The idea behind the conference was to educate local business, community, and civic leaders about our many world class transportation assets, and, just as importantly, to learn from transportation experts and users what further assets and investments would be needed to help position the Windsor Essex region as a premier North American Transportation Hub.
My interview with Business Executive about the conference. Business Executive is filled with feature stories, and covers Toronto, Mississauga, Halton, Hamilton, Niagara Region, Canada's Technology Triangle, Guelph, London, Sarnia and Windsor. To date, Business Executive is Southern Ontario's only business-to-business newspaper published on a monthly basis.
Information as a result of the conference would then be prepared in summary document form. This important task of writing the summary document was, and still is to my knowledge, to be undertaken by noted transportation expert Bill Anderson of the University of Windsor, with the help of WEDC staff. The idea was to use this information to promote the region to private business, and bolster the region's request for additional senior government funding in all areas of transportation. The then WEDC Board felt this would be a major step forward in diversifying the hard hit local economy.
As observers from the Windsor Essex region will know, the entire Board of Directors resigned due to the requested change in the WEDC governance model, not to mention the extreme political interference and abuse. Read our notice of resignation and resignation statement. I will write more about the resignation of the WEDC Board in a future post.
However, as hoped for, staff at the WEDC with the help of professional event planners and community transportation stakeholders moved forward with this event.
In the Windsor Star (May 6th), a very nice piece of journalism by reporter Ellen van Wageningen talked about the opening night of the conference. Yes, there are some good reporters at the Star.
However, the next day, the conference took a political turn. Federal transportation minister John Baird captured the daily headlines in the Windsor Star with his key note address. The story written by Windsor Star "super snooper" Dave Battagello served up very tired and very old rhetoric regarding the Ambassador Bridge and the Windsor/Detroit border crossing area.
Gosh Dave, how many times can you attack Matty Moroun and the Ambassador Bridge before you wear yourself out!!!!!
While serving on the committee organizing the conference (prior to the resignation of the then WEDC Board), we discussed in great detail the need to keep politics out of this conference. It was my hope and the hope of others that this event would be a "policy development conference". At that time the focus was on securing participation from world class transportation and economic experts, and users of the system. Inviting a cabinet minister to pour gasoline on a heated public issue does not make for thoughtful policy development. I and others would have strongly advised against this.
As well, the folks over at the Ambassador Bridge were to have been invited, and should have been invited to participate on a panel at this event. I am told they were not invited. If this is the case, a very good and important conference for the Windsor Essex region was diminished in value.
The issue is not whether you like or dislike or are in favour or opposed to the Ambassador Bridge Company activities. They are big players in the region and very big players in the North American transportation and logistics industry. By excluding Ambassador Bridge we lost out on their knowledge and made ourselves in Windsor Essex look very small and very political.
