Route Canal Work

The secret is out. I finally figured it all out. Of course, it took an outsider to make it all obvious. In this case, one of Canada's national newspapers.

Just follow along the pathway I am setting out so that you will see how the Grand Canal Vision developed and why and what steps have been taken already to advance it.

Also learn that building canals may not be smooth sailing and silly mistakes can be made.

NAYSAYING ON A NATIONAL BASIS

Payback is a…well you know the word. This is a G-rated it BLOG so I cannot use it.

Can it get any worse. The value of that train trip to Toronto and the big party there has to be about nil right now. As I have said to you before, we naysayers cannot compete with some of the big players in town about being negative about Windsor.

The National/Financial Post is distributed nationally and is a sister publication of the Windsor Star. Don’t tell me that someone from CanWest, the parent company, is not angry about the 20 page PERSPECTIVE WINDSOR 2008 insert in the Globe and Mail, their big competitor. That has a lot of advertising dollars in it at a time when the market is very tight.

When the Financial Post published a story with the headline “Crumbling infrastructure reduces productivity,” which city do you think was the poster child for crumbling infrastructure?

If you guessed Windsor, then you are a naysayer par excellence. The Post said as part of the caption of a picture showing Windsor workers putting asphalt into potholes

• “Road repair workers in Windsor, Ont. were busy with a multitude of cracks and gaping holes along University Avenue West near California Avenue.”

Not just cracks and holes mind you but a multitude of cracks and gaping holes.

The value of that 20 pages of expensive advertising was wiped out by one photograph! We are still the laughing stock of Canada!

By the way, isn’t that address where the patching is being done near the University where Dave Cooke is the Chair and the one who is spearheading the feasibility study on the canal project?

Pure coincidence or a message being delivered for the future. You be the judge of that.

EDDIE’S GRAND CANAL SCHEME

That story in the Financial Post got me thinking.

Why would Eddie be undertaking a feasibility study for the canals while at the same time saying in PERSPECTIVE WINDSOR 2008 that:

• “…we’re planning a new canal and urban Village development.”

The answer is so obvious that I should have seen it but it took the photo in the Post to help me understand it.

You don’t really believe that our Mayor, the man who wants us to THINK BIG or GO BIG OR GO HOME, would be satisfied with a few measly blocks of canals in the downtown do you.

Piffle!

Eddie’s comment doesn’t sound like some small canal system to me. No siree, there is a much bigger plan. The City has been deliberately allowing the streets in the downtown to deteriorate so badly that they have to be replaced. Oh, the few shovels full of asphalt are a temporary fix to keep people quiet. Just look at Wyndotte West as an example as Councillor Jones should know. A disgrace.

However, when the Cooke study comes back saying that canals are feasible, as we know the study will, expect the Mayor to make his big announcement. Rather than replacing our streets with more asphalt so that cars can travel over them and pollute the atmosphere or so that Montréal to Tijuana international trucks can go to the Ambassador Bridge, our Mayor will announce that he has demanded of the Senior Levels millions of dollars of infrastructure money so that all of the downtown major streets can be dug up and used as canals! Heck, he just got $20M just the other day to use as he wants.

Now that is how to use the Greenlink proposal to lever money out of the Province and the Feds.

What a people and environmentally friendly City that Windsor would become when we can travel City streets by gondola and water taxis just like in Venice. What a legacy that would be for our Mayor.

THE PORT AUTHORITY’S GONDOLA MISTAKE

I really could not understand why the WFCU contributed money for the feasibility study. For all I knew, perhaps there may be another section of the Naming Rights agreement respecting the East End arena that gives the WFCU the right to name the canals if they contributed some money to the feasibility study. Perhaps that might be why they are involved.

As far as the Windsor Port Authority was concerned, I was rather disappointed. I thought they might have used their time and money more productively to figure out how Windsor can take advantage of HIGHWAY H2O rather than to be concerned about water taxis. I assumed that, if there was a water taxi, the Authority would make a few dollars on docking fees. But that hardly seemed to be enough money to be involved in all of us.

Do you think that this might be the explantion? It cannot posibly be true but then again look at this. According to Wikipedia, an often-repeated urban legend was that a mistake was made in building the London bridge that was reconstructed at Lake Havasu City, Arizona. The Purchaser thought that he was buying the Tower Bridge!

When the Port Authority people heard about gondolas they did not think of the ones in Venice. They thought that the discussion was about the Jorgensen gondolas! That is why they were interested and threw in all of this money.

You forgot already didn’t you. That Jorgensen plan was a

• “$100-million cable car project linking Windsor and Detroit…
  
  Dwight Duncan, [at the time] minister of energy, government house leader and key player in the Dalton McGuinty cabinet, has been prodding the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Commission (OLGC) to consider accommodating the Skylink International gondola plans in its $400- million Casino Windsor expansion and renovation…
  
  "It would absolutely save Casino Windsor," argued Jorgensen, describing his cable proposal as a "conveyor belt" that could ferry 4,000 individuals every hour between the casino and a site east of the Renaissance Center, delivering people in as little as 41/2 minutes. "No cars. No lineups. No pollution," he enthused.
  
  "It would do 10 times more for Casino Windsor than all of that expansion would do. It would be a knockout, linking a corporate world headquarters with a glittering billion-dollar casino. I just shake my head when I think how Windsor and Detroit could have had this world-class gondola that would really enhance the regional market."

The Port Authority people obviously got so worked up that they thought that this plan was coming back. Why would they be interested you might say. According to what Gregg Ward of the Detroit/Windsor Ferry claimed:

• “They also have the authority to be involved in residential uses, food, beverage and retail services in support of tourism…
  
  A few years back, the port proposed to charge the gondola project $0.25 per passenger for use of air rights over the river.”

At 4000 people per hour, that is a hefty chunk of change for the Port Authority to make over the period of a year.

Imagine their embarrassment when the only gondolas being talked about would have a singer inside.

I suspect that they will not be the only ones embarrassed by the time that this project is considered further.