Exactly 10 years ago, on May 14, 2015, the Prime Minister of Canada and the Governor of Michigan announced that a new, publicly owned bridge between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan, funded completely by Canada, would be named the Gordie Howe International Bridge after the Canadian hockey legend who led the Detroit Red Wings to four Stanley Cup victories.
Only last September, in the same issue that features our annual citations of Canada’s Best Locations for corporate investment, this publication’s Global Groundwork Index saluted progress on that bridge with an iconic photograph showing Canadian and U.S. operating engineers and ironworkers shaking hands as their work on either side of the majestic span reached a midpoint overlooking the Detroit River.
At this writing, Gordie Howe’s name is being invoked alongside a phrase once associated with his on-ice toughness — “Elbows Up” — in order to express the sentiments of an entire nation angry at its belittling and disrespectful treatment by the current U.S. presidential administration.
The die is cast. For those like me who have cultivated decades of relationships with Canadian business leaders, diplomats, economic developers, entrepreneurs and government officials, the feeling in the pits of our stomachs is not about tariffs or countermeasures, terms of which change daily if not hourly. It’s not about the hundreds of investment projects Site Selection has tracked by U.S. companies in Canada and vice versa. It’s not even about the sophomoric suggestion that our sovereign upstairs neighbor become “the 51st state.” No, this is much more basic: It’s about how you treat people.
I think of the Canadian individuals I’ve been fortunate to meet or cover, including a talk aboard a train with the CEO of VIA Rail who asked me to wait until he first listened to his on-board customers. In 2016 I was fortunate to speak with Canada’s Governor General David Johnston, who told me this will be the first era when societies are not evaluated by GDP or armadas, but by “how well we can develop the talent of all of our people.” His motto contemplare meliora means “to envisage a better world” and refers to his belief in “the abilities of all Canadians to imagine and create a smarter, more caring nation and contribute to a fairer, more just world.”
In a time when “globalist” is an epithet and being aware, respectful and educated about the rest of the world is derided by some as unpatriotic, this American publication will continue to be global in its outlook, just like the competent, influential and diplomatic business leaders we serve. Witness the insights in this issue on Latin America from a native Brazilian on Pepsico’s global real estate team, from our friends at Tractus on India’s economic potential and from experts on the status of cross-border electrical power flows between Quebec and New England.
In 2018 I attended an on-stage conversation sponsored by the Canadian-American Business Council (CABC) at the Carter Center in Atlanta featuring President Jimmy Carter and former Canadian Prime Minister Joe Clark. The first topic broached was the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, when Canada offered shelter in its embassy basement to U.S. officials and then mounted a daring rescue effort.
“What we did was help a friend,” Clark said, describing how things unfolded the day he found out about the situation through his foreign secretary Flora MacDonald. “There was no cost-benefit analysis. We decided immediately there standing in the center of Parliament that we would bring them out. Then there was an extraordinary period of cooperation between authorities and others.”
Looking directly at President Carter, Clark said, “When your country is in trouble or my country is in trouble, we come instinctively to the aid of the other.”
In this fraught era, look to personal, local relationships and subnational diplomacy and trade activity to reinforce a cross-border mutual aid society. Behind the daily negotiations and bluster, as CABC CEO Beth Burke put it earlier this spring in one of her weekly missives, “Let’s hope for sun to follow the storm.”
I’m envisioning that sun breaking through clouds to shine down on a long line of Canadian and U.S. citizens standing shoulder to shoulder across the Gordie Howe International Bridge. Suddenly and instinctively, they put their elbows up … and link them.
