Obama administration supports DRIC's Bridge

Obama administration supports DRIC's Windsor-Detroit bridge, ambassador says

By Chris Vander Doelen, The Windsor Star, March 24th 2010

WINDSOR, ONT. -- The Obama administration supports construction of the proposed DRIC bridge over the Detroit River but the border here will never again be as easy to cross as it once was, says the new U.S. ambassador to Canada.

With the DRIC project now the only bridge-crossing application still standing for U.S. regulatory approval after the Ambassador Bridge’s disqualification, “my government supports the DRIC,” said David Jacobson. “We think it’s a good thing.

“We believe there is probably demand for both” crossings, Jacobson said in an interview Tuesday, prior to delivering the annual Herb Gray lecture at the University of Windsor. “But certainly there is enough for the DRIC.”

David Jacobson, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, spoke at the Faculty of Law at the University of Windsor Tuedsay.

Jacobson, a lawyer and Democratic party organizer, was appointed the U.S.’s 22nd ambassador to Canada by President Barack Obama six months ago — a posting he describes as his “dream job.”

Fixing the Windsor-Detroit border will be part of that job, but it “is going to take time,” Jacobson warned. “We’ll have to be patient.”

In the interview, he declined to answer questions regarding the financing of the U.S. half of the project, saying the money end was out of his pervue.

But he said improving border travel between the two countries has become a major focus of his job in Ottawa and will probably continue to be so during the duration of his tenure there.

But even when the infrastructure of the border at the Windsor-Detroit frontier is finally fixed, he said, it won’t likely duplicate the ease of crossing that existed pre-9/11.

“The world has changed, unfortunately,” Jacobson said. “I wish it were not so, but that is the reality. There are people in the this world who wish us ill.”

“It’s probably never again going to be the way it was when your grandfather crossed,” he told a student who asked how the border could be improved. “Probably not again during our lifetimes.”

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