Canada

The Gordie Howe International Bridge risks becoming a financial sinkhole for Canadian taxpayers.

Although the current uproar over Canada’s side deal with the United States is renewing public focus on the bridge’s finances, the fiscal hazards of the 2.5-kilometre span connecting Windsor and Detroit involve more than just that pact.

Dozens of Acadians living in the United States are among those hoping to become Canadian citizens under the country’s new citizenship by descent law — but one expert says the Immigration Department’s narrow interpretation of the rules appears to disregard the history of this particular group.

Nadine Morin, a documentation specialist at the Anselme-Chiasson Centre for Acadian Studies at the Université de Moncton, said she’s received genealogy requests from at least 30 people since January.

At first, she said, she thought it might be a stretch to trace the Canadian connection back to the 1700s. “It wasn’t even Canada yet,” she said in an interview.

Acadian Expulsion

How come you never hear a hue and cry from our leftists about the historic maltreatment of the Acadians?

We hear what awful slavers we were even though slavery was abolished before Canada existed, just as the expulsion took place long before 1867.

We learned this week the outcome of Canada’s gunpoint re-negotiation with the United States over revenue from the new Gordie Howe International Bridge, an impressive $6.4-billion cross-border span that Canada paid for and is now finally able to open for traffic on Monday.

The reality of the forced amendments — hammered out under threat from U.S. President Donald Trump who demanded changes to a long-standing binational contract at the eleventh hour — is not so much that it makes the new bridge a terrible deal for Canada, it’s that the changes made a bad deal even worse, according to a source with high-level knowledge of the business of border infrastructure.