OPINION: Canada’s Chrystia Freeland – A Personal View

The Canadian Minister of Finance resigned from her post on Dec. 16. A battle for the leadership of the Liberal Party appears imminent, and federal elections are scheduled for 2025. Will Chrystia Freeland, who speaks Ukrainian at home with her three children, be Canada’s next Prime Minister?

First the obvious accolades. She’s the smartest and most experienced person in Canadian politics. But also the least visible until now. Canadians will vaguely recall her role as Minister of Foreign Affairs (2017), as Deputy Prime Minister (2019), and as Finance Minister (2020) in Justin Trudeau’s government. A poor reflection of her actual intellectual stature.

The Prime Minister kept her on a short leash. He feared her acumen and her eloquence. Which means that we usually saw her standing politely behind him. Even when Trudeau visited Zelensky in Kyiv, Freeland was kept in the background, despite the fact that she speaks Zelensky’s mother tongue (Russian) fluently and his adopted language (Ukrainian) perfectly. It was painful to watch.

That’s not how I see Chrystia Freeland. Hers is a long story. (The full-length biography by Catherine Tsalikis became available Dec. 20). Chrystia Freeland organized her first strike in grade five and excelled at everything she did. She studied Russian history and literature at Harvard (BA) and completed an MA in Slavonic studies at Oxford. A Rhodes Scholar, her drift towards economics was fuelled by her journalistic reporting on corruption and state mismanagement while serving as Moscow Bureau Chief for the Financial Times in the latter half of the 1990s.

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Her first book on Russia, entitled “Sale of the Century” (2000), is still one of the best studies of the incremental transfer of Russia’s natural resources into the hands of Russia’s oligarchs. Published before Putin assumed power (but updated in 2005), the volume offers a subtle and detailed introduction to what happened next in the former Soviet state: Using KGB tactics, Putin jailed the oligarchs who resisted his complete control of the petrostate and the media. Oligarchs either fell in line or were coerced into leaving the country.

With the publication of her next book, “Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else” (2012), Freeland offered an analytical model for what went wrong in Russia thereafter. The best studies of Putin’s regime – among them Karen Dawisha’s “Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?” (2014) and Catherine Belton’s “Putin’s People” (2020) – pay homage to her work in their footnotes. But note the predominance of women among authors of books on misogynist autocrats! Chrystia Freeland was the first.

Canadians apparently fail to see that, for many here in Europe, Chrystia Freeland is an intellectual hero. While I was living in Moscow in the late 1980s, Freeland was in Ukraine, where she bravely supported pro-democracy activists and environmentalists and documented the various crimes of the KGB against Ukrainian dissidents. The local KGB had an extensive file on her person. (The Globe & Mail reported that her KGB officer held her to be “a remarkable individual” with “an analytical mindset”). Shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union, she was barred from re-entering the country.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, she was welcomed back to both Ukraine and Russia yet declared persona non grata in Russia already in 2014 for exposing the corruption at the root of Putin’s system. Chrystia Freeland has thus the curious distinction of being the only prominent Western intellectual to have been barred from both the Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia. “It’s an honor to be on Putin’s sanction list,” Freeland posted on Twitter on the 24th of March 2014.

Freeland has often been referred to as Justin Trudeau’s Minister for Everything. There is little doubt that, since joining the government, she has provided the intellectual competence and depth Trudeau lacks, particularly when he’s under pressure. The current rift between Freeland and Trudeau was perhaps precipitated by the latter’s unmistakably populist decision to cut taxes on groceries for a pitiful two-month period. A “gimmick,” she correctly observed in her letter of resignation.

But other differences must have weighed heavily on her decision. Foremost among them: in all her roles, Freeland has never been at liberty to act on her best instincts and to perform to the best of her abilities. Rather, she has been used to adorn Trudeau’s lack in judgement and, most recently, to take the blame for policies she herself had warned against.

We are currently living in an environment where all democracies appear threatened by autocrats and plutocrats, whose identities occasionally coincide (as in the post-Soviet state of Georgia). Canada and Germany face a similar challenge: a looming election just as Trump sweeps into power with promises of crippling sanctions.

Some of these threats are magnified through the prism of Ukraine’s battle against Russian aggression and its connection with would-be autocrats the world over. The ideological challenge posed simultaneously by Musk and by Russian disinformation (not to mention Fox News and Canada’s alt-right Rebel News) is thus part of a global attack upon our democracies. No one in the current Canadian government is better equipped to deal with these challenges than Chrystia Freeland.

Prevailing misogyny would have us believe that Freeland bears responsibility for the economic perils we are facing. The truth, I believe, is that women need a stronger voice in politics. Canadians don’t know just how smart and how strong Chrystia Freeland is. If she is allowed to take the fall for Trudeau’s own disasters, Canadians will prove, once again, that they’re blind to the misogynistic sleight of hand.

But if we’re lucky, a woman with deep roots in Ukraine could soon lead the world’s second largest country.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.