagon to the Ukrainian cause after ditching under-pressure Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. At home, the Kremlin demagogue is experiencing a mounting crisis. A costly, grinding war with Ukraine has created an economic train wreck, with fuel costs spiraling out of control. His approval rating is ticking down as a result. In short, his stock is low, and Trump appears to be looking towards pastures new. “Very good!!!” the president, 80, gushed on Truth Social, sharing a snippet of Laura Loomer’s upcoming interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump appears to be embracing Ukraine and Zelensky. So too does Loomer, despite her previous position as one of MAGA’s most critical anti-Ukraine voices. Her opposition boiled down to an America-first stance, where she favored not supporting Zelensky’s regime militarily due to the cost Americans would ultimately incur. But this month, Loomer traveled to Ukraine, where she experienced an air raid, toured sites damaged by Russian attacks, visited the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery, and, of course, met Zelensky. She has now changed her tone, even rattling off friendly tweets about the leader she once called “a Jihadi apologist,” who leads a country “full of Nazi apologists.” - The Daily Beast
The Kremlin’s demographic panic has found a new frontline: the ninth-grade classroom. Orthodox priests are fanning out across Russian schools to deliver so-called “chastity lessons” - abstinence sermons, anti-abortion messaging and screenings of church-produced films - as part of a state push to instill “traditional family values,” The Moscow Times reports. The timing is no accident. Russia’s fertility rate fell earlier this year to its lowest level in two decades, and Moscow’s answer is less maternity policy than moral instruction. Lessons are increasingly embedded in “Family Studies,” a new Education Ministry course introduced in 2024 and set to roll out nationwide as an optional offering in the 2026-27 academic year. Some sessions have gone well beyond moralizing: a Sakhalin school showed students graphic footage of surgical abortions, with clergy insisting the shock was necessary, and students in the Tver region were handed fetal models to examine.
The number of measles cases in the U.S. has surpassed the record-breaking tally for all of 2025, with five more months of 2026 still to come. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention logged 2,318 cases of measles as of Thursday, according to an agency update on Friday. The nation had 2,289 cases in 2025, the worst year for measles in more than three decades. Now, 2026 has easily become the U.S.’s worst year for measles since 1991, as major outbreaks in South Carolina, Utah and Arizona have sickened hundreds and smaller clusters of cases sparked in other states. In November, international health officials will meet to determine if the U.S. and Mexico have lost their measles-free status. The U.S. eliminated local measles spread in 2000 by maintaining high vaccination rates, which have fallen in recent years to below the 95% coverage needed to prevent outbreaks - AP
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