Trust and the Politician

Eddie Francis will never be successful as a politician.

Oh Eddie will win elections all right, just as he became Councillor and then Mayor in Windsor. If he ran federally this time around, he might even win a seat as well.

However the real test for a politician is whether he can be re-elected.

I know I am speaking heresy now. The view is that Eddie is invincible (and his political machine tries to chase away a challenger when one appears or even before---Marra, Brister and Lewenza have been the targets so far. Who is next?). In my opinion, Eddie Francis cannot be re-elected as Mayor if a credible candidate runs against him unless he drastically changes over the next few months. And I am not sure that he can.

You are obviously thinking, dear reader, that I am going to slam him over his failure to achieve results over the border issue. Well you are partially correct but not in the way you are thinking.

You are obviously thinking that I am going to list his failures and lack of accomplishment since taking office, comparing what he promised to do as a mayoral candidate with what he has actually done. Not this time.

Eddie’s fundamental weakness as a politician is that he does not trust the electorate even though he asks us to trust him.

Eddie has forgotten who put him in power and what his obligation to the People is. The People are there, he must believe, merely to vote him into office. They can be ignored otherwise until the next election when they are expected to see the wonderful results achieved that only he could have accomplished. At that time, they are to follow his PLAN and re-elect him.

The man should be exulting in victory today along with Windsorites who helped achieve what seems to be a great success on the border file. Instead the best he can say is that we should be cautiously optimistic and wait more months for the Bi-National and attend Open Houses. Has anyone heard what the "official" City position is? Of course, citizens will not be asked for any input.

Perhaps Eddie can learn finally that LIFE does not necessarily work out the way his business model says it must. I have heard several times over the past few weeks that Eddie is going around asking people why he is so “disliked” in the Community. He started going on the rubber chicken circuit for a bit and doing photo ops. But that seems to have stopped as Councillors are again standing in for him at local functions. Locking himself up in his office, working 18 hours a day and having only a small group of loyalists around him for advice will not make it easy for him to discover the truth.

How can I justify my opening statement? Here it comes, my border fixation. It was like an unexpected bolt of lightening. It was the coming together of a number of factors. Let me explain.

Several things have always bothered me about the border file since they made no sense and were illogical:

1. First and foremost, why have the Mayor and Council always rallied for the short-term solution and not the long-term
2. Why didn’t Schwartz end his presentation at the Cleary at the intermission when he had set out the long-term Ojibway solution as the answer? Why was it necessary to dilute it with the short-term nonsense in the second half
3. Why have the Mayor and Council ignored the principle of “open and transparent” government by endorsing Schwartz in secret and never giving the people the chance to express their opinion on it
4. Why didn’t the Mayor and Council object vigorously when the Federal Government and then the Province said that they would “respect” the Bi-National process, in other words, stall the whole issue
5. Why was the Schwartz Report that Council saw a few days before Schwartz’s presentation not similar to the one they saw in the summer
6. Why did the Mayor on the Sunday following the Schwartz presentation say in an interview on Detroit TV that the Bi-national were the decision makers
7. Why did Sam Schwartz say months ago that his Report was a thought provoker and now Councillor Valentinis says it is a starting point

It all came together when I learned that Schwartz has not done any border related work for the City for a very long time now, and may not do any more. Can you believe it—the architect of what the City has been advocating and what some Councillors are asking us to support may be through? What a shocker that was, especially when it seems that not all of the Councillors know that yet! Once the Feds called Eddie’s bluff with the Cansult Report, Eddie knew that the game was over. That is why Councillor Valentinis, Eddie’s closest ally on Council, had to back-peddle from the Schwartz Report publicly.

In my opinion, Eddie learned in the November-December time-period last year, if not earlier that the Feds, and perhaps the Province too, as can be seen by the Border Czar appointment subsequently, were reneging on what they led him to believe: that what Windsor wanted as a solution, we would get. Whatever the first version of Schwartz was, the Feds were not buying into it. Their excuse became “respecting” the process.

I suspect that Eddie panicked. He is results and success-oriented. The Feds' position would mean that he failed, at least in his mind. His “building of relationships” using the border as an excuse had cost him, and Windsorites, dearly. His mistake was thinking that no one would ever meet with a Windsor mayor but for the border mess. This had taken so much time that he had lost the momentum after Phase 1 (another bad Francis decision that came back to haunt him) allowing the Federal and Provincial bureaucrats time to regroup. He had also lulled most Windsorites into a false sense of security on the border making us think that we were in charge. We would be rudely awakened later by the “SNUB.”

