Jon Liedtke joins 610 CKTB’s Gene Valaitis for his regular weekly segment, Liedtke’s Got a Take!
On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Jon Liedtke reflects on his personal memories of the day and its devastating, lasting economic impact on the Windsor-Detroit border. He highlights the tragic irony that the border seeing a necessary new, secure crossing with the Gordie Howe Bridge, built for post-9/11 resilience, cross-border trade now faces stiff US tariffs and political plays.
Transcript (Gemini Generated):
Gene Valaitis: Friday morning, and it is time for Liedtke’s Got a Take. Jon Liedtke joins me. Good morning, Jon.
Jon Liedtke: Good morning, Gene.
Gene Valaitis: Well listen, just about 30 minutes ago at 8:46, traffic halted on the US-Canadian border, the Gordie Howe Bridge, to mark exactly 25 years since 9/11 and the first jet going into the North Tower. I just told my story. Jon, take us back to that morning in 2001. What do you remember?
Jon Liedtke: Yeah, you know, it’s surreal to think about the border closure for the 25th anniversary of September 11th just moments ago. I was 12 years old, and rumors began to trickle into classrooms right after school started from students who arrived late. It was kept from us from teachers. I remember teachers crying openly in classrooms, assigning busywork. But at lunch, I was a crossing guard and a man walked up to the crosswalk, and I told him what I had heard about, you know, what was relayed by, you know, the rumors. And he sort of froze, reached into his pocket and shoved a $1 bill into my hand, US, and then he reached down his shirt collar and he pulled out a set of military dog tags. And I didn’t realize what was happening really at the time, but he looked at me with this sheer intensity and said, “Which way is the river?” I pointed, and he just said to me, “I have somewhere I need to be,” and he took off sprinting north towards Detroit. You know, I was 12, two months away from my Bar Mitzvah, becoming a man at that point. So I was still, you know, a child by all accounts. And that was the second that the world changed, even though I didn’t realize it around me. I saw the reality of the US Armed Forces and the panic of a border city right there on the pavement.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah, you know, today we watch global tragedies in 4K on our phones regularly. But in 2001, social media didn’t exist. You know, I was telling my story. I had a Nokia flip phone, and I kept calling my—my pals, all of whom died in the World Trade Center on that morning. What—what was your experience that day?
Jon Liedtke: Yeah, you know, I just—it’s so difficult to explain the morning of September 11th or even the days afterwards to the cell phone and social media generation today. I mean, when COVID hit or when Russia invaded Ukraine, we all were doomscrolling the world collapsing in high resolution on our phones together in a way. But on September 11th, we were trapped in information vacuums and silos. So, yeah, again, teachers were weeping in hallways, desperately trying to keep us all calm while crying in front of us. But there was no social media. No one had an actual understanding of what was going on. Um, some classrooms in grade 8, which I wasn’t in, I was in grade 7, they had TVs rolled into the classrooms on metal carts, and they saw some grainy footage. But nothing was really coming out that was clear until much later in the day. And I mean, I’ve heard stories of people, you know, the—the cell networks that did exist and the phone networks were down for quite some time across like the entire continent in some places. So, you know, it’s just—it’s so hard to explain to today’s interconnected world what it was like to be completely separated from an event that touched us all.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah, I remember. You know, when the US-Canada border was closed on 9/11, the road leading to the Ambassador Bridge became like a parking lot. Um, in—in your memory, how—how fast did our cities and factories just grind to a halt?
Jon Liedtke: Yeah, September 11th was a heart attack for our economy, and I’ve been doing a bunch of research reading back some of the reflective stories from the time and then from 10 years later, 20 years later, and now, you know, the recent ones that are out. And the US went on highest alert, and the border literally became a border wall. The road leading the bridge wasn’t just backed up, as you said, it was a parking lot. The former mayor, Eddie Francis, recalled 20 kilometers of idling transport trucks from the bridge down the 401 to the nearest town of Tecumseh. That bisected the entire region. And, you know, auto plants run on just-in-time delivery. Those rolling warehouses that are transport trucks were stuck on both sides of the border. And there’s actually a local story from a worker who was on the line at the Windsor Assembly Plant at the time, Chrysler. And they were all listening to the news on a boombox, and adult auto workers were crying on the line, but the physical line hadn’t even stopped at that point. So they were standing there, tears in their eyes, and installing rivet nuts every 46 seconds. And that’s how jarring it was. The world had ended, but the assembly line kept moving, even though the trucks rolling off the line had nowhere to go.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Uh, the tourism CEO Gordon Orr said 9/11 killed spontaneous border travel overnight. You know, and I was telling my story about how I would go down see my pals in New York City, and I remember you’d go to the airport and they’d say, “Where are you born?” I’d say “Toronto,” and that would be it. Occasionally you’d have to show like your birth certificate, but, you know, just in and out. Uh, just how permanent was that economic hit for all the border cities in Canada?
Jon Liedtke: Permanent is the perfect exact word to describe how the border changed. Uh, before 9/11, Windsor had, Windsor-Essex had over 7 million visitors a year, 80% of which were Americans. And Gordon Orr, the CEO there, nailed it. I mean, we were a passport-free suburb of Detroit. You just flashed your license, even if it came to that, and you were able to cross the border one way or the other. And 9/11 killed that spontaneous traveler overnight. The US would eventually mandate passports, and Homeland Security rolled out the terrifying color-coded terror threat scale. And Americans stopped coming across en masse. We lost over 2 million American visitors in just two years. That wasn’t made up by domestic visitors. But to put things in comparison, I looked up the numbers, we went from 5.5 million US visitors annually before 9/11 to 3.5 million two years later. And today, that number is 1.7 million, and that reflects pre-pandemic levels. So the old, frictionless border culture never fully came back. It’s—it’s different.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah, I feel sorry for people who never experienced that. Uh, I remember when I was in university, like on a Friday night, it was no big deal to hop into somebody’s car and drive down to Buffalo to have wings and then drive back, and, you know, the border crossing guards, “Oh, you crazy university kids.” I mean, now it’s take off your shoes, none of this liquid and that. It’s, uh, really, really quite something. Well, you know, 9/11 ultimately catalyzed the necessity for the Gordie Howe Bridge and other bridges. Uh, so what’s the Liedtke take on the legacy of 9/11 and—and Gordie?
Jon Liedtke: You said, you know, the gridlock of 9/11 proved that relying on one privately owned bridge, Matty Moroun’s Ambassador Bridge, was a massive national security economic threat. And 9/11 ultimately brought Prime Minister Chrétien and Ontario Premier Ernie Eves down to Windsor-Essex to announce a new border crossing fund at the time. And here we are 25 years later, $6.5 billion later, building and opening up the Gordie Howe Bridge to guarantee that our mutually integrated economies on both sides of the border could survive externally imposed border closures. But the tragic irony, I guess, Gene, today, the 25th anniversary, is that we’re watching a US president who delayed the bridge’s opening, refused to attend the ceremony, unilaterally imposed massive tariffs without, you know, real justification, threatening to sever our economies all over again. We spent a quarter century bulletproofing our infrastructure against external threats only to have the trade relationship threatened from the inside of the house. But the legacy remains though, and as you said, you know, just a half hour ago, the brand new Gordie Howe Bridge still had to drop its gates and fall—fall silent for at 8:46 for a half hour. 25 years later, 9/11 is still stopping the border.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Excellent take this morning. Thank you.
Jon Liedtke: Thank you, Gene.
Gene Valaitis: And thanks for your story, 9/11. Liedtke’s Got a Take with Jon Liedtke.
This aired on 610 CKTB
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