With middle finger raised very, very high, I salute the city fathers in Windsor, Ont., for their appalling lack of vision. They really want to make a toll route out of the few kilometres of municipal road that link the end of Hwy. 401 to the Ambassador Bridge, gateway to Detroit and the U.S. Interstate system. They really do.

Worse yet, they want to stick a toll only on heavy trucks.

This isn’t just another toll road, of course, but another money grab by people who don’t appear to have a clue about the importance of trucking to their community.

Where on earth would Windsor be without the trucks that move auto parts into and out of its factories? Windsor is a dedicated car-building town, like Detroit across the river, as dependent on free international trade as any city we have. And thus utterly dependent on trucks for its livelihood in the most fundamental of ways.

Yet municipal officials want to erect a barrier to such free trade because maintenance on that stretch of roadway, the Huron Church Road, costs the city something like $300,000 a year, all of which they attribute to heavy-truck traffic.

Please. This is too stupid for words.

Unless I’m heading to Detroit itself, or to Detroit’s airport, I avoid this pathway to the U.S. altogether. It’s the busiest border crossing in the world, often congested, so I find driving life a whole lot easier to the north at the Sarnia/Port Huron border point. A heck of a lot of truckers see it this way, too, so much so that traffic at the Bluewater Bridge crossing in Sarnia, Ont., is expected to double in the next few years. Much of that growth comes from simple international business expansion, but I’d venture to say that some of it also comes from frustration with the Windsor option.

Surely the city officials in Windsor realize this. So how can they possibly justify making it more difficult, more costly, for truckers to choose Windsor? How can they consciously choose to increase congestion on a road that’s already so laden with traffic? Really, it boggles my tiny mind.

Now, this was still just a proposal as we went to press, and it may well have blown over by the time this issue hits the street. But it’s still worth discussion here because it’s an example of short-term bandwagon thinking. The kind of thinking that says tolls will fix anything and that “rich” truckers are easy targets.

It’s also an example of a hard-pressed local government getting a little too creative with their increasingly desperate need to tax-especially in Ontario, where the provincial government has shifted more responsibility for road maintenance down to the local level.

But in fact, I’m not sure this country’s most significant overland international crossing should be the City of Windsor’s responsibility at all. At worst, the financial burden should be shared among the federal, provincial, and city governments. In fact, why should Huron Church Road, with its string of strip malls and stop lights, be carrying 7000 to 11,000 trucks every day in the first place? It’s not suitable. Not even close.

If federal Transport Minister David Collenette wants to show that he’ll make good on his promise to “continue to work collaboratively” with his provincial colleagues in response to a damning study released in December that says Canada’s national highway system is in disrepair and needs $17 billion to fix, he should demand that some of the $4.5 billion in fuel tax money the federal government collects each year be allocated for a new border approach that cuts Windsor out of the mix entirely.

If you look at the Detroit side, you’ll see two Interstate highways taking traffic directly to and from the border. You don’t have to visit the city if you don’t want to, and that’s how it ought to be in Windsor. Hwy. 401 should be extended somehow, even if only by dedicated truck lanes along the existing route for the time being, so that Windsor might avoid some of the pain of all those nasty trucks. More accurately, so that truckers might avoid the hassle of navigating Windsor streets at 60 km/h.

That’s a real solution, and it ought to be a joint federal/ provincial project.

Another solution? Windsor’s toll threat is a sign of things to come. It’s time to get involved with your own municipal government, maybe even run for office, and make sure that your own local councilors eat a bit of brain food every day. If Windsor’s any indication, there’s a challenge and a half.