Internal government documents show the costs incurred during the Ambassador Bridge blockade earlier this year were much lower than what the federal government stated publicly.
At a press conference on Feb. 14—the day the federal government invoked the Emergencies Act—Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland told reporters that the protest blocking the Windsor, Ontario, crossing to Detroit cost the Canadian economy nearly $400 million a day.
“The blockade of the Ambassador Bridge has affected about $390 million in trade each day,” Freeland said. “This bridge supports 30 percent of all trade by road between Canada and the United States, our most important trading partner.”
“Those costs are real,” she said, while also mentioning the impact resulting from the blockades at the border crossings at Coutts, Alberta, and Emerson, Manitoba. “They threaten businesses big and small. And they threaten the livelihoods of Canadian workers, just as we are all working so hard to recover from the economic damage caused by COVID.”…