Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who said on Tuesday that the US$4.7-billion Gordie Howe Bridge would open this week, told reporters that the ceremony had been delayed “at the request of the United States.”
He said the two governments were going “to work through some issues that have come up,” without specifying, but that it would only be a “question of a few weeks.”
“There is no great drama here,” he said, dismissing speculation that tensions with US President Donald Trump had played a role.
In February, Trump threatened to fully block the bridge – which connects the province of Ontario with the northern US state of Michigan – insisting that the United States had been treated unfairly in its construction and that it should be “at least half” US-owned.
According to a factsheet issued by the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority, the bridge was financed entirely by Canada and will be jointly owned by the governments of Canada and the state of Michigan.
The bridge authority’s interim CEO, Chuck Andary, said earlier on Thursday that “Canada and the United States have agreed to delay the opening of the bridge, taking the necessary time to resolve any outstanding issues.”
“As we work towards an opening date, we are taking a collaborative approach,” he said in a statement.
Carney said this week that the bridge’s opening marked “positive news” and “a symbol, but also a fact of cooperation between our countries.”
The nature of Trump’s anger about the bridge was not entirely clear, but he first opposed it shortly after Carney’s widely praised January speech at the World Economic Forum, an address broadly seen as a denunciation of Trump.
Carney had also just sealed a preliminary trade deal with China, prompting massive new tariff threats from the United States.
The private owners of a rival international bridge previously sued seeking to block the Gordie Howe from being built.
Construction of the bridge, which began in 2018, was financed by Canada because the US refused to pay for it. The costs will be covered by tolls over 30 years.
US Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said at a Senate hearing last week that the department was “good to go” to staff the Gordie Howe bridge.
The new bridge will help ease truck traffic on the Ambassador Bridge into Detroit, the largest freight port on the US-Canada border, which handled US$126 billion of value traded by commercial trucks as of 2023.
It will cut 20 minutes off the crossing time, saving truckers US$2.3 billion over 30 years, according to a University of Windsor study. (Agencies)
