What is important, though, is this: Matty is going backward in his efforts to build a new bridge next to the Ambassador, and Snyder, for the time being, anyway, is going nowhere with the effort to build, in partnership with Canada, a publicly owned span downriver.

As a result, Matty wins by maintaining a virtual monopoly over cross-border commercial traffic between Detroit and Windsor, and the entire region loses. Not only in terms of construction jobs being lost, but also in the potential loss of industry that, facing the uncertainty of the current situation, looks to locate someplace else. Someplace where there is a guarantee the trucks moving goods back and forth across the border won't be idling in traffic tie-ups, wasting time and money.

If greed and the profound lack of a civic conscience were a crime, Matty would have been sent to jail long ago. If he keeps defying Edwards, and then besmirching him to boot, we might yet get to see how an octogenarian billionaire looks wearing an orange jumpsuit.

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