Accordingly, Schwartz Report #2 was prepared (or #3, I am not sure because of the earlier leak over E C Row) and had to be “sold.” Knowing that the Feds would NOT allow the long-term, Ojibway corridor solution at this time, the short-term had to be emphasized. The solution “genius” was to be the Horseshoe Road. Once it was agreed to, the Ojibway corridor, most people’s choice for the new crossing, had to be completed. It made no sense otherwise to spend hundreds of millions on a road to nowhere. In that way, Eddie would “trick” the Feds into supporting Schwartz and undermine the Bi-national process. Eddie would get what he wanted by doing indirectly what he could not do directly.

Eddie and his strategists took a very big gamble. The Schwartz short-term solution was written as a “political” statement not an engineering document giving just about every group in the City everything they wanted other than the Ambassador Bridge Co. that was targetted. As an example, I was told before the public announcement, without any details being given, that STOPDRTP should be overjoyed since we had won big time!

I am sure that they expected a temporary, negative reaction from environmentalists and those who lived in the path of the new road but it would be drowned out by the cheerleading and applause that was to follow for “THINKING BIG.”

Almost immediately, this strategy started to unravel! Within days, many thoughtful commentators came out stating that the Schwartz short-term plan made no sense. One by one, each element of the plan, when looked at closely, fell apart. But it was too late for the Mayor and Council. They had bought into a strategy designed to save their necks and they could not now admit they were wrong. They had to tough it out.

They dared not “ratify” their secret endorsement of Schwartz publicly by Resolution since that would allow delegations to appear and to speak against it. (You saw what happened with the infamous Agenda Item #5---16 delegations signed up overnight to oppose it. The Mayor and Council chickened out and deferred it) They tried hard to sell it. When the Feds finally had enough and hired a consultant to do a peer review of Schwartz, Eddie knew that the Schwartz Plan was unsupportable. Everyone knew what the answer would be.

Ergo, no more work for Sam, ergo the “starting point” comment, ergo a new strategy was needed. Therefore the Tunnel purchase and/or lease was trotted out. (That is a whole different story too.)

What went wrong? Simple. Eddie was afraid to face the electorate and tell us the truth. He forgot he became Mayor because of the votes of the people of Windsor. He forgot that it was the people that made him a success. He forgot about STOPDRTP’s 1400 lawn signs as an example, the biggest Special Council meeting in 20 years, our thousands of emails and letters, our pressure on every politician in the area and even our picketing of the Premier. He could talk to "stakeholders" in advance and get them to write glowing endorsements about the Schwartz Plan but could not speak to citizens or even re-schedule a meeting he cancelled in the last minute. He was the golden boy who would arrive at a solution, who had the Plan. Everyone was kowtowing to him: the PM, the Premier, various Ministers, even the US Ambassador. How could he admit he blew it?

Like someone making a mistake and hoping it would somehow all go away, all we have been hearing from the Mayor and Council is “Schwartz, Schwartz, Schwartz.” It made no sense from someone as intelligent as the Mayor.

If Eddie had faith in the electorate, and in himself, if he trusted Windsorites, when he saw the Feds backing off, he should immediately have called them on it by going public. But he could not do that.

Can you imagine what the reaction would have been locally had Eddie done so? No one would have criticized him since everyone was under the belief that everything was OK. The Federal Liberals would have been slammed as Eddie could have put forward his long-term solution that the vast majority of Windsorites would have supported in a heart-beat. The snubbing of the Senior Levels was the first indication of a serious problem, a realization that Windsor was in big trouble and perhaps that Eddie was not sharing the truth with us.

It was all down-hill from there. A waste of almost a year on a short-term, billion dollar dream that was doomed to failure. Millions of dollars of taxpayer money wasted since all we have achieved is a “starting point” for more negotiations. The credibility of the Mayor and Council is in tatters.

What is Eddie going to do now—sell us on his Tunnel scheme? Will he try and convince us that the Schwartz Report was a diversion, that his PLAN was always to buy and then lease the Tunnel for hundreds of millions of dollars and then try and take over the Ambassador Bridge from Matty Moroun? Ojibway and the Schwartz Report, in other words, were nothing more than pressure points to convince Moroun to sell out while the selling was good. He cannot take credit for the Bi-national's decision. Isn't it strange that it was the bureaucrats who actually listened to the people! That is why there is so much silence from City Hall

Was Eddie trying to out-Hurst Mike Hurst, to do in one-term what Mike could never accomplish as Mayor? Does Eddie really think we will buy his story now?

In the ultimate irony, the Bi-national picked the Ojibway route as the long-term solution. If only Eddie had allowed Sam to stop at the intermission.