What a crazy month for geopolitical bingo. Who had a successful Syrian revolution on their card? Or martial law in South Korea? Or, a world-class-worthy-of-Shakespeare political drama in Ottawa?
The day up north began with a resignation letter from Canadian Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland. Before anyone dares to suppress a yawn — and I am well aware that New York Times columnist Flora Lewis’s “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” won the New Republic’s prize in 1986 for most boring headline ever written — this was no ordinary letter. Chrystia Freeland is no ordinary politician.
Freeland is, first of all, a journalist. She can write. She has also, going back to 2013 when Justin Trudeau recruited her from the ink-stained world, been steadfastly loyal to him. In her various cabinet posts after Trudeau and the Liberals won power two years later, Freeland kept the rapier always sheathed. In words spoken and written, she was measured. A team player, always. Old friends from the Financial Times, her professional home for many years (where for three years in the mid-1990s she was my boss), were amazed/annoyed by how disciplined she was when they had to cover her. Chrystia was no Boris, as in former British Prime Minister Johnson, another hack-turned-pol, who was desperate to charm and entertain his old pals in the trade. Then Monday came her letter, published on X.
It’s a doozy. Let’s count the ways. Least of it is its appearance first on (lapsed Canadian and Trump BFF) Elon Musk’s social media platform. There’s the exquisitely awful, for Trudeau, timing. Later on Monday, Freeland was due to present the government’s fall economic statement, a fiscal health report closely watched by markets and the media. Her abrupt and unexpected resignation, effective immediately that morning, turned from a personnel crisis for Trudeau into a governing crisis. His minority coalition can fall anytime a budget is rejected. Immediately following her announcement, there were rumors flying around that Trudeau, deeply unpopular as he is, might resign. He is done — whether in the coming days or by the next election. Freeland is too smart to not know that this chaos is how her move would play out.
As for the letter itself, you don’t have to know anything about Canadian politics to appreciate the sight of a rhetorical rapier plunged straight in in the bright light of day. You tried to demote me, she writes, so I quit. She didn’t need to say it but it was noticed that Trudeau did the same to other prominent women in his cabinet, and Freeland wasn’t going to let him do it to her. She was building up her steam. “You and I have found ourselves at odds,” she writes. I see President-elect Donald Trump’s “aggressive economic nationalism,” in the form of tariffs, as “a grave challenge,” she writes. You, Dear Justin, are into “costly political gimmicks” — the details here are boring but basically involve fiscal giveaways over the holidays — “which we can ill afford.” You are unserious, she implies. Then she lays out what it “means” to be “serious.” To act in “good faith and humility,” to face “the threat” from Trump, to be a nation “strong, smart and united.” You, Pretty Boy, are not able to lead this kind of Canada. I am. I’ll be running for my seat in the next election, she writes. And as everyone can read between the lines, I’ll be running to lead the party.
This kind of thing is not done in Canada. In the other colonies, like Australia, or the original parliament in Britain cabinet members take on unpopular leaders. Canada is, as the cliché goes, polite in its politics as well. Trudeau runs a top-down system. They don’t defenestrate their leaders there unceremoniously.
Now is Freeland’s chance. It’s hard to predict her future. She shares the blame and woefully low approval ratings with Trudeau for the many things that anger Canadians about the economy: rising housing prices, falling economic growth and stagnating living standards. The Liberals are headed for a thrashing in the elections, due no later than next October. In any leadership contest, the perception that she lacks the talent and taste for retail politics may limit her. In this job especially, though she spent part of her childhood on her father’s farm in northern Alberta, Freeland has come across as technocratic and elite — Harvard degree, Rhodes Scholarship and “Young Global Leader” of the World Economic Forum bauble. On the world stage, Freeland was a particularly prominent voice on behalf of Ukraine, the birthplace of her mother Halyna, where both of them worked in the early days of its independence. She was taken very seriously in G7 finance and foreign policy councils, even though Freeland was speaking on behalf of a country that — unwilling to spend on defense, falling well short of the NATO minimum guidelines of 2 percent of GDP — was itself not taken seriously.
But the woman who dominated the headlines across the border and got plenty of attention here on Monday sounded like a different kind of leader than Canadians have come to know so far.
Perhaps it’s fitting that the most extraordinary day in Canadian politics in recent memory comes courtesy of their most globally-minded and -networked pol. Disruption fits the moment. Politics are in upheaval in Germany (the government there fell Monday), France (the government fell there earlier in December), Korea and of course south of the border. Some call it the Trump effect, but that misses the point. Across the world, voters want directness, authenticity and results from their politicians. They think the system needs a reboot. It is Trump’s unique talent — as a 78-year-old who has been at the center, in one way or another, of American public life since the 1980s — to have become the avatar of 21st-century politics. As different in every respect to Trump as she is, Chrystia Freeland’s bid is to be that kind of avatar — for her party and for Canada.
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