You should hold the top hand on the stick like you would hold a hammer when you’re driving a nail. You have the most leverage, and you won’t get your wrist broken. —Canadian hockey legend Gordie Howe
By rights, opening the Gordie Howe International Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, should mean celebrating the Saskatchewan-born Detroit Red Wings hockey great who spent 25 years with the NHL team. After nearly a decade of construction, the longest cable-stayed bridge on the continent should be providing long-sought relief from chronic traffic bottlenecks for commuters, vacationers, and truckers at the United States–Canada border.
Last week, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told the Senate Appropriations Committee that U.S. customs and border employees are “ready to go.” And yet the bridge stretching 1.5 miles across the Detroit River has become a point of leverage in the trade talks between the U.S. and Canada. Both Canada and Mexico have called for a renewed 16-year USMCA agreement. President Trump responded with another “51st state” post. Neither Canada nor Mexico is budging. Meanwhile, Michigan and Ontario drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians wonder how much longer they’ll have to wait before they can use the river crossing.
The Canadians’ insistence on adulting has done nothing but rile up a White House obsessed with exercising hard power through trade sanctions. In a May interview with a Windsor, Ontario, radio station, Evan Solomon, the Canadian minister who heads up the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario, all but admitted that the bridge is effectively being held hostage in the USMCA negotiations: “… But you know there’s a lot of factors. The bridge is one factor, trade, there’s a lot of industries that are being impacted.”
Gordie Howe didn’t dole out stick handling advice with U.S.-Canada relations in mind. But ever since Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney turned the tables on American intransigence at Davos by asserting his country’s middle-power prerogatives, the White House has been thrown off-kilter. Will Carney’s strategy, relying on globe-trotting soft power, translate into more leverage for Canada, now that the administration has welded the bridge to USMCA negotiations?
THE AMBASSADOR BRIDGE, the Detroit River crossing between the Motor City and Windsor, Ontario, opened about two weeks after the stock market crash that sent the globe spiraling into the Great Depression. In recent decades, replacement proposals have gone nowhere. The privately owned toll bridge conveys about $300 million in commercial goods daily, about 25 percent of the annual land trade between the U.S and Canada. But it has lost its ranking as busiest span between the two countries. It has high tolls and is decrepit, congested, and basically living on borrowed time: Many commercial drivers go two hours north to use the Blue Water Bridge into Ontario.
The Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, the world’s sole underwater international border crossing and a third option to cross the river, prohibits trucks carrying hazardous materials. An estimated 400 commercial vehicles will cross the Gordie Howe Bridge every hour, saving truckers 850,000 hours—if it ever opens.
The Moroun family, owners of the Ambassador Bridge since 1979, have long squelched any progress toward building a second, competing publicly owned span (in part by convincing state lawmakers, especially rural ones, that a new bridge would only benefit Detroit). The family patriarch Manuel Moroun was at the center of maddening dealings involving the span, including being briefly jailed in 2012 at age 84 for refusing a court order to complete a link to the bridge for local freeways.
By then, supremely frustrated Canadian officials were putting their loonies and toonies together for a new bridge: Construction began in 2018 and cost the country nearly $4.5 billion. No one on the American side paid a cent, but the federal government did agree to turn over the toll revenues to Canada as reimbursement. Michigan also has its sights on those revenues, but its cut may be a long time coming since Canada needs to deal with its obligations.
The senior Moroun died nearly six years ago. Matthew Moroun, his billionaire son and a Trump supporter, took up the family’s bridge vendetta with the White House. In February, the president helped out by declaring that he intended to block the bridge’s opening until the Canadians exhibited the proper deference and paid the U.S. compensation for “everything we have given them.” Afterward, MAGA Inc., a Trump-aligned PAC, received a $1 million contribution from the family. The White House and the PAC denied any quid pro quo.
MICHIGAN GOV. GRETCHEN WHITMER (D); former Gov. Rick Snyder (R), who helped seal the bridge deal; Pete Buttigieg, former Biden transportation secretary turned Michigan transplant; Ontario Premier Doug Ford; and Carney have all called for the bridge to open.
But once the Trump administration decides to block an infrastructure project, pleading doesn’t make much difference—unless the courts intervene. New York and New Jersey got Gateway rail tunnel funds restored after they filed suit and federal judges forced the Transportation Department to release the funding. Neither Michigan nor the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority (WDBA), the Canadian government entity that oversees the bridge project (a public-private partnership with the Bridging North America consortium), seems interested in going that route.
