(Windsor, Ont.) Commercial trucks and other vehicles traveled as normal Monday morning on the Ambassador Bridge, which reopened late Sunday evening, but police were closely monitoring this busy Canada-US border crossing.
Posted at 12:21 p.m.
Traffic had resumed just before midnight on Sunday on this vital commercial link which was blocked for almost a week due to a protest against sanitary measures on the Canadian side of the bridge connecting Windsor, Ont., and Detroit, Aus. Michigan.
The police intervened on Sunday to clear the demonstrators from the foot of the bridge, making more than twenty arrests.
On Monday morning, police cars were stationed in a lane leading to the access to the Ambassador Bridge, while some intersections were blocked off to prevent protesters from returning to the foot of the bridge.
A handful of protesters lined up on the corner of an intersection a short distance from the bridge, waving Canadian flags and shouting occasional cries of “freedom.”
Tristan Émond, who has been participating in the protest since Friday evening, says the group plans to protest peacefully until an agreement is reached with the Canadian government to remove COVID-19 restrictions in the country.
Mr. Émond says the group plans to return to the original protest site to get their message across. It was unclear, however, whether the group would eventually be able to return to the foot of the bridge.
Windsor Police have warned there will be ‘zero tolerance for illegal activity’ in the area where the previous protest blocked the bridge.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in imports and exports pass through this transnational bridge every day, and politicians on both sides of the border had decried the economic impact of the protest which blocked traffic heading into Canada.
The chairman of the Detroit International Bridge Company, which owns the bridge, called on Monday for a plan to avoid such disruptions in the future.
“We must come together to develop an action plan that will protect and secure all border crossings in the Canada-U.S. corridor and ensure that this type of critical infrastructure disruption never happens again,” Matt Moroun wrote in a statement. .
Last week’s protest on the bridge affected three of Toyota Canada’s factories, prompted Ford Canada to cut capacity at its plants in Oakville and Windsor, Ontario, and cut manufacturing capacity at Stellantis and Honda Canada .