President Trump was furious at Canada, again.

Early last month, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said the Gordie Howe International Bridge -- a long-awaited project linking Detroit and Windsor, Ontario -- was set to be opened. A Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority invitation announced a ribbon cutting for June 12.

Months earlier, Trump had threatened to delay the bridge's opening over over a long list of U.S.-Canada trade grievances. Now, he was convinced Carney was trying to rush the opening and circumvent him, a U.S. official said.

In a meeting with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the official said, Trump came up with an idea: What if he revoked the presidential permit that allowed the bridge to open?

Aides ultimately dissuaded the president from that plan, but a day before the June 12 ribbon cutting, the event was abruptly called off. Carney said Canada agreed to delay the opening at the request of the U.S. -- the latest twist in a decadelong effort to open the 1.5-mile, cable-stayed span that has emerged as a symbol of the evolving state of U.S.-Canada relations.

The bridge opens to traffic Monday with U.S.-Canada tensions still running high over trade and the president's 51st-state rhetoric more than 18 months into Trump's second term.

"It's not a breaking news story that [the bridge] reflects the troubles, " said Christopher Sands, director of the Center for U.S.-Canada Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. "It's just part of a long period in which the relationship has gotten worse, and we just don't seem to be able to fix it."

In 2015, when then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the bridge would be named after the Canadian hockey great who captained the Detroit Red Wings, he hailed the "very strong and important" relationship between the U.S. and Canada and a future of more bilateral trade. Then-Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder stood beside him in a sign of that chummy bond.

Today, uncertainty looms over U.S.-Canada trade and security ties, and Gordie Howe's "elbows up" style of play has become a Canadian rallying cry amid Trump's menaces. Canada disinvited U.S. officials from what was meant to be a joint ribbon-cutting on Friday to mark the bridge opening after Trump threatened more tariffs.

The bridge didn't appear to become a part of the broader tensions in the bilateral relationship until early February, when Trump fired off a lengthy post on his Truth Social account threatening to block the bridge unless "Canada treats the United States with the Fairness and Respect that we deserve." He claimed that U.S. steel wasn't used in the construction of the bridge; Snyder and Canadian officials say U.S. steel and labor were used. Trump also criticized Canada's rapprochement with China, claiming Beijing would eliminate professional hockey's championship trophy, the Stanley Cup.

On both sides of the border, the recent drama over the span has also become a political liability.

In Canada, Carney is under fire for making a new deal to get the bridge's opening back on track -- an agreement critics view as a U.S. shakedown of Canada. In the U.S., Democrats are investigating whether Trump stalled the bridge's opening as a favor to a donor, and the issue has become a flashpoint in Michigan's midterm elections.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer didn't respond to requests for comment. A senior Canadian government official said Carney's announcement about the bridge opening was informed by the project having achieved substantial completion, a final step in the construction process that allowed the span to open. The official declined to comment on Trump's belief that Carney was doing an end-run around him and referred additional questions to the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority, which didn't respond to a request for comment.

"President Trump will always fight for the best deal possible for America, and the Administration's renegotiated deal for the Gordie Howe Bridge is proof that the President is delivering," White House spokesman Kush Desai wrote in an email.

The Gordie Howe bridge was conceived to smooth the flow of trade across the border.

For decades, commercial truck traffic between Windsor and Detroit, the heart of the integrated auto industry, has mostly flowed across the Ambassador Bridge. Last year, more than 1.8 million trucks rumbled across the aging aquamarine span, which opened in 1929 and is one of the continent's busiest land-border crossings. Historically, around a quarter of U.S.-Canada trade has moved across the bridge.

But congestion at the privately owned bridge has long worried politicians as well as automakers that depend on a just-in-time delivery model. The risk of relying on one artery for so much trade was underscored after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the bridge was temporarily closed and trucks idled in a miles-long traffic jam.

Officials in both countries decided a new bridge over the Detroit River was the solution.

The Gordie Howe bridge is expected to ease bottlenecks because it has more lanes and highway access. To access the Ambassador Bridge, trucks now crawl down a Windsor road with more than a dozen intersections with traffic lights. This, coupled with toll increases on the Ambassador Bridge, has pushed more trucks to cross into Michigan at the Blue Water Bridge, some 100 miles away.

The standard toll for a commercial truck using the Gordie Howe bridge is $8.75 per axle, compared with $20 an axle for the Ambassador Bridge. A 2021 study from the University of Windsor estimated the new span would slash 20 minutes off crossing time for each truck and save the trucking industry billions in costs over its lifetime.

This bodes ill for the Moroun family, the billionaire owners of the Ambassador Bridge since 1979, who have long sought to block the new bridge's construction.

The Morouns have mounted several unsuccessful legal challenges to the Gordie Howe bridge project and spent $30 million on a failed ballot initiative in Michigan that would have amended the state constitution to require a statewide vote on the construction of new international bridges or tunnels. The late patriarch Manuel "Matty" Moroun, then 84, was found in contempt in 2012 for failing to make court-ordered repairs to the Ambassador Bridge and spent a night in jail. The Morouns spent millions on ads, lobbying and political campaigns.

In 2012, Canada said it would pick up the full tab for the Gordie Howe bridge, which turned out to be 6.4 billion Canadian dollars, or about $4.5 billion.

"It became evident pretty quickly that the Morouns were quite successful, quite adept at blocking progress," said Roy Norton, who as Canada's consul general in Detroit from 2010 to 2014 crisscrossed Michigan to advocate for the bridge. Eventually, Ottawa "took the highly unusual step of trying to circumvent that blockage by saying, 'Fine, we'll pay for the damn thing.'"

During Trump's first term, the Mourons aired ads on "Fox & Friends" that made a personal appeal to the president. Trump had named the bridge a priority infrastructure project.

Two former Canadian officials said they don't recall complaints about the bridge in his first term.

But in his February social-media post, Trump threatened to block the bridge's opening. Manuel Moroun's son, Matthew Moroun, who donated $1 million to the Trump-aligned MAGA Inc. super PAC this year, met with Lutnick a day before the threat, The Wall Street Journal reported, and the commerce secretary told the president the U.S. was getting a bad deal.

Moroun has since donated $150,000 to House Speaker Mike Johnson's joint fundraising PAC. During Trump's second term, his Detroit International Bridge Company has paid $550,000 to the Trump-connected lobbying firm Ballard Partners.

Representatives for Moroun's companies didn't respond to requests for comment.

A deal this month to open the bridge gives a U.S.-controlled fund half of the net bridge and crossing revenues for the first 15 years and Washington a veto over some toll-rate changes during that period, a move seen as benefiting the Morouns. Under an original agreement from 2012, Canada would collect all toll revenue until it recouped its construction costs. Then it would split it with Michigan.

Carney told reporters last week that he estimated the U.S. would receive about 5% of the costs of building the bridge over the 15 years and that the 2012 agreement remained in place. Trump on Friday said it didn't, suggesting there might still be more twists and turns to come.

Norton said he has mixed feelings about the deal but is glad the span is opening.

"It's been a saga," he said. "There were moments when one doubted whether it actually would materialize."

Write to Amanda Coletta at amanda.coletta@wsj.com and Brian Schwartz at brian.schwartz@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 26, 2026 19:00 ET (23:00 GMT)

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