Why Eddie Has Not Sued

With all of the errors that DRIC has made as claimed by our Mayor/lawyer over the last few weeks, aren't you shocked that he and Council have not instructed our hired weapon of legal mass destruction to commence a lawsuit yet?

One of Eddie’s major flaws is that he thinks that he is so much more clever than everyone else when in fact he is quite obvious. Of course, it may take time to figure out exactly what he is doing but in the end, the hints are there. Once we can put them all together, it becomes fun watching the game play itself out.

I must admit that I do not understand this fascination with gamesmanship rather than actually doing something. It seems like an incredible waste of time to me when there are so many matters to deal with. To get from Point A to Point B, why do we have to go through most of the other letters of the alphabet first?

Let me give you an example of what I mean. I have just written a BLOG effectively calling our Mayor weak in relation to the border file. David Estrin spent hours in front of Council telling us why DRIC was wrong in what they did. On our behalf, he submitted a very long report to DRIC with respect to their Environmental Assessment. The Mayor has levelled charges against the Premier for prejudicing the DRIC process and effectively telling people not to bother making any comments even though DRIC asked for them.

Supposedly, Council voted recently in camera, always in camera, nine to one in favour of litigation to seek judicial review of what DRIC has done, Eddie has threatened litigation so many times that I have lost count and yet nothing has been done.

The media have been played like violins including the EH-News story of the other day with the so-called bombshell that even the Ontario Ministry of the Environment thinks that DRIC has not done a good job:

• “Reporter: It's not the critical tone of the memo that's as surprising as the identity of its author. DRIC's efforts to design a new border crossing have put Ontario's Ministry of Transportation squarely at odds with the City of Windsor, but this memo reveals concerns have also been raised by fellow scientists within the Provincial Government. In the memo an employee for the Ministry of Environment says, in part "For an environmental assessment, I found the detail and information on the environment to be somewhat sparse."
  
  Gerald Diamond (Ontario Ministry of the Environment): They don't give me enough information so I can sit back and comfortably go "Well gee, they've looked at everything and the people of the Province can rest easy now." I just thought - and I'm not saying they didn't do it - what I'm saying is they didn't prove to me that they did it.
  
  Reporter: Mayor Eddie Francis says the memo reinforces his position that the Windsor-Essex Parkway's environmental assessment was flawed.
  
  Mayor Francis: This confirms what the City of Windsor and our team have been saying all along - the DRIC team is hiding the facts. The DRIC have not done their work and to hear a representative from the Ministry of the Environment take them to task on it just confirms what we've said yesterday as well…
  
  It begs to ask the question what other internal memos are there and what other advice and what other comments is the DRIC team ignoring?”

In passing, I hardly think that our Mayor should be the one who talks about open and transparent Government. Moreover, say what you will, the document was published by DRIC as part of the Comments received. It was NOT hidden. Can we say the same about what takes place in our City? Just take a look at the number of Freedom of Information Applications that have been made recently.

Here we have all of this information that should be used in a major lawsuit by our Mayor who is our Champion, in his mind at least, who is protecting

• “Our residents, their lives and the quality of life.”

But he has not done anything? Why not? Can you understand it?

The answer was given in yesterday’s Star in this story

• “Bridge, city rap border plan
  DRIC's environmental assessment could face two court challenges
  
  The environmental assessment for a proposed route to a third border crossing has "fatal flaws" and must start over, the president of the Ambassador Bridge said Tuesday.
  
  Dan Stamper said the EA filed Friday could be the target of legal action by the bridge, which has a competing proposal to build the next Windsor-Detroit crossing.”

I trust that you understand it now. Our Mayor does not have the nerve to sue. He cannot take the political risk that the Senior Levels will pull out of town taking with them 20,000 jobs. It would be political suicide for him and Council. He knows that they are serious. He knows that his bluff has been called and that is why he made that comment that he would support DRIC if the Senior Levels guaranteed the jobs at the start of 2009.

Everything that has been going on over the past few weeks with respect to lawsuits and threats of lawsuits is nothing more than Eddie praying that the Bridge Company will take the bait that he has laid out for them. He is hoping that they actually will sue and save his bacon.

Let the Bridge Company be the bad guys if the Senior Levels pull out of town so that he can denounce the Bridge Company. It would be all the Bridge Company's fault, not Eddie's, for the loss of jobs. If they do not leave, then Eddie can claim that he stood up to the Senior Levels as our Hero and that everything that the Bridge Company is saying is something that he already conceived.

That is Eddie’s game isn’t it! He views it as a no-lose as long as the Bridge Company acts as he assumes they will.

After all, the Bridge Company’s law firm was Gowlings as well. There is a lawsuit over that. Here is our Mayor giving the Bridge Company all of the information to defeat DRIC on a silver platter and at Windsor taxpayer expense too. What could be a nicer present than that to the Bridge Company? Why, they would be ungrateful if they did NOT sue right away!

Don’t you find it fascinating that the Mayor requires his “Enemy” to save his political skin!

Do you see what I mean? Eddie thinks that everyone else is too stupid to understand what he is doing? He does not believe that anybody can see through him and his tricks. He believes that people take him at face value and cannot understand his strategy. He thinks he can sucker the Bridge Company to do his work.

Tell me the truth. You had it all figured out when you saw the Star story didn’t you. You have been my BLOG reader for a long time. It was so obvious. Heck, if we figured it out, some others did too.

Poor Eddie, he forgot what Gord wrote some time ago:

• “I'm in awe of Moroun and his hired hands. These folks are the masters. They're always two or three cunning moves ahead of the other players in what amounts to a high-stakes border chess match."

You see, dear reader, we all are not so dumb as some people think.