Jon Liedtke joins 610 CKTB’s Gene Valaitis for his weekly segment, Liedtke Has a Take!
Jon Liedtke discusses how Windsor’s historical growth forced a town near Toronto to rename itself Whitby in 1847 to resolve postal confusion. He contrasts Windsor’s practical grit with Niagara’s taste for extreme spectacle, using Nikola Tesla’s legacy to argue that Ontario must overcome bureaucratic red tape and innovate boldly today.
Transcript (Gemini Generated):
Gene Valaitis: Good morning, Jon.
Jon Liedtke: Hey Gene, you told me that today, the 10th of July, is a day of historic humiliation. Humiliation for a town near Toronto, and apparently it’s all Windsor’s fault. Okay, so what did Windsor do to the poor people of Whitby back in, of all years, 1847 on today’s date, July 10?
Jon Liedtke: Okay, let me set the scene for you, Gene. So, it’s the muddy shores of Lake Ontario, it was a fledgling settlement standing proud, the timber buildings relatively new, industrious people. They had a brand new post office standing at the center of town, but something was wrong. Deep in the wilderness, a phantom was haunting their mailbags. You see, an early landowner named John Scadding, he christened the village Windsor after his grand estate back in England.
But down here by Detroit, my Windsor was already growing at an incredible speed and absolutely dominating the maps. And the 19th-century postal service just completely threw up its hands in defeat. Month after month, the pioneers in Windsor (Whitby) would gather at the post office only to find that their critical business deeds, their shipping manifests, and even their scandalous, ink-stained romantic love letters were vanished—they were hijacked by the geography of the Deep South, and they were sent straight to our docks down here in Windsor across from Detroit.
So on July 10th of 1847, the madness reached a boiling point. A crowd of furious, mail-deprived citizens all packed tightly into the smoke-filled quarters of the Scriptures Inn Tavern. With tankards of ale in hand, they wept, they raged, and they completely surrendered to my Windsor’s geographic dominance. They voted to strip away their own identity. They voted to rebrand their town as Whitby instead, just so they could finally get their newspapers on time to check the lottery numbers. Imagine being so powerful down here in Windsor, Ontario, that you were able to force a town 400 kilometers away to hold a tavern summit just to escape our shadow. Windsor has not been as strong ever since.
Gene Valaitis: Okay, I’ve never heard this story before. So Windsor stole a town’s identity and their mail in 1847? But you have a theory…
Jon Liedtke: We didn’t—we didn’t steal it. We just outgrew them.
Gene Valaitis: Okay. But I hear you have a theory that the ghost of those pioneers are getting their revenge on Windsor.
Jon Liedtke: Oh, it’s a spiritual curse, Gene. There’s no other explanation. So yeah, we grew faster than them, taking their namesake, I suppose. And now, they’re taking our mail. Think about this: ever since Canada Post closed our local Windsor sorting facility a few years back, if you mail a letter in Windsor to another Windsor address, it doesn’t just go down the street. It gets loaded onto a truck, driven 200 kilometers up the 401 to London, sorted, processed, put back on a truck, and driven 200 kilometers back down to Windsor. This is the most passive-aggressive, dastardly Canadian revenge plot in history. We still get our mail down here, it’s just taking weeks to travel a massive loop, which is exactly what we did to those poor Whitby pioneers 180 years ago. The universe is balancing the scales, Gene.
Gene Valaitis: Okay, so you’re talking to me—I’m in Niagara, where it’s officially, by the way, Nikola Tesla Day. Now, you’ve mentioned we have a bit of a “little brother syndrome” because we love extreme spectacles and dangerous stunts to compete with Toronto. Are you saying that Windsor is superior to us?
Jon Liedtke: Oh, I wouldn’t say that. I say this all with love, Gene. But look at your track record there. Niagara has always been completely obsessed with dangerous, extreme spectacles—from daredevils in barrels over the falls to that time that you almost incinerated the future King of England, Prince Albert Edward, with chemical flares on a wooden platform back in 1860.
I mean, the falls themselves are this roaring natural marvel that forces everyone around them to chase greatness. But I think that being so close to Toronto does give you a little bit of a little brother syndrome where you’re constantly screaming, “Look at me!” We don’t have that in ourselves, Gene. We don’t care about impressing Toronto, and we know that we can’t compete with Detroit. So, we’re perfectly content sitting down here at the end of the 401, hanging out with Detroit, being completely alone in our little end of the corner of the province. We don’t need giant light shows like the falls; we’re just content building our cars and complaining about the provincial and national capitals.