If not for the USMCA, both Canada and the U.S. would likely be in worse shape, especially since the White House struck again last week, levying another round of tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and 54 other countries for violations involving goods made with forced labor (known as Section 301 investigations). USMCA-compliant goods won’t be subject to these latest tariffs.
“What you have is over 80 percent of Canadian trade enters under USMCA tariff rates, which are almost zero,” says Inu Manak, a senior fellow for international trade at the Council on Foreign Relations. “I think that the administration fully understands that if they were to put across-the-board tariffs on Canada, as they had on other countries, it would be tremendously disruptive to U.S. industry.” Total trade between Canada and the U.S. reached nearly $910 billion in 2024.
Right now, the U.S. has the leverage going into North American trade talks. While the American focus is on compelling Mexico to make concessions not only on trade issues, but on immigration, narcoterrorism, and border security, Canada drifts. “There’s nothing that says that the USTR [United State trade representative] has to submit anything to Congress before deciding what to do, so there is enough space in there for the administration to say, well, the president can decide what he wants to do with the USMCA,” says Manak.
However, modifying or otherwise dispensing with the pact altogether requires congressional action. The countries will begin a joint review of the treaty beginning on July 1. Canada and Mexico want to extend the treaty for 16 years. The three countries can also agree to review it annually.
Those talks are on the rocks. Last week, during a bilateral round of negotiations with Mexico, the U.S. proposed a substantial modification of automotive rules of origin. The change would require 82 percent North American content with 50 percent of that value produced in the U.S. to qualify for preferential tariff rates. There was no provision made for Canadian content. The omission sparked suspicions that American negotiators might try to force Canada to accept that proposal, or float an entirely new bilateral agreement with Canada.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has gone so far as to lump Canada in with China as countries that “retaliated” against the U.S when it decided to levy tariffs. He labeled the challenges with Canada as “significant.” “They’re just in a different spot,” Greer told a Council on Foreign Relations audience in New York at the end of May. “And it’s hard to see necessarily where that ends.”
Carney’s China deal to import 49,000 Chinese-made EVs, while a small number where autos are concerned, also appears to have set off the administration—worried, perhaps, that Canada might go so far as to invite China to site manufacturing plants in Canada.
“My general rule of thumb is it’s impossible to stop pure economics,” says Jason Miller, a Michigan State University professor of supply chain management. “There’s a market for Chinese EVs, so there will be a process through which they will eventually get to North America in significant quantities. If you’re the Canadians, you’re saying, ‘Hey, if we could become sort of the production base for Chinese EVs, that helps revitalize our auto industry.’”
President Trump, however, has completely dismissed Canada’s importance to the American economy. “You’ve had the president say things like ‘We don’t need their cars, we don’t need their aluminum, we don’t need their steel, etc.,” he adds. “It’s certainly a limited standpoint that is categorically untrue.” The White House “has taken a situation that was already not good and made it significantly worse.”
As if on cue, Carney appeared at the Economic Club of New York two days after Greer’s remarks to count the ways he’s reeled in trade deals. Chinese EVs have already begun arriving in Canada, and he scored two surveillance aircraft as part of a deal with Saab, the Swedish aerospace and defense firm. Carney’s parting message—“Canada strong will help make America great again”—was quite the burn after Trump’s failed China excursion.
FROM AN ENGINEERING STANDPOINT, the Gordie Howe International Bridge is more than ready for prime time. In addition to customs and border facilities, the bridge also requires a State Department permit and a directive from the Transportation Department to take down the barriers from Interstate 75. Whether the White House plans to cooperate on those is an open question. Every week that the bridge isn’t open costs the WDBA $7 million.
Carney, the former head of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, is nothing if not a shrewd operator. His strategy to leverage soft power, combined with a knack for facing unpleasant facts, helps quite a bit in an environment where the goalposts keeping moving. He’s raised Canada’s profile by securing trade and defense deals, earning more respect from the globe’s major power players. For the moment, the prime minister has strong domestic support: Approval rankings for the Canadian federal government, his Liberal Party, and his personal leadership are high—heights that an American president mired in an unpopular war of choice can’t possibly match.
What Trump has done is transform one of the world’s most fruitful alliances into a toxic international reality show. Once a global leader in infrastructure innovation and investment, the U.S. has not only fallen way behind on that score, but it appears ready to stiff the once steadfast ally that footed the entire bill for the project.
Could the Gordie Howe Bridge just sit there? “I wouldn’t rule anything out,” says Manek. “Honestly, it’s really hard to see this administration approaching this with any form of logic at this point. Everything is a point of leverage in the Trump worldview—and so I do think he’d be willing to risk it to get something from Canada.” Untethering a bridge from a trade treaty will be the next test of Mark Carney’s political acumen.