Gene Valaitis: Okay, so Windsor is content just being alone at the end of the 401. But let’s look at the contrast between our regions. Why do you think that Windsor became so focused on practical, border-town grit, while we here in Niagara went the route of trying to capture lightning in a bottle?
Jon Liedtke: I think it comes down to geography and destiny. Our identity was forged out of, you know, sheer survival, logistics, manufacturing. We became the ultimate border gateway, the Underground Railroad terminus, and the automotive heart of the country because our relationship is with the Midwestern muscle of Detroit and Michigan—the Midwestern United States. I mean, we deal in iron, steel, and horsepower.
Niagara was a different beast just by nature—you were handed a different hand of cards, excuse country. When you live next to one of the wonders of the world, your entire economy and culture become about capturing awe. So, Windsor was about the practical grit of moving the world, and Niagara’s destiny was always trying to capture lightning in a bottle. You guys catered to the imagination, and I think that’s—that’s incredible. It’s beautiful. And look at what it’s yielded all of you guys. I mean, you’ve got one of the most incredible regions in the country.
Gene Valaitis: Now, you hit on something interesting about today being Nikola Tesla Day. He was a total outsider. Why do you think it took a foreigner, Tesla, to come to the Niagara Peninsula to actually ignore red tape and build the modern electrical grid, while—let’s face it—Canadian history is full of committees?
Jon Liedtke: [Laughs] I mean, this is the thing, right? I mean, this is—this is peak outsider coming into North America with a completely different mindset. When Tesla came to America, he had a signed letter from the European Edison Company—Thomas Edison’s company—that said, “Hey, this guy’s pretty good.” He got over to America, showed the letter to Edison, and Edison said, “Hey, if you want to come work for me, you have to abandon your crazy, harebrained scheme about alternating current.” And you know, he worked for him for a year, and then he quit the job, went and worked with Westinghouse, and the rest is history.
But if a local committee had been left in charge to harnessing Niagara Falls, we’d still be waiting on environmental assessments today, Gene! I mean, the public consultants would be raking up the bills. But I mean, look at St. Catharines. You guys had, you know, an incredible streetcar system built in 1924, but the whole thing was paralyzed because the city and the transit company spent years arguing over who was responsible to pour the asphalt.
So, I mean, we can’t allow zoning committees to strangle the future, which is why it took someone like Tesla to show up with a childhood dream of looking at the Niagara Falls on a postcard and thinking, “Why don’t I put a giant wheel under that thing?” He completely ignored the colonial, form-in-triplicate mentality and even the American idea of trying to pull together alliances, and he just built it. He understood what we all always seem to forget here, which is that it’s infinitely better to innovate first, shoot the lightning bolts, and then beg for forgiveness from the bureaucrats later.
Gene Valaitis: All right. So, final question. So here we are, July 10th, the big anniversary. So, your final take: what’s the ultimate lesson here for Ontario? How do we stop waiting for permission, get past the red tape, and finally just build the wheel?
Jon Liedtke: I think the lesson is that we need to stop being so deeply paternalistic and waiting for permission. I mean, we’ve got the grit in both Windsor and Niagara; we’ve got the raw power in both of our areas. But as Canadians, we’re terrified of making moves until someone in a capital city gives us a rubber stamp telling us that it’s okay to do something.
Tesla is a massive point of pride up in your region. You’ve got a monument to him, a boulevard, a plaza. But lighting up the falls isn’t enough. If we really want to honor that spirit today, we’ve got to stop setting up these committees. We’ve got to stop letting transit systems get bogged down by petty disputes and have grander vision. We need to start channeling bold, unapologetic imagination, the likes of which Tesla brought from across the ocean. So let’s stop filling out the forms, let’s drop the red tape, and let’s just finally build the darn wheel, Gene!
Gene Valaitis: Yeah, and the wheel right now are two oil pipelines. Another great take. Thank you so much.
Jon Liedtke: Thank you.
Gene Valaitis: There he goes, Jon Liedtke. He always has a take, and they’re always fascinating.
This aired on 610 CKTB
